Centre for Internet and Society

Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_13_Resized

sumandro — 2015-07-13T07:17:31Z

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Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_14_Resized

sumandro — 2015-07-13T07:18:00Z

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Iron out contradictions in the Digital India programme

sumandro — 2015-07-28T01:04:28Z

The Digital India initiative takes an ambitious 'Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani' approach to develop communication infrastructure, government information systems, and general capacity to digitise public life in India. I of course use 'public life' in the sense of the wide sphere of interactions between people and public institutions.

The article was published in the Hindustan Times on July 15, 2015.

The 'Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani' approach involves putting together Japanese shoes, British trousers, and a Russian cap to make an entertainer with a pure Indian heart. In this case, the analogy must not be understood as different components of the initiative coming from different countries, but as coming from different efforts to use digital technologies for governance in India.

It is deploying the Public Information Infrastructure vision, inclusive of the National Optical Fibre Network (now renamed as BharatNet) and the national cloud computing platform titled Meghraj, so passionately conceptualised and pursued by Sam Pitroda. It has chosen the Aadhaar ID and the authentication-as-a-service infrastructure built by Nandan Nilekani, Ram Sewak Sharma, and the team, as the identity platform for all governmental processes across Digital India projects. It has closely embraced the mandate proposed by Jaswant Singh led National Task Force on Information Technology and Software Development for completely electronic interface for paper-free citizen-government interactions.

The digital literacy and online education aspects of the initiative build upon the National Mission on Education through ICT driven by Kapil Sibal. Two of the three vision areas of the Digital India initiative, namely 'Digital infrastructure as a utility to every citizen' and 'governance and service on demand,' are directly drawn from the two core emphasis clusters of the National e-Governance Plan designed by R. Chandrashekhar and team, namely the creation of the national and state-level network and data infrastructures, and the National Mission Mode projects to enable electronic delivery of services across ministries.

And this is not a bad thing at all. In fact, the need for this programmatic and strategic convergence has been felt for quite some time now, and it is wonderful to see the Prime Minister directly addressing this need. Although, while drawing benefits from the existing programmes, the DI initiative must also deal with the challenges inherited in the process.

Recently circulated documents describes that the institutional framework for Digital India will be headed by a Monitoring Committee overseeing two main drivers of the initiative: the Digital India Advisory Group led by the minister of communication and information technology, and the Apex Committee chaired by the cabinet secretary. While the former will function primarily through guiding the implementation works by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), the latter will lead the activities of both the DeitY and the various sectoral ministries.

Here lies one possible institutional bottleneck that the Digital India architecture inherits from the National e-Governance Plan. Putting the DeitY in the driving seat of the digital transformation agenda in parallel with all other central government departments indicate an understanding that the transformation is fundamentally a technical issue. However, most often what is needed is administrative reform at a larger scale, and re-engineering of processes at a smaller scale.

Government agencies that have addressed such challenges in the past, such as the department of administrative reforms and public grievances, is not mentioned explicitly within the institutional framework, and instead DeitY has been trusted with a range of tasks that may be beyond its scope and core skills.

The danger of this is that the Digital India initiative will end up initiating more infrastructural and software projects, without transforming the underlying governmental processes. For example, the recently launched eBasta website creates a centralised online shop for publishers of educational materials to make books available for teachers to browse and select for their classes, and for the students to directly download, against payment or otherwise. The website has been developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing and DeitY. At the same time, the ministry of human resource development, which is responsible for matters related to public education, has already collaborated with the Central Institute of Educational Technology and the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in TIFR to build a comprehensive platform for multi-media resources for education – the National Repository of Open Educational Resources. The initial plans of the DI initiative are yet to explicitly recognise that the key challenge is not in building new applications and websites, but aligning existing efforts.

This mismatch, between what the Digital India initiative proposes to achieve and how it plans to achieve it, is further demonstrated in the 'e-Governance Policy Initiatives under Digital India' document. The compilation lists the key policies to govern designing and implementation of the Digital India programmes, but surprisingly fails to mention any policies, acts, and pending bills approved or initiated by any previous government. This is remarkably counter-productive as the existing policy frameworks, such as the Framework for Mobile Governance, the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy, and the Interoperability Framework for e-Governance, are suitably placed to complement the new policies around use of free of open source softwares for e-governance systems, so as to ensure their transparency, interoperability, and inclusive outreach. Several pending bills like The National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010, The Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011, and The Privacy (Protection) Bill, 2013, are absolutely fundamental for comprehensive and secure implementation of the various programmes under the Digital India initiative.

The next year will complete a decade of development of national e-governance systems in India, since the launch of National e-Governance Plan in 2006. Given this history of information systems sometimes partially implemented and sometimes working in isolation, a 'Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani' approach to digitise India is a very pragmatic one. What we surely do not need is increased contradiction among e-governance systems. Simultaneously, we neither need digital systems that centralise governmental power within one ministry on technical grounds, or expose citizens to abuse of their digital identity and assets due to lack of sufficient legal frameworks.

(Sumandro Chattapadhyay is research director, The Centre for Internet and Society. The views expressed are personal.)

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Digital Activism in Asia Reader

sumandro — 2015-10-24T14:36:44Z

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. It is our great pleasure to present the Digital Activism in Asia Reader.

The Book

The Reader took shape over two workshops with a diverse range of participants, including activists, change-makers, and scholars, organised by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in June 2014 and March 2015. During the first workshop, the participants identified the authors, topics, and writings that should be included/featured in the reader, based upon their relevance in the grounded practices of the participants, who came from various Asian countries. The second workshop involved open discussions regarding how the selected readings should be annotated, from key further questions to strategies of introducing them, followed by development of the annotations by the participants of the workshop. The full list of contributors, annotators, and editors is mentioned at the end of the book.

We are grateful to the Meson Press for its generous and patience support throughout the development process of the book.

Please download, read, and share this open-access book from the Meson Press website.

The Reader has been edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.

Excerpt from the Foreword

Compiling this Reader on Digital Activism in Asia is fraught with compelling challenges, because each of the key terms in the formulation of the title is sub-ject to multiple interpretations and fierce contestations. The construction of ‘Asia’ as a region, has its historical roots in processes of colonial technologies of cartography and navigation. Asia was both, a measured entity, mapped for resources to be exploited, and also a measure of the world, promising anorientation to the Western World’s own turbulent encounters. As Chen Kuan-Hsing points out in his definitive history of the region, Asia gets re-imagined as a ‘method’ in cold-war conflicts, becoming the territory to be assimilated through exports of different ideologies and cultural purports. Asia does not have its own sense of being aregion. The transactions, interactions, flows and exchanges between different countries and regions in Asia have been so entirely mediated by powers of colonisation that the region remains divided and reticent in its imagination of itself. However, by the turn of the 21st century, Asia has seen a new awakening. It finds a regional identity, which, surprisingly did not emerge from its consolidating presence in global economics or in globalised structures of trade and commerce. Instead, it finds a presence, for itself, through a series of crises of governance, of social order, of political rights, and of cultural productions, that binds it together in unprecedented ways.

The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn, because with the new networks of connectivity, with Asian countries marking themselves as informatics hubs, working through a circulated logic of migrant labour and dis-tributed resources, there came a sense of immediacy, proximity, and urgencythat continues to shape the Asian imagination in a new way. In the last decade or so, the rapid changes that have emerged, creating multiple registers of modernity, identity, and community in different parts of Asia, accelerated by a seamless exchange of ideas, commodities, cultures, and people have created a new sense of the region as emerging through co-presence rather than competition and conflict. Simultaneously, the emergence of global capitals of information, labour and cultural export, have created new reference points by which the region creates its identities and networks that are no longer subject to the tyranny of Western hegemony...

While the digital remains crucial to this shaping of contemporary Asia, both in sustaining the developmental agenda that most of the countries espouse, and in opening up an inward looking gaze of statecraft and social organisation, the digital itself remains an ineffable concept. Largely because the digital is like a blackbox that conflates multiple registers of meaning and layers of life, it becomes important to unengineer it and see what it enables and hides. The economic presence of the digital is perhaps the most visible in telling the story of Asia in the now. Beginning with the dramatic development of Singapore as the centre of informatics governance and the emergence of a range of cities from Shanghai to Manilla and Bangalore to Tehran, there has been an accelerated narrative of economic growth and accumulation of capital that is often the global face of the Asian turn. However, this economic reordering is not a practice in isolation. It brings with it, a range of social stirrings that seek to overthrow traditional structures of oppression, corruption, control, and injustice that have often remained hidden in the closed borders of Asian countries. However, the digital marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being excavated by the ICT4D logic, of the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself. These are questions that emerge from the ground, as more people interact with progressive and liberal politics and aspire not only for higher purchase powers but a better quality of rights. The digital turn has opened up a range of social and political rights based discourses, practices, and movements, where populations are holding their governments and countries responsible, accountable, and culpable in the face of personal and collective loss and injustice...

In the face of this multiplicity of digital sites and usages that are reconfiguring Asia, it is obvious then, that the very nature of what constitutes activism is changing as well. Organised civil society presence in Asia has often had a strong role in shaping modern nation states, but more often than not these processes were defined in the same vocabulary as that of the powers that they were fighting against. Marked by a strong sense of developmentalism and often working in complement to the state rather than keeping a check on the state’s activities, traditional activism in Asia has often suffered from the incapacity to scale and the inability to find alternatives to the state-defined scripts of development, growth and progress. In countries where literacy rates have been low, these movements also suffer from being conceived in philosophical and linguistic sophistry that escapes the common citizen and remains the playground of the few who have privileges afforded to them by class and region. Digital Activism, however, seems to have broken this language barrier, both internally and externally, allowing for new visualities enabled by ubiquitous computing to bring various stakeholders into the fray... At the same time, the digital itself has introduced new problems and concerns that are often glossed over, in the enthralling tale of progress. Concerns around digital divide, invasive practices of personal data gathering, the nexus of markets and governments that install the citizen/consumer in precarious conditions, and the re-emergence of organised conservative politics are also a part of the digital turn. Activism has had to focus not only on digital as a tool, but digital also as a site of protest and resistance...

The Reader does not offer an index of the momentous emergence with the growth of the digital or a chronological account of how digital activism in Asia has grown and shaped the region. Instead, the Reader attempts a crowd-sourced compilation that presents critical tools, organisations, theoretical concepts, political analyses, illustrative case-studies and annotations, that an emerging network of changemakers in Asia have identified as important in their own practices within their own contexts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader

Oxblood Ruffin - Dharamsala

sumandro — 2015-08-17T08:11:43Z

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Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Open Review

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:54:33Z

This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3.

Preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conferences organized by the United Nations in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005) initiated crucial platforms and networks, some temporary and some continued, for various non-governmental actors to intensively and periodically take part in the discussions of governance of Internet and various related activities towards the goals of inclusive development and human rights. Many of the civil society organizations taking part in the WSIS conferences, as well as the various regional and thematic preparatory meetings and seminars, had little prior experience in the topic of Internet governance. They were entering these conversations from various perspectives, such as local developmental interventions, human and cultural rights activism, freedom and diversity of media, and gender and social justice. With backgrounds in such forms of applied practice and theoretical frameworks, members of these civil society organizations often faced a difficult challenge in articulating their experiences, insights, positions, and suggestions in terms of the (then) emerging global discourse of Internet governance and that of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as instruments of development. At the WSIS: An Asian Response Meeting in 2002, Susanna George, (then) Executive Director of Isis International, Manila, succinctly expressed this challenge being faced by the members of civil society organizations:

For some feminist activists however, including myself, it has felt like trying to squeeze my concerns into a narrow definition of what gender concerns in ICTs are. I would like it to Cinderella’s ugly sister cutting off her toe to fit into the dainty slipper of gender concerns in ICTs. The development ball, it seems, can only accommodate some elements of what NGO activists, particularly those from the South, are concerned about in relation to new information and communications technologies. (George 2002)

The above mentioned seminar, held in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 22-24, 2002, was a crucial early meeting for the representatives from Asian civil society organizations to share and shape their understanding and positions before taking part in the global conversations during the following years. The meeting was organised by Bread for All (Switzerland), Communication Rights in the Information Society Campaign (Netherlands), Forum-Asia (Thailand), and World Association for Christian Communication (United Kingdom), as a preparatory meeting before the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of WSIS, with 34 organizations from 16 Asian countries taking part in it. The Final Document produced at the end of this seminar was quite a remarkable one. It highlighted the simultaneity of Asia as one of the global centres of the information economy and the everyday reality of wide-spread poverty across the Asian countries, and went on to state that the first principle for the emerging global information society should be that the '[c]ommunication rights are fundamental to democracy and human development' (The World Summit on the Information Society: An Asian Response 2002). It proposed the following action items for the efforts towards a global inclusive information society: 1) strengthen community, 2) ensure access, 3) enhance the creation of appropriate content, 4) invigorate global governance, 5) uphold human rights, 6) extend the public domain, 7) protect and promote cultural and linguistic diversity, and 8) ensure public investment in infrastructure (ibid.).

Immediately after this Conference, several Asian civil society organizations attended the Asian Civil Society Forum, organised as part of the Conference of Non-governmental Organizations in Consultative Relations with the United Nations (CONGO), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 9-13, 2002. Representatives of Dhaka Ahsania Mission (Bangladesh), OneWorld South Asia (India), GLOCOM (Japan), Foundation for Media Alternative (Philippines), Korean Progressive Network – JINBONET (Republic of Korea), Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Singapore), International Federation of University Women (Switzerland), and Forum Asia (Regional) drafted a Joint Statement emphasising that a 'broad-based participation of civil society, especially from those communities which are excluded, marginalized and severely deprived, is critical in defining and building such a [true communicative, just and peaceful] society' (Aizu 2002). In the very next month, the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference was held in Tokyo during January 13-15, 2003, 'to develop a shared vision and common strategies for the “Information Society' (WSIS Executive Secretariat 2003: 2). The conference saw participation of representatives from 47 national governments, 22 international organizations, 54 private sector agencies, and 116 civil society organizations across the Asia-Pacific region. The Tokyo Declaration, the final document prepared at the conclusion of the Conference, recognized that:

[T]he Information Society must ... facilitate full utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) at all levels in society and hence enable the sharing of social and economic benefits by all, by means of ubiquitous access to information networks, while preserving diversity and cultural heritage. (Ibid.: 2)

Further, it highlighted the following priority areas of action: 1) infrastructure development, 2) securing affordable, universal access to ICTs, 3) preserving linguistic and cultural diversity and promoting local content, 4) developing human resources, 5) establishing legal, regulatory and policy frameworks, 6) ensuring balance between intellectual property rights (IPR) and public interest, 7) ensuring the security of ICTs, and 8) fostering partnerships and mobilizing resources. It is not difficult to see how the focus of necessary actions shifted from an emphasis on concerns of community and human rights, and public investments and commons, towards those of legal and policy mechanisms, multi-partner delivery of services, and intellectual property rights. Civil society organizations, expectedly, felt sidelined in this Conference, and decided to issue a join statement of Asian civil society organizations to ensure that their positions are effectively presented. The first two topics mentioned in this document were: 1) '[c]ommunication rights should be fully recognized as a fundamental and universal human right to be protected and promoted in the information society,' and 2) '[t]he participation of civil society in the information society at all levels should be ensured and sustained, from policy planning to implementation, monitoring and evaluation' (UNSAJ et al 2003). The joint statement was endorsed by 30 civil society organizations: UDDIPAN (Bangladesh); COMFREL (Cambodia); ETDA (East Timor); The Hong Kong Council of Social Services (Hong Kong); Food India, IT for Change (India); Indonesian Infocom Society (Indonesia); Active Learning, CPSR, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, JTEC, Kyoto Journal, Ritsumeikan University Media Literacy Project, UNSAJ (Japan); Computer Association Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme (Nepal); APC Women's Networking Support Programme, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International (Philippines); Citizens' Action Network, Korean Progressive Network – Jinbonet, Labor News Production, ZAK (Republic of Korea); e-Pacificka Consulting (Samoa); National University of Singapore (Singapore); Public Television Service, Taiwan Association for Human Rights (Taiwan); Asian-South Pacific Bureau for Adult Education, FORUM ASIA, and TVE Asia Pacific (Regional) (Ibid.).

Participation in the WSIS Process

The first WSIS conference was held in Geneva in December 2003. Through the processes of organizing this conference, and the second one in Tunis in November 2005, United Nations expressed a clear intention of great participation of actors from the private companies, civil society, academia, and media, along with the governmental organizations. During the first meeting of the WSIS Preparatory Committee (PrepCom-1) in Geneva, during July 1-5, 2002, the civil society organizations demanded that they should be allowed to co-shape the key topics to be discussed during the first conference (2003). There was already an Inter-Governmental Subcommittee on Contents and Themes, but no equivalent platform for the civil society organizations was available. With the approval of the Civil Society Plenary (CSP), the Civil Society Subcommittee on Content and Themes (WSIS-SCT) was instituted during PrepCom-1 (WSIS-SCT 2003b). At the second WSIS Preparatory Committee meeting (PrepCom-2) in Geneva, during February 17-28, 2003, the WSIS-SCT produced a summary of the views of its members titled 'Vision and Principles of Information and Communication Societies,' and also a one page brief titled 'Seven Musts: Priority Principles Proposed by Civil Society' to be used for lobbying purposes (Ibid.). This brief mentioned seven key principles of Internet governance identified by the civil society organization taking part in the WSIS process: (1) sustainable development, (2) democratic governance, (3) literacy, education, and research, (4) human rights, (5) global knowledge commons, (6) cultural and linguistic diversity, and (7) information security (WSIS-SCT 2003a).

Asian civil society organizations that took part in the PrepCom-2 meeting included United Nations Association of China (China); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, C2N - Community Communications Network (India); ICSORC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Resource Center (Iran); GAWF - General Arab Women Federation (Iraq); Daisy Consortium, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications (Japan); Association for Progressive Communication, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); WFEO - World Federation of Engineering Organization (Palestine); Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International – Manila (Philippines); Korean Progressive Network - Jinbonet (Republic of Korea); IIROSA - International Islamic Relief Organization (Saudi Arabia); and Taking IT Global (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Turkey) (ITU 2003a).

All these efforts led to development of the Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society, which was prepared and published by the Civil Society Plenary at the Geneva conference, on December 08, 2003. The Declaration was titled 'Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2003). The Asian civil society organization that took part in the Geneva conference were BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, Drik, ICTDPB - Information & Communication Technology Development Program, Proshika - A Center for Human Development (Bangladesh); China Society for Promotion of the Guangcai Programme, Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, United Nations Association of China (China); The Hong Kong Council of Social Service (Hong Kong); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (India); Communication Network of Women's NGOs in Iran, Green front of Iran, ICTRC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Center, Islamic Women's Institute of Iran, Institute for Women's Studies and Research, Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (Iran); ILAM - Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel (Israel); Citizen Digital Solutions, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications, JCAFE - Japan Computer Access for Empowerment, Soka Gakkai International (Japan); LAD-Nepal - Literary Academy for Dalit of Nepal (Nepal); Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); PAK Educational Society / Pakistan Development Network, SMEDA - Small & Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Pakistan); Palestine IT Association of Companies (Palestine); Isis International – Manila, Ugnayan ng Kababaihan sa Pulitika / Philippine Women's Network in Politics and Governance (Philippines); Citizen's Alliance for Consumer Protection of Korea, Korean Civil Society Network for WSIS (Republic of Korea); Youth Challenge (Singapore); Association for Progressive Communications (India and Philippines), CITYNET - Regional Network of Local Authorities for the Management of Human Settlements (India. Mongolia, and Philippines), Taking IT Global (India and Philippines) (ITU 2003b).

As the preparatory meetings and consultations towards the second WSIS conference advanced during the next year, the Asian civil society organizations attempted to engage more directly with the global Internet governance processes on one hand, and the national Internet and ICT policy situations on the other. Writing about their encounters at and before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, held in Geneva during February 17-25, 2005, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh made several early observations that have continued to resonate with the experiences of Asian civil society organizations throughout the decade (Gurumurthy & Singh 2005). Firstly, they indicated that the government agencies present in the dialogues tend to take diverging positions in international events and domestic contexts. Secondly, there was a marked absence of formal and informal discussions between the governmental and the civil society representatives of the same country present at the meeting. The government agencies were clearly disinterested in involving civil society organizations in the process. Thirdly, the civil society actors present in the meeting were mostly from the ICT for Development sector, and the organizations working in more 'traditional' sectors – such as education, health, governance reform, etc. – remained absent from the conversations. This is especially problematic in the case of such developing countries where there does not exist strategic linkages between civil society organizaions focusing on topics of technologized developmental interventions, and those involved in more 'traditional' development practices. Rekha Jain, in a separate report on the Indian experience of participating in the WSIS process, re-iterates some of these points (Jain 2006). She notes that '[w]hile the Secretary, [Department of Telecommunications, Government of India] was involved in (PrepCom-1) drafting the initial processes for involvement of NGOs, at the national level, this mechanism was not translated in to a process for involving the civil society or media' (Ibid.: 14).

The frequent lack of interest of national governments, especially in the Asian countries, to engage with civil society organizations on matters of policies and projects in Internet governance and ICTs for development (Souter 2007), further encouraged these organization to utilise the global discussion space opened up by the WSIS process to drive the agendas of democratisation of Internet governance processes, and protection and advancement of human rights and social justice. The second WSIS conference held in Tunis, during November 16-18, 2005, however, did not end in a positive note for the civil society organizations as a whole. The sentiment is aptly captured in the title of the Civil Society Statement issued after the Tunis Conference: 'Much more could have been achieved' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2005). Apart from producing this very important critical response to the WSIS process, within a month of its conclusions, the civil society organization contributed effectively in one of the more longer-term impacts of the process – the establishment of the Internet Governance Forums (IGFs). Immediately after the publication of the Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance (Desai et al) in June 2005, the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Japan, acting on behalf of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus, came forward with public support for 'the establishment of a new forum to address the broad agenda of Internet governance issues, provided it is truly global, inclusive, and multi-stakeholder in composition allowing all stakeholders from all sectors to participate as equal peers' (WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2005: 3).

Asian Civil Society Organizations at the IGFs

In 2006, the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus was reformed and established as a permanent 'forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil society contributions in Internet governance processes' (Civil Society Internet Government Caucus 2006). Representatives from Asian civil society organizations have consistently played critical roles in the functionings of this Caucus. Youn Jung Park of the Department of Technology and Society, SUNY Korea, co-founded and co-coordined the original Caucus in 2003. Adam Peake of the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan, was co-coordinator of the original Caucus from 2003 to 2006. Parminder Jeet Sing of IT for Change, India, was elected as one of the co-cordinators of the newly reformed Caucus in 2006, with the term ending in 2008. Izumi Aizu of the Institute for HyperNetwork Society and the Institute for InfoSocinomics, Tama University, Japan served as the co-coordinator of the Caucus during 2010-2012.

The first Internet Governance Forum organized in Athens, October 30 – November 2, 2006, saw participation from a very few Asian civil society organizations, mostly from Bangladesh and Japan (IGF 2006). The second Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro, November 12-15, 2007 had a wider representation from Asian civil society organizations: Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication, BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, VOICE – Voices for Interactive Choice and Empowerment (Bangladesh); China Association for Science and Technology, Internet Society of China (China); University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); Alternative Law Forum (via Association for Progressive Communications - Women's Networking Support Programme), Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, IT for Change (India); GLOCOM, Kumon Center, Tama University (Japan); Sustainable Development Networking Programme (Jordan); Kuwait Information Technology Society (Kuwait); Assocation of Computer Engineers – Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme, Nepal Rural Information Technology Development Society (Nepal); Bytesforall – APC / Pakistan, Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippine Resources for Sustainable Development Inc. (Philippines); and LIRNEasia (Sri Lanka). At the Open IGF Consultations in Geneva, on February 26 2008, the Internet Governance Caucus made two significant submissions: 1) that, although structuring the IGF sessions in Athens and Rio de Janeiro around the large themes of access, openness, diversity, and security have been useful to open up the multi-stakeholder dialogues, it is necessary to begin focused discussions of specific public policy issues to take the IGF process forward (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008a), and 2) that the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), which drives the IGF process and events, should be made more proactive and transparent, and expanded in size so as to better include the different stakeholder groups who may self-identify their representatives for the MAG (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008b).

On one hand, the IGF Hyderabad, December 3-6, 2008, experienced a decline in the percentage of participants from civil society organizations and a rather modest increase in the percentage of participants from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables), especially since this was the first major international Internet governance summit held in an Asian country. On the other hand, the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus succeeded to bring forth the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda, to be addressed and discussed in one of the main sessions of the Forum (IGF 2008). The next IGF held in Sharm El Sheikh, November 15-18, 2009, saw further decline of participation from both the representatives of civil society organizations, and the attendees from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables). In this context, Youn Jung Park made the following statement in the Stock Taking session of the summit:

As a cofounder of WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus in 2003, I would like to remind you ... [that] Internet Governance Forum was created as a compromise between those who supported the status quo Internet governance institution under one nation's status provision, and those who requested for more balanced roles for governments under international supervision of the Internet. While IGF has achieved a great success of diluting of such political tension between those who have different views of how to institutionalize Internet governance, ironically Internet governance forum became a forum without governance... [We] have to admit [that] IGF failed to deliver another mandate of the U.N. WSIS: Continuing discussion of how to design Internet governance institutions... The current IGF continues to function as knowledge transfer of ICANN's values to other stakeholders, while those who want to discuss and negotiate on how to design Internet governance institutions should have another platform for that specific U.N. WSIS mandate. (IGF 2009)

The first Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) was held in Hong Kong on June 14-16, 2010. The organising committee included three civil society / acadmic organizations – Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Internet Society Hong Kong, and National University of Singapore – and three indpendent experts – Kuo-Wei Wu (Taiwan), Norbert Klein (Cambodia), and Zahid Jamil (Pakistan). Though the Forum had dominant presence from government and private sector participants, several representatives from Asian civil society / academic organizations spoke at the sessions: Ang Peng Hwa (Singapore Internet Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University), Charles Mok (Internet Society Hong Kong), Christine Loh (Civic Exchange), Chong Chan Yau (Hong Kong Blind Union), Clarence Tsang (Christian Action), Ilya Eric Lee (Taiwan E-Learning and Digital Archives Program, and Research Center for Information Technology Innovation), Izumi Aizu (Institute for HyperNetwork Society, and Institute for InfoSocinomics, Kumon Center, Tama University), Oliver “Blogie” Robillo (Mindanao Bloggers Community), Parminder Jeet Singh (IT for Change), Priscilla Lui (Against Child Abuse in Hong Kong), Tan Tin Wee (Centre for Internet Research, National University of Singapore), and Yap Swee Seng (Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development). As Ang Peng Hwa noted at the beginning of the summit, its key objective was to provide a formal space for various stakeholders from the Asia-Pacific region to discuss and provide inputs to the IGF process (APrIGF 2010). The regional forum was successful in enabling newer civil society entrants from the Asia-Pacific region to familiarize themselves with the IGF process, and to contribute to it. Oliver “Blogie” Robillo, represented and submit recommendations from Southeast Asian civil society organizations at IGF Vilnius, September 14-17, 2010, which was the first time he took part in the summit series. He emphasised the following topics: 1) openness and freedom of expression are the basis of democracy, and state-driven censorship of Internet in the region is an immediate threat to such global rights, 2) coordinated international efforts need to address and resolve not only global digital divides, but also the divides at regional, national, and sub-nationals scales, 3) the right to privacy is an integral part of cybersecurity, as well as a necessary condition for exercising human rights, 4) global Internet governance efforts must ensure that national governments do not control and restrict abilities of citizens to express through digital means, and it should be aligned with the universal human rights agenda, and 5) even after 5 years of the IGF process, a wider participation of civil society organizations, especially from the Asia-Pacific regions, remains an unachieved goal, which can only be achived if specific resources are allocated and processes are implemented (IGF 2010).

Internet Censorship and Civil Society Responses

Throughout the decade of 2000-2010, censorship of Internet and restriction of digital expression remained a crucial Internet rights concern across the world, and especially the Asian countries. One of the earliest global reports on the matter was brought out by the Reporters without Borders. In 2006, it published a list of countries marked as 'Internet Enemies' that featured 16 countries, out of which 11 were from Asia: China, Iran, Maldives, Myanmar (then, Burma), Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam (Reporters without Borders 2006). The list was updated in 2007, and three of these countries – Libya, Maldives, and Nepal – were taken off (Ibid.). The unique contradictions of the Asian region were sharply foregrounded in the 2006-07 report on Internet censorship by OpenNet Initiative, which noted:

Some of the most and least connected countries in the world are located in Asia: Japan, South Korea, and Singapore all have Internet penetration rates of over 65 percent, while Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal remain three of thirty countries with less than 1 percent of its citizens online. Among the countries in the world with the most restricted access, North Korea allows only a small community of elites and foreigners online. Most users must rely on Chinese service providers for connectivity, while the limited number North Korean–sponsored Web sites are hosted abroad... [T]hough India’s Internet community is the fifth largest in the world, users amounted to only about 4 percent of the country’s population in 2005. Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal are among the world’s least-developed countries. Despite the constraints on resources and serious developmental and political challenges, however, citizens are showing steadily increasing demand for Internet services such as Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), blogging, and chat. (Wang 2007)

The report further described the strategy used by various Asian governments of 'delegation of policing and monitoring responsibilities to ISPs, content providers, private corporations, and users themselves' (Ibid.) These mechanisms enforce self-surveillance and self-censorship in the face of threats of loss of commercial license, denial of services, and even criminal liability. Defamation suits and related civil and criminal liability have also been used by several Asian governments to silence influential critics and protesters. Direct technical filtering of Internet traffic (especially inwards traffic) and blocking of URLS via government directives sent to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have also been common practice in key Asian countries (Ibid.). Expectedly, such experiences of oppression led to widespread campaigns and communications by the Asian civil society organizations, as can be sensed from the above mentioned submission by Oliver “Blogie” Robillo at IGF Vilnius.

Among the Asian countries, the comprehensive technologies of censorship developed and deployed by China has been studied most extensively. The Golden Shield Project was initiated by the Ministry of Public Security of China in 1998 to undertake blanket blocking of incoming Internet traffic based on specific URLs and terms. Evidences of the project getting operationalised became available in 2003 (Garden Networks for Freedom of Information 2004). Censorship of Internet in China, however, has not only been dependent on such sophisticated systems. In 2003, it was made mandatory for all residents of Lhasa, Tibet, to use a specific combination and password to access Internet, which was directly linked to their names and address. An Internet ID Card was issued by the government to implement this (International Campaign for Tibet. 2004). Tibet Action Institute has been a key civil society organization at the forefront of cyber-offensive of the Chinese government. A recent documentary by the Institute, titled 'Tibet: Frontline of the New Cyberwar,' has narrated how it has worked closely with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, to identify, trace, and resist the malware- and other cyber-attacks experienced by the civil society actors and websites in favor of independence of Tibet (Tibet Action Institute 2015). Not only activists supporting the Tibetan cause, digital security training emerged as an important aspect of the life of civil society organizations during the decade. Asian organizations like Bytes for All (Pakistan) and Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (Mynamar), as well as international organizations like Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab have educated and supported civil society activities much beyond the Internet governance sphere with tools and techniques for effectively using digital channels of communications, and defending themselves for cyber-threats.

Combination of traditional forms of civil society mobilizations and digital techniques have often been used resist attempts by Asian governments to control the online communication space. Huma Yusuf has extensively studied the emergence of hybrid media strategies, using both old media channels like newspapers and new media channels like blogs and video sharing platforms, among citizen journalists and civil society activists in Pakistan as the government took harsh steps towards control of both traditional and online media during 2007-2008 (Yusuf 2009). She has carefully traced how possibilities of new forms of information and media sharing enabled by Internet were initially identified and implemented by citizen journalists and student activists, which was quickly learned and re-deployed by more formal organisation, such as print and electronic news companies, and civil society organizations like those involved in election monitoring (Ibid.). Malaysia also experienced fast-accelerating face-off between the government and the civil society during 2007-2010, as the former started intervening directly into censoring blogs and newspaper websites. On one hand, the government took legal actions against critical bloggers, either directly or indirectly, and on the other it instructed ISPs to block 'offensive content.' It also borrowed the 'Singapore-model' to mandate registration of bloggers with government authorities, if they are identifed as writing on socio-political topics. The civil society actors responded to these oppressive steps by setting up a new blog dedicated to coverage of the defamation cases (filed against prominent bloggers), and publicly sharing instructions for circumvention of the blocks imposed by ISPs. The National Alliance of Bloggers was soon formed, which organised the “Blogs and Digital Democracy” forum on October 3, 2007 (Thien 2011: 46-47). Similarly, Bloggers Against Censorship campaign took shape in India in 2006 as the government first directed ISPs to block specific blogs hosted on Blogspot, TypePad, and Yahoo! Geocities, and then went for complete blocking of Yahoo! Geocities as the ISPs failed to block specific sub-domains of the platform (Bloggers Collective Group 2006). Learning from this experience, the following year Indian government decided to work directly with Orkut to take down 'defamatory content' about a politician (The Economic Times 2007). This is common for other Asian governments too, as they have continued to develop more legally binding and technically sophisticated measures to monitor and control online expression.

In the 'Internet Enemies Report 2012,' Reporters without Borders listed 12 countries as 'enemies of the Internet,' out of which 10 were from Asia – Bahrain, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam – and it named 14 countries that are conducting surveillance on its citizens, out of which 7 were from Asia – India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates (Reporters without Borders 2012). At the APrIGF held in Tokyo, July 18-20, 2012, a group of delegates from civil society organizations working in the South-East Asian region issued a joint statement with a clear call for global action against the shrinking space for freedom of (digital) expression in the region (Thai Netizen Network et al 2012). They specifically noted the following national acts as examples of the legislative mechanisms being used by different Asian governments to criminalize online speech and/or to harass public dissenters:

Burma – The 2004 Electronic Transactions Act
Cambodia – The 2012 Draft Cyber-Law, the 1995 Press Law, and the 2010 Penal Code
Malaysia – The 2012 Amendment to the Evidence Act and the 2011 Computing Professionals Bill
Indonesia – The 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transaction and the 2008 Law on Pornography
The Philippines – The 2012 Data Privacy Act
Thailand – The 2007 Computer Crimes Act, the Article 112 of the Penal Code, and the 2004 Special Case Investigation Act
Vietnam – The 1999 Penal Code, the 2004 Publishing Law, the 2000 State Secrets Protection Ordinance, and the 2012 Draft Decree on Internet Management. (Ibid.)

The statement was co-signed by Thai Netizen Network, Thai Media Policy Centre, The Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM), Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media (SEACeM), Victorius (Ndaru) Eps, Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), Sovathana (Nana) Neang, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), and was endorsed by ICT Watch (Indonesian ICT Partnership Association).

Annexe – Tables

Table 1: Participation from Asian Countries and of representatives from Asian civil society organisations in IGFs, 2006-2010

Event	Participants from Asian Countries	Participants from Civil Society Organizations
IGF Athens 2006	11%	29%
IGF Rio de Janeiro 2007	13%	32%
IGF Hyderabad 2008	56% from India, and 15% from other Asian countries	25%
IGF Sharm El Sheikh 2009	17%	19%
IGF Vilnius 2010	Not Available	Not Available

Source: Reports available on Internet Governance Forum website (http://igf.wgig.org/cms).

Table 2: Internet Society Chapters in Asia

Chapter	Year of Establishment	URL
Afghanistan	In formation	Not available
Bahrain	2001	http://www.bis.org.bh/
Bangladesh	2011	http://www.isoc.org.bd/dhaka/
Hong Kong	2005	http://www.isoc.hk/
India (Bangalore)	2010	http://www.isocbangalore.org/
India (Chennai)	2007	http://www.isocindiachennai.org/
India (Delhi)	2002. Rejuvenated in 2008.	http://www.isocdelhi.in/
India (Kolkata)	2009	http://isockolkata.in/
India (Trivandrum)	2015	Not available
Indonesia	2014	http://www.isoc.or.id/
Israel	1995	http://www.isoc.org.il/
Japan	1994	http://www.isoc.jp/
Lebanon	2010	http://www.isoc.org.lb/
Malaysia	2010	http://www.isoc.my/
Nepal	2007	http://www.internetsociety.org.np/
Pakistan (Islamabad)	2013	http://www.isocibd.org.pk/
Palestine	2002	http://www.isoc.ps/
Philippines	1999. Rejuvenated in 2009.	https://www.facebook.com/isoc.ph/
Qatar	2011	http://www.isoc.qa/
Republic of Korea	2014	Not available
Singapore	2011	http://isoc.sg/
Sri Lanka	2010	http://www.isoc.lk/
Taipei	1996	http://www.isoc.org.tw/
Thailand	1996	http://www.isoc-th.org/
United Arab Emirates	2007	http://www.isocuae.com/
Yemen	2013	http://isoc.ye/

Source: Details of chapters available on Internet Society website (http://www.internetsociety.org/).

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-open-review

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Open Review

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:51:03Z

This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.

You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3.

Early Days

The overarching context of development interventions and rights-based approaches have shaped the space of civil society organizations working on the topics of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and Internet governance in India. Early members of this space came from diverse backgrounds. Satish Babu was working with the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS) in mid-1990s, when he set up a public mailing list called 'FishNet,' connected to Internet via the IndiaLink email network, (then) run by India Social Institute to inter-connect development practitioners in India. He went on to become the President of Computer Society of India during 2012-2013; and co-founded Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) in 2003, where he served as the Executive Secretary during 2003-2010 [Wikipedia 2015]. Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director of IT for Change and one of the key actors from Indian civil society organizations to take part in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process, had previously worked extensively on topics related to public health and women's rights [ITfC b], which deeply shaped the perspectives she and IT for Change have brought into the Internet governance sphere, globally as well as nationally [Gurumurthy 2001]. Arun Mehta initiated a mailing list titled 'India-GII' in 2002 to discuss 'India's bumpy progress on the global infohighway' [India-GII 2005]. This list played a critical role in curating an early community of non-governmental actors interested in the topics of telecommunication policy, spectrum licensing, Internet governance, and consumer and communication rights. As Frederick Noronha documents, the mailing list culture grew slowly in India during the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, they had a great impact in organizing early online communities, sometimes grouped around a topical focus, sometimes functioning as a bridge among family members living abroad, and sometimes curating place-specific groups [Noronha 2002].

The inaugural conference of the Free Software Foundation of India [FSFI] in Thiruvananthapuram, on 20 July 2001, galvanized the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community in India. The conference was titled 'Freedom First,' and Richard Stallman was invited as the chief guest. It was a vital gathering of actors from civil society organizations, software businesses, academia, and media, as well as the Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala (the state where the conference was held). The conference laid the basis for sustained collaborations between the free software community, civil society organizations, emerging software firms in the state, and the Government of Kerala for the years to come. Two early initiatives that brought together free software developers and state government agencies were the Kerala Trasportation Project and the IT@School project, which not only were awarded to firms promoting use of FLOSS in electronic governance project, but facilitated a wider public dialogue regarding the need think critically about the making of information society in India [Kumar 2007]. The inter-connected communities and overlapping practices of the FLOSS groups, civil society organizations involved in ICT for Development initiatives, telecommunication policy analysts and advocates, and legal-administrative concerns regarding life in the information society – from digital security and privacy, to freedom of online expressions, to transparency in electronic governance infrastructures – have, hence, continued to shape the civil society space in India studying, discussing, responding, and co-shaping policies and practices around governance of Internet in India.

Key Organizations

IT for Change was established in 2000, in Bengaluru, as a non-governmental organization that 'works for the innovative and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote socio-economic change in the global South, from an equity, social justice and gender equality point of view' [ITfC]. It has since made important contributions in the field of ICTs for Development, especially in integrating earlier communication rights practices organised around old media forms with newer possibilities of production and distribution of electronic content using digital media and Internet [ITfC e], and in that of Internet governance, especially through their participation in the WSIS and Internet Governance Forum (IGF) processes and by co-shaping the global Souther discourse of the subject [ITfC d]. It has also done significant works in the area of women's rights in the information society, and have been a core partner in a multi-country feminist action research project on using digital media to enhance the citizenship rights and experiences of marginalized women in India, Brazil, and South Africa [ITfC c]. IT for Change has co-led the formation of Just Net Coalition in February 2014 [JNC].

Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was founded by Osama Manzar, in New Delhi in 2002, with a 'deep understanding that marginalised communities living in socio-economic backwardness and information poverty can be empowered to improve their lives almost on their own, simply by providing them access to information and knowledge using digital tools' [DEF c]. DEF has contributed to setting up Community Information Resource Centres across 19 states and 53 districts in India, with computers, printers, scanners, and Internet connectivity [DEF]. DEF organises one of the biggest competitions in Asia to identify, foreground, and honour significant contributions in the area of ICT for Development [DEF d]. This annual competition series, titled 'Manthan Award' (Translation: 'manthan' means 'churning' in Sanskrit), started in 2004. It has alllowed DEF to create a detailed database of ICT for Development activities and actors in the South Asia and Asia Pacific region. Since 2011, DEF has started working with Association for Progressive Communications on a project titled 'Internet Rights' to take forward the agenda of 'internet access for all' in India [DEF b].

The Society for Knowledge Commons was formed in New Delhi 2007 by 'scientists, technologists, researchers, and activists to leverage the tremendous potential of the ‘collaborative innovation’ model for knowledge generation that has lead to the growth of the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS) around the world' [Society for Knowledge Commons]. It has championed integration of FOSS into public sector operations in India – from electronic governance systems to use of softwares in educational institutes – and has made continuous interventions on Internet governance issues from the perspective of the critical importance of shared knowledge properties and practices for a more democratic information society. It is a part of the Free Software Movement of India [FSMI], an alliance of Indian organizations involved in advocating awareness and usage of FOSS, as well as a founding member of the Just Net Coalition [JNC].

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) was established in Bengaluru in 2008 with a research and advocacy focus on topics of accessibility of digital content for differently-abled persons, FOSS and policies on intellectual property rights, open knowledge and Indic Wikipedia projects, digital security and privacy, freedom of expression and Internet governance, and socio-cultural and historical studies of Internet in India [CIS]. In one of the key early projects, CIS contributed to the making of web accessibility policy for government websites in India, which was being drafted by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India [CIS 2008]. In the following years it took part in the Internet Governance Forum summits; submitted responses and suggestions to various policies being introduced by the government, especially the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, National Identification Authority of India (NIA) Bill, 2010, and the Approach Paper for a Legislation on Privacy, 2010; produced a report on the state of open government data in India [Prakash 2011b], and undertook an extensive study on the experiences of the young people in Asia with Internet, digital media, and social change [Shah 2011].

Software Freedom Law Centre has undertaken research and advocacy interventions, since 2011, in the topics digital privacy, software patents, and cyber-surveillance [SFLC]. The Internet Democracy Project, an initiative of Point of View, has organised online and offline discussions, participated in global summits, and produced reports on the topics of freedom of expression, cyber security and human rights, and global Internet governance architecture since 2012 [IDP].

The first Internet Society chapter to be established in India was in Delhi. The chapter began in 2002, but went through a period of no activity before being revived in 2008 [Delhi]. The Chennai chapter started in 2007 [Chennai], the Kolkata one in 2009 [Kolkata], and the Bengaluru chapter came into existence in 2010 [Bangalore]. Asia Internet Symposium have been organised in India twice: 1) the Kolkata one, held on on 1 December 2014, focused on 'Internet and Human Rights: Empowering the Users,' and 2) the Chennai symposium, held on 2 December 2014, discussed 'India in the Open and Global Internet.' The newest Internet Society chapter in India is in the process of formation in Trivandrum [Trivandrum], led by the efforts of Satish Babu (mentioned above).

Global and National Events

The first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference in Geneva, held on 10-12 December 2003, was not attended by many civil society organizations from India. Several Indian participants in the conference were part of the team of representatives from different global civil society organizations, like Digital Partners, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and International Centre for New Media [ITU 2003]. Between the first and the second conference, the engagement with the WSIS process increased among Indian civil society organizations increased of the WSIS process, which was especially led by IT for Change. In early 2005, before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, it organized a discussion event titled 'Gender Perspectives on the Information Society: South Asia Pre-WSIS Seminar' in partnership with DAWN and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, which was supported by UNIFEM and the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme [Gurumurthy 2006]. In a separate note, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change have noted their experience as a South Asian civil society organization engaging with the WSIS process [Gurumurthy 2005]. The second WSIS conference in Tunis, held on 16-18 November 2005, however, neither saw any significant participation from Indian civil society organizations, except for Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, and IT for Change [ITU 2005]. This contrasted sharply with the over 60 delegates from various Indian government agencies taking part in the conference [ITU 2005].

Two important events took place in India in early 2005 that substantially contributed to the civil society discourses in India around information technology and its socio-legal implications and possibilities. The former is the conference titled 'Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics' organized by the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Alternative Law Forum, and Public Service Broadcasting Trust, in Delhi on 6-8 January 2005. The conference attempted to look into the terms of intellectual property rights (IPR) debates from the perspectives of experiences in countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. It was based on the research carried out by the Sarai programme and Alternative Law Forum on contemporary realities of media production and distribution, and the ways in which law and legal instruments enter into the most intimate spheres of social and cultural life to operationalise the IPRs. The conference combined academic discussions with parallel demonstrations by media practitioners, and knowledge sharing by FLOSS communities [Sarai 2005]. The latter event is the first of the Asia Source workshop that took place in Bengaluru during 28 January - 4 February 2005 . It brought together more than 100 representatives from South and South-East Asian civil society organizations and technology practitioners working with them, along with several leading practitioners from Africa, Europe, North America, and Latin America, to promote adoption and usage of FLOSS across the developmental sector in the region. The workshop was organized by Mahiti (Bengaluru) and Tactical Technology Collective (Amsterdam), with intellectual and practical support from an advisory group of representatives from FLOSS communities and civil society organizations, and financial support from Hivos, the Open Society Institute, and International Open Source Network [Asia Source].

While the participation of representatives from Indian civil society organizations at the IGFs in Athens (2006) and Rio de Janeiro (2007) was minimal, the IGF Hyderabad, held on 3-6 December 2008, provided a great opportunity for Indian civil society actors to participate in and familiarize themselves with the global Internet governance process. Apart from various professionals, especially lawyers, who attended the Hyderabad conference as individuals, the leading civil society organizations participating in the event included: Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace, Centre for Internet and Society, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Internet Society Chennai chapter, IT for Change, and Mahiti. The non-governmental participants from India at the event, however, were predominantly from private companies and academic institutes [IGF 2008].

IT for Change made a critical intervention into the discourse of global Internet governance during the Hyderabad conference by bringing back the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society [ITU 2005 b]. At IGF Sharm El Sheikh, held during 15-18 November 2009, Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change explained:

[E]nhanced cooperation consists of two parts. One part is dedicated to creating globally applicable policy principles, and there is an injunction to the relevant organizations to create the conditions for doing that. And I have a feeling that the two parts of that process have been conflated into one. And getting reports from the relevant organizations is going on, but we are not able to go forward to create a process which addresses the primary purpose of enhanced cooperation, which was to create globally applicable public policy principles and the proof of that is that I don't see any development of globally applicable public policy principles, which remains a very important need. [IGF 2009]

This foregrounding of the principle of 'enhanced cooperation' have since substantially contributed to rethinking not only the global Internet governance mechanisms and its reconfigurations, but also the Indian government's perspectives towards the same. It eventually led to the proposal made by a representative of Government of India at the UN General Assembly session on 26 October 2011 regarding the establishment of a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies [Singh 2011].

Internet Policies and Censorship

One of the earliest instances of censorship of online content in India is the blocking of several websites offering Voice over IP (VoIP) softwares, which can be downloaded to make low-cost international calls, during late 1990s. The India-GII mailing list initiated by Arun Mehta, as mentioned above, started almost as a response to this blocking move by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), the government-owned Internet Service Provider (ISP). Additionally, Mehta filed a case against VSNL for blocking these e-commerce websites, which might be identified as the first case of legal activism for Internet-related rights in India [India-GII 2001]. During the war between India and Pakistan during 1999, the Indian government instructed VSNL to block various Pakistani media websites, including that of Dawn. Like in the case of websites offering VoIP services, this blocking did not involve direct intervention with the websites concerned but only the ability of Indian users to access them [Tanna 2004]. The first well-known case of the Government of India blocking digital content for political reasons occurred in 2003, when a mailing list titled 'Kynhun' was banned. Department of Telecommunications instructed all the But the previously deployed URL-blocking strategy did not work in the new situation of mailing lists. Blocking the URL of the group did not stop it from being used by members of the group to continue sharing email through it. Government of India then approached Yahoo directly to ensure that the mailing list is closed down, which Yahoo declined to implement. This resulted in imposing of a blanket blocking of all Yahoo Groups pages across ISPs in India during September 2003. By November, Yahoo decided to close down the mailing list, and the blanket blocking was repealed [Tanna 2004]. Further blocking of several blogs and websites continued through 2006 and 2007, where the government decided to work in collaboration with various platforms offering hosted blog and personal webpage services to remove access to specific sub-domains. In resistance to this series of blocking orders by the government, there emerged an important civil society campaign titled 'Bloggers Against Censorship' led by Bloggers Collective Group, a distributed network of bloggers from all across India [Bloggers 2006].

A few weeks after the IGF Hyderabad, the Government of India passed the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008 on 22 December 2008 [MoLaJ 2009], although it was notified and enforced much later on 27 October 2009 [MoCaIT 2009]. This amendment attempted to clarify various topics left under-defined in the Information Technology Act of 2000. However, as Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society noted, the casual usage of the term 'offensive content' in the amendment opened up serious threats of broad curbing of freedom of online expression under the justification that it caused 'annoyance' or 'inconvenience' [Prakash 2009]. The sections 66 and 67 of the amended Information Technology Act, which respectively address limits to online freedom of expression and legally acceptable monitoring of digital communication by government agencies, have since been severely protested against by civil society organizations across India for enabling a broad-brushed censorship and surveillance of the Internet in India. The section 66A has especially allowed the government to make a series of arrests of Internet users for posting and sharing 'offensive content' [Pahwa 2015].

In 2011, the Government of India introduced another critical piece of policy instrument for controlling online expressions – the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2011 [MoCaIT 2011] – targeted at defining the functions of the intermediaries associated with Internet-related services and communication, and how they are to respond to government's directives towards taking down and temporary blocking of digital content. The draft Rules were published in early 2011 and comments were invited from the general public. One of the responses, submitted by Privacy India and the Centre for Internet and Society, explicitly highlighted the draconian implications of the (then) proposed rules:

This rule requires an intermediary to immediately take steps to remove access to information merely upon receiving a written request from “any authority mandated under the law”. Thus, for example, any authority can easily immunize itself from criticism on the internet by simply sending a written notice to the intermediary concerned. This is directly contrary to, and completely subverts the legislative intent expressed in Section 69B which lays down an elaborate procedure to be followed before any information can be lawfully blocked. [Prakash 2011]

The policy apparatus of controlling online expression in India took its full form by the beginning of the decade under study here. The 'chilling effect' of this apparatus was made insightfully evident by a study conducted by Rishabh Dara at the Centre for Internet and Society, where fake takedown notices (regarding existing digital content) were sent to 7 important Internet intermediaries operating in India, and their responses were studied. The results of this experiment demonstrated that:

[T]he Rules create uncertainty in the criteria and procedure for administering the takedown thereby inducing the intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply with takedown notices in order to limit their liability; and as a result suppress legitimate expressions. Additionally, the Rules do not establish sufficient safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse of the takedown process to suppress legitimate expressions. [Dara 2012]

Reference

[Bloggers 2006] Bloggers Collective Group, Bloggers Against Censorship. Last updated on April 30, 2009‎. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bloggers_Against_Censorship.

[Dara 2012] Dara, Rishabh, Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet. The Centre for Internet and Society. April 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/chilling-effects-on-free-expression-on-internet.

[DEF] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Community Information Resource Centre. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/circ-2/.

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[DEF c] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Our Story. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/about-def/.

[DEF d] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Manthan Awards. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/manthan-award-south-asia-masa/.

[FSFI] Free Software Foundation of India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://fsf.org.in/.

[FSMI] Free Software Movement of India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.fsmi.in/node.

[Gurumurthy 2001] Gurumurthy, Anita, A Gender Perspective to ICTs and Development: Reflections towards Tunis. January 15. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.worldsummit2003.de/en/web/701.htm.

[Gurumurthy 2005] Gurumurthy, Anita, and Parminder Jeet Singh, WSIS PrepCom 2: A South Asian Perspective. Association for Progressive Communications. April 01. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://www.apc.org/en/news/hr/world/wsis-prepcom-2-south-asian-perspective.

[Gurumurthy 2006] Gurumuthy, Anita et al (eds.), Gender in the Information Society: Emerging Issues. UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.genderit.org/sites/default/upload/GenderIS.pdf.

[India-GII 2001] India-GII, Status of VSNL Censorship of IP-Telephony Sites. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://members.tripod.com/~india_gii/statusof.htm.

[India-GII 2005] India-GII. 2005. Last modified on May 24. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://india-gii.org/.

[IDP] Internet Democracy Project. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://internetdemocracy.in/.

[ITU 2003] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva Phase of the WSIS: List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/summit_participants.pdf.

[ITU 2005] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), List of Participants (WSIS) – Update 5 Dec 2005. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/final-list-participants.pdf.

[ITU 2005 b] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Tunis Agenda for the Information Society. November 18. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.pdf.

[IGF 2008] Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad Provisional List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/content/article/385-hyderabad-provisional-list-of-participants.

[IGF 2009] Internet Governance Forum, Managing Critical Resources. IGF Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt . November 16. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/2009/sharm_el_Sheikh/Transcripts/Sharm%20El%20Sheikh%2016%20November%202009%20Managing%20Critical%20Internet%20Resources.pdf.

[Bangalore] Internet Society Bangalore Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org/.

[Delhi] Internet Society Delhi Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org.

[Chennai] Internet Society Chennai Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org.

[Kolkata] Internet Society Kolkata Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://isockolkata.in/.

[Trivandrum] Internet Society Trivandrum Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/chapters/india-trivandrum-chapter.

[ITfC] IT for Change, About IT for Change. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/aboutus.

[ITfC b] IT for Change, Anita Gurumurthy. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/Anita.

[ITfC c] IT for Change, Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society: Southern Feminist Dialogues in Practice and Theory. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.gender-is-citizenship.net/.

[ITfC d] IT for Change, Internet Governance. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/Techgovernance.

[ITfC e] IT for Change, Our Field Centre. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/field_centre.

[JNC] Just Net Coalition (JNC). Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://justnetcoalition.org/.

[Kumar 2007] Kumar, Sasi V. 2007. The Story of Free Software in Kerala, India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://swatantryam.blogspot.in/2007/08/story-of-free-software-in-kerala-india.html.

[MoLaJ 2009] Ministry of Law and Justice (MoLaJ), The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008. The Gazette of India. February 05. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/it_amendment_act2008.pdf.

[MoCaIT 2009] Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCaIT), Notification. The Gazette of India. October 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/act301009.pdf.

[MoCaIT 2011] Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCaIT), Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011. The Gazette of India. April 11. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511%281%29.pdf.

[Noronha 2002] Noronha, Frederick, Linking a Diverse Country: Mailing Lists in India. The Digital Development Network. May 22. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.comminit.com/ict-4-development/content/linking-diverse-country-mailing-lists-india.

[Pahwa 2015] Pahwa, Nikhil, A List of Section 66A Arrests in India through the Years. Medianama. March 24. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-section-66a-arrests-in-india/.

[Prakash 2009] Prakash, Pranesh, Short Note on IT Amendment Act, 2008 . The Centre for Internet and Society. February. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/publications/it-act/short-note-on-amendment-act-2008/.

[Prakash 2011] Prakash, Pranesh, CIS Para-wise Comments on Intermediary Due Diligence Rules, 2011. The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/intermediary-due-diligence.

[Prakash 2011 b] Prakash, Pranesh, et al, Open Government Data Study. The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/open-government-data-study.

[SFLC] Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://sflc.in/.

[Shah 2011] Shah, Nishant. 2011. Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook.

[Singh 2011] Singh, Dushyant, India's Proposal for a United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies. Sixty Sixth Session of the UN General Assembly, New York. October 26. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/sites/default/files/ItfC/india_un_cirp_proposal_20111026.pdf.

[SKC] Society for Knowledge Commons. About Us. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.knowledgecommons.in/about-us/.

[Asia Source] Tactical Technology Collective, Asia Source. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://tacticaltech.org/asiasource.

[Tanna 2004] Tanna, Ketan, Internet Censorship in India: Is It Necessary and Does It Work?. Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.ketan.net/INTERNET_CENSORSHIP_IN_INDIA.html.

[CIS] The Centre for Internet and Society. About Us. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/about/.

[CIS 2008] The Centre for Internet and Society. 2008. Annual Report. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/accessibility/annual-report-2008.pdf.

[Sarai 2005] The Sarai Programme, Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics. January 12. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://sarai.net/contested-commons-trespassing-publics/.

[Wikipedia 2015] Satish Babu. Wikipedia. Last modified on June 25. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review

CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01

sumandro — 2020-05-11T10:49:51Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_01.jpeg

CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_SZ_02

sumandro — 2020-05-11T10:52:11Z

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CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02

sumandro — 2020-05-11T14:02:49Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_AG_02.jpg

CIS_APU_DigitalLabour_PlatypusEssays_NR-RJ_01

sumandro — 2020-05-13T09:12:10Z

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Amutha Arunachalam - Stand Shielded of Digital Rights (Delhi, May 05, 4 pm)

sumandro — 2017-05-03T13:30:32Z

We are proud to announce that Amutha Arunachalam will be the speaker at the May #FirstFriday event at the CIS Delhi office. Amutha is Principal Technical Officer in the Council Of Scientific and Industrial Research. The talk will be on digital signatures, traceability of time-stamps, and setting up an Indian Standard (Digital) Time. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Amutha Arunachalam

Principal Technical Officer, Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

Amutha Arunachalam entered the Indian Government service as an Intelligence Officer in Ministry of Home Affairs in 1988 after working at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Fibre Optic communication Laboratory. She later moved to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in the field of Information Technology. She managed the IT infrastructure of the CSIR lab (Central Road Research Institute) till 2006 and moved to CSIR Head Quarters and contributed in the ICT refurbishment drive, mainly in the IT with a major contribution in establishing DATA Centre, implementing network security, linking CSIR HQ to the National Knowledge Network facility extended by National Information Centre(NIC) before joining UIDAI.

In UIDAI (National Identity Project) she managed the Data Center operations that includes critical CIDR (Central Identification Repository) and was responsible for setting up Infrastructure to roll out Disaster recovery centre, Aadhaar Enrolment Service, Benchmarking of UIDAI Enrolment , Authentication Applications and setting up of Backend infrastructure of the Authentication Service for Roll out to citizens. After the five year Deputation at UIDAI (Feb 2016), she is currently posted in the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research working in the Area of Policy in Cyber Security for CSIR, Enhancing Research with collaborative, networking and Building unified CSIR Ecosystem with Enterprise platform.

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/firstfridayatcis-amutha-arunachalam-stand-shielded-of-digital-rights-may-05

SoI’s Open Series Maps Fails to Implement Public Sharing of Govt Data

sumandro — 2017-05-04T12:19:01Z

Although it has made the topographic maps or the Open Series Maps available to general public, Survey of India’s (SoI) Nakshe portal will have to go through a variety of litmus test, as the initiative fails to implement the mandates of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012, says Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, The Centre for Internet and Society. This interview was published by Geospatial World on May 02, 2017.

Cross-posted from Geospatial World.

What are your views on the Nakshe Portal initiative from Survey of India?

It is a most welcome initiative by the Survey of India to realize the mandate of the National Map Policy (NMP) 2005 to publicly distribute “Open Series Maps of scales larger than 1:1 million”. The Survey of India has also drawn from and implemented the mandate of the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP) 2012 to make available the shareable and non-sensitive Open Series Maps documents without any necessary fees to access and use them.

The initiative, however, fails to achieve the goal of of public sharing of government data using open standards and open license as put forward by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. This substantively raises the barrier to access the Open Series Maps data and reduces its possibilities of reuse, especially for commercial innovation, in a very serious way. This undermining of the open data agenda is not only a concern for the Nakshe portal in particular, but also sets a dangerous precedent for future open government data initiatives in India.

What is your view on the data provided and its usability?

The Nakshe portal has created several barriers to access and use of the Open Series Maps data, all of which are in violation of the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012:

NDSAP 2012 mandates that shareable and non-sensitive government data (such as Open Series Maps) are made public through the data.gov.in portal created under the guidance of the NDSAP 2012. Survey of India may of course decide to publish the Open Series Maps data on the Nakshe portal along with on the data.gov.in portal. Publishing of the data only through the Nakshe portal not only violates the mandate of NDSAP 2012, they make such data much less discoverable.
NDSAP 2012 allows for “registered access” to open government data. That is, it allows for data to be shared only with users who have registered with the data publishing portal. Making registration only possible via Aadhaar number, however, significantly limits the number of users who can access this data. For example, non-Indian researchers form an important potential sub-section of users of Open Series Maps but they will not be able to access the data. The website neither has a privacy policy that clarifies how these submitted Aadhaar numbers will be stored, protected, and shared (if at all) by the Survey of India.
NMP 2005 instructs Survey of India to “allow a user to add value to the maps obtained (either in analogue or digital formats) and prepare his own value-added maps”. The Government Open Data License has been recently notified under NDSAP 2012 to guide permitted uses of open government data in India.

The very restricted approach to permitted end-uses of Open Series Maps by the Survey of India neither follow the NMP instruction, nor adopt the Government Open Data License. Data available from Nakshe portal cannot be exported (which is technically an absurd demand due to globally distributed nature of servers), commercialized, or altered. This creates a most serious barrier to using the Open Series Maps data available via the Nakshe portal.
The Nakshe portal has published geospatial data in PDF format. This is a clear violation of open data practices globally and the NDSAP Implementation Guidelines more specifically, which states that open geospatial data standards, like GML and KML, should be used).

Does this fall in line with the larger government aim of having open and accessible data? If not why?

In a nutshell, the Open Series Maps data being published on the Nakshe portal is neither open (as it does not use open standards to share the data and does not share the data under an open licenses) nor universally accessible (due to the requirement for registration via Aadhaar number).

What improvements do you suggest in the approach of SoI about the portal?

I have listed four major conflicts that the Nakshe portal has with the directives and guidelines offered by the NMP 2005 and NDSAP 2012. I sincerely hope that the Survey of India and the Department of Science and Technology will address them soon, as they significantly limit the ability of users to access and use the Open Series Maps data.

These changes will make the Open Series Maps data open, and ensure that the data can be accessed and innovated with by various stakeholders.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/survey-of-india-open-series-maps-fails-to-implement-public-sharing-of-govt-data

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

sumandro — 2017-05-31T03:49:26Z

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

Japleen Pasricha

Founder & Editor-in-chief, Feminism in India

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

RSVP

Location

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

Internet Researchers' Conference 2016 (IRC16)

sumandro — 2016-02-27T06:19:33Z

The first Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC16) will be organised at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi, on February 26-28, 2016. The focus of the Conference is on the experiences, adventures, and methods of 'studying internet in India.' We are deeply grateful to the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), JNU, for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for the generous support. It is a free and open conference. Please use the form to register.

It is our great pleasure to announce the beginning of the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), an annual conference series initiated by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at CIS to gather researchers, academic or otherwise, studying internet in/from India to congregate, share insights and tensions, and chart the ways forward.

This conference series is specifically driven by the following interests: 1) creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions, 2) foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India, 3) accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and 4) exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Conference, IRC16, is engaging with the theme of 'studying internet in India.' The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

Dates and Venue

The IRC16 will take place during February 26-28, 2016, at the Convention Centre of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi. We are grateful to Centre for Political Studies (CPS) at JNU for hosting the Conference, and to the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF) for its generous support.