Centre for Internet and Society

Samskrita Vaibhavam (Sanskrit Wiki Outreach Program)

Shubha and Sayant Mahato — 2014-10-31T14:02:51Z

To celebrate the revival of Sanskrit language, the Bangalore chapter of Samskrita Bharati organised a two-day mega event "Samskrita Vaibhavam" at VSR Kalyan Mantapa in Bangalore on August 9 and 10, 2014.

Competition, Conference & Exhibition

The theme of the event was promotion of Sanskrit. It offered an encapsulation of the culture and heritage woven into Sanskrit. No wonder, the event attracted more than thousand samskrita premis or Sanskrit enthusiasts, who actively participated in the proceedings.

As is well known, Samskrita Bharati with a missionary zeal, is engaged in popularising Sanskrit language and demonstrating to the world that Sanskrit cannot only be easily learnt by anyone but also by those who can easily speak in Sanskrit and transact daily activities too. Samskrita Bharati organises Samskrita Shibirams through which these concepts are popularised.

Notable during the event was a seminar on "Why Samskrit". Dr. Chamu Krishna Shastry, Samskrita Bharati; Dr. Srinivas Varkhede, Karnataka Samskrit University; Dr. Ramachandra Bhat, Veda Vignyana Gurukulam; Dr. Balachandra Rao, mathematecian and astrophysicist; Dr. VR Anil Kumar, Kalpa Heritage Trust; and Uttara Nerurkar, Vedic scholar, were the expert speakers.

Additionally, an exhibition was also organised. Here, there was a stall on "Samskrita Wikipedia" (Sa.Wikipedia). This was a grand attraction for visitors as Sanskrit Wikipedia showed that (Sanskrit) knowledge can be accessed in a split second with a click on a computer.

The Sanskrit Wikipedia wing of Samskrita Bharati is thankful for the timely support from CIS-A2K, which was used for designing and printing handbills and brochures about Sanskrit Wikipedia. The brochures, which were distributed among participants, were well appreciated as it helped them connect with Sa.Wikipedia, and the myriad possibilities available to them by learning Sanskrit.

The entire event was of great significance in the promotion of Sanskrit language.

Acknowledgement from Samskrita Bharati

This article was written by Shubha and Sayant Mahato.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/samskrita-vaibhavam

Sambad 100 Women Edit-a-thon

Ting Yi Chang and Sailesh Patnaik — 2017-04-18T10:05:52Z

A two-day 100 Women Edit-a-thon was held on March 18 and 19, 2017 in collaboration with Odisha’s biggest newspaper publisher Sambad. The event was inspired by BBC’s 100 Women series and edit-a-thons with the same name in December 2016. More than 20 female journalists participated and registered as new Odia Wikipedians. The event served as a highlight of the Women’s History Month in Indian language Wikipedias as well as in the global movement.

The name 100 Women was coined for BBC’s annual series featuring inspirational women from around the globe. In December 2016, in coordination with the broadcast of the program, an edit-a-thon of the same name was conducted at the headquarters of BBC, including at its Delhi office in India. The edit-a-thons aimed to create and edit biography articles of notable women on Wikipedia(s) to address the under-representation of women online and on Wikipedia - what we call the “Wikipedia gender gap.”

In March, Sambad became the first major news publisher after BBC to pick up the initiative and the first to hold a 100 Women edit-a-thon for Odia Wikipedia, commemorating International Women’s History Month. Sambad, an Odia daily, is among the most widely circulated papers in the state of Odisha. Ms. Tanaya Patnaik, Director of Eastern Media (Sambad’s parent company) had enthusiastically agreed to the collaboration in December 2016:

"This is the first 100 Women Editathon in India in collaboration with a media house. We are really proud to host it. A few days ago, I attended a fellowship event on ending gender violence against women, where I spoke about this editathon, and people were excited to know about this event and how we are taking such initiatives to make information about women accessible on the Internet. We will organise such events regularly and will follow up with the journalists to achieve the target of writing 100 articles about Odia Women."

The edit-a-thon was held at the Sambad headquarters in Bhubaneswar with over 20 female journalists attending the event. The event commenced on March 18, Saturday, with a half-day workshop and introduction session to Wikipedia and the topic of bridging the gender gap. Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, founder of the Sambad group, said at the event:

"Technology is always considered an enemy of language. Now is the time for language and technology to collaborate. New technologies have been developed over the last couple of years. If we can implement these technologies in our own language and accept it as a friend, we can take our language ahead. With the help of Odia Wikipedia, people using smartphones and other smart devices can access the information in their own language."

After a round of participants’ self-introduction, Sailesh Patnaik, Community Advocate, CIS-A2K introduced Odia Wikipedia, Odia input tools and how to edit. Some participants were able to create their Wikipedia accounts on the first day. CIS-A2K Research Intern, Ting-Yi Chang, highlighted in her presentation, the reasons for and significance of the Wikipedia gender gap. The event is an important effort to help Odia Wikipedia and its readers combat the gender bias in knowledge creation.

On March 19, Sunday, participants began hands on editing with the help of local Wikimedians from the Bhubaneswar Tungi community. Each participant had chosen a female achiever in advance and had prepared citable sources from the Sambad publications. The chosen figures are influential and important women in Odisha history and society, such as Kalpana Dash, the first Odia mountaineer to scale Mt. Everest, Parbati Ghosh, an accomplished Odia film-maker, Shyamamani Patnaik, a famous Odishi singer,among others. In total, 23 female biography articles were created and improved during the edit-a-thon. In an anonymous survey conducted during the event, over three-quarters of the participants said that they do not find editing difficult and over 80 percent of the participants express interest in writing about women or women-related subjects on Wikipedia.

However, since all the participants were first-time Wikipedians, the edit-a-thon was not without its challenges. Some participants had trouble getting used to the Unicode input method for the Odia script. Many of them are familiar with Shree lipi, an older input method that is not supported by Unicode interfaces such as Wikipedia. Luckily, a Shree lipi-to-Unicode conversion application was available on the computers at the venue; however, the conversion is not always perfect and the process can make editing more time consuming. A handout was given to the participants to help familiarize themselves with the new input method. Additionally, the organizers discovered the need to elaborate on what is considered a reliable source for reference. Participants were reminded during the event that in addition to the sources available at the Sambad office, they can also use other news articles on the Internet as long as they are published by credible news publishers.

Despite its challenges, the Sambad 100 Edit-a-thon was able to stand out and succeed because of a combination of the global initiative and a localized focus, the abundance of reliable resources available for editing, support from the Odia Wikipedia community, and the post-event media exposure. For example, the event was inspired by the BBC 100 Women global edit-a-thon series but was planned and carried out in the Odisha context - using Odia script, Odisha figures, and sources in Odisha’s most prominent newspaper. That being said, the existence of verifiable citation is often more crucial than one’s editing skills or writing style in determining the fate of a new article on Wikipedia. Holding the event in the Sambad office in Bhubaneswar not only ensured the availability of necessary facilities but also equipped us with abundant sources that can be cited in the articles.

The event also served as an example of regional community collaboration. Thanks to the strong support team from the Bhubaneswar WikiTungi community, participants were able to consult (both male and female) tutors throughout the event when questions emerged. The new Wikipedians were invited to join future monthly WikiTungi meetups in the city.

Finally, it is worth noting that a significant part of event was its reach. Sambad helped the event and the movement tremendously not only with their support in event planning and execution, but also with media exposure. Although the event could only accommodate around 20 participants, raising public awareness through mass media could help more people know about the existence of Odia Wikipedia and the issue of gender gap within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/sambad-100-women-edit-a-thon

Rootconf 2019

Admin — 2019-07-05T00:52:38Z

Karan Saini participated in the annual Rootconf conference held by HasGeek on June 21 and 22, 2019. This conference was held at the NIMHANS Convention Centre in Bangalore, India.

Apart from being responsible for reviewing proposals for security-related talks for Rootconf, Karan also moderated a 'Birds of a Feather’ session with Vandana Verma and Shubham Mittal wherein participants discussed the various offensive and defensive security applications of open source intelligence. The conference schedule can be accessed here. The abstract for the Birds of a Feather session on OSINT can be found here. More information on the event can be viewed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/rootconf-2019

Right to Information Act and Open Data Policy in India

praskrishna — 2015-06-18T01:27:34Z

Sumandro led a knowledge sharing session at this event organized by Myanmar ICT Development Organization (MIDO) on May 14, 2015.

The session focused on the making of the global open data movement, the open data policy in India and its linkages with the Right to Information Act, the experience of the making of the Right to Information Act in India and its implementational challenges, the emerging open data activities in India and its opportunities and challenges. The issue of Myanmar’s decision to become part of the Open Government Partnership was discussed. The initiative started during Barack Obama's visit in Myanmar in 2012.

The NGOs in Myanmar since then have boycotted talks with the government regarding this topic, as they have felt that the government did not involve them in the decision in the first place. The Myanmar government has promised to be part of OGP by 2016. The NGOs in Myanmar has started to engage with the OGP process on their own. This is being led by the Myanmar Alliance for Transparency and Accountability, or MATA. MIDO is a member of the Alliance. Also, Nwezin Win of National NGO Network of Myanmar has also become a civil society member of the OGP Steering Committee during the rotation of the committee in 2014.

In a brief discussion regarding how open data can be part of the OGP conversations in Myanmar, and the role that MIDO can play in this, Sumandro suggested that MATA focuses both on articulating a demand for open data and information from the government, and on increasing the capacities to work with data among its members. MIDO has critical roles to play in both the demand and supply side of open data and information, especially since ICT capabilities of NGOs in Myanmar are often not sufficient, and it is very important to raise general awareness about technical qualities of open data and information impact the way such data and information can be used in transparency and accountability initiatives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/right-to-information-act-and-open-data-policy-in-india

Right to Education and the Future of Our Languages

praskrishna — 2015-05-27T14:00:44Z

The Department of Linguistics, University of Mumbai and Dr. Rakhmabai Educational Resource and Research Centre in association with ICSSR (WRC) organized a National Symposium on Right to Education and the Future of Our Languages at Pherozeshah Mehta Bhavan from March 9 to 11, 2015. Tanveer Hasan was a speaker.

Prof. Ganesh Devy gave the inaugural address and Prof. Anita Rampal gave the keynote address. Tanveer Hasan spoke about the importance of Free and Open Resources of Knowledge and how these resources could be harnessed in providing access to knowledge and subsequently claim the right to education. The event was organized as an effort to understand the effect of RTE act on the primary and high school education standards across India with special reference to Maharashtra. The workshop also provided an opportunity to meet several like minded institutions and individuals.

More information on the event here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/right-to-education-and-future-of-our-languages

RHoK Global June 2013

praskrishna — 2013-05-31T13:58:00Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is hosting the Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) Global event at its office in Bangalore on June 1 and 2, from 8.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.

RHoK is a rapidly growing global initiative encompassing a community of over 5,500 innovators in over 30 countries striving to make the world a better place by developing practical, open source technology solutions to respond to some of the most complex challenges facing humanity. We do this by defining problems, organizing hackathons, and ensuring projects are effectively deployed.

Bangalore has been hosting RHoK hackathons since 2010. RHoK pre-hackathon reception will be hosted on May 31, 2013 at CIS. The tentative plan for tonight's reception can be found at https://www.smore.com/x3fm

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/rhok-bangalore-2013

Research papers will be available in public domain

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T05:38:36Z

IIT-Madras intends to make circle of knowledge complete, writes Vasudha Venugopal in this article published in the Hindu on 15 February 2012. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is quoted in the article.

2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.

The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.

What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.

Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.

Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.

While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.

Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says.

The original article was published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain

Report: Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, 23 Oct 2010, Doha, Qatar

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:43:25Z

A summary of the event "Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum" held in Doha.

Although I arrived in early morning of Saturday, 23 October 2010, I managed to attend Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, held at Sharq Village, Doha Qatar. Here is below a summary of the event.

The welcoming speech was given by Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. Al Jaber spoke about the importance of open digital environments for the region, and outlined specific initiatives that ictQATAR is leading to embrace it (establishment of incubation center, drafting policies that encourage open source in government and arabizing content). She noted that "The Arab world has a strong and important voice that must be heard. Embracing a digitally open world will put us at the forefront of innovation and help propel us towards being a knowledge based economy." The full speech of Dr. Al Jaber is available here.

Michelle Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation provided her insights of openness. She described elegantly openness as “a state of mind” and is about spreading innovation. To Baker, if you want to be effective on the internet, you need to have “scale”. Openness is important for “scale”. Creative Commons is a framework of how to work with a copyright system and share ideas. Mozilla intends to build a layer of the internet designed for individuals to make civil and social value. According to Baker, there are many degrees of “openness” and it up to the users contributing to open projects and the companies to choose between the various levels. She argues that openness does not mean “free” and believe that in certain areas this might hold some truth, but the matter is far from being settled.

Joi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons gave an interesting presentation entitled “Innovation and Digital Content Rights”. He described from his own experience while working for Japanese IT companies how innovation was perceived pre the internet era and afterward. He also compared between the traditional style of IT innovation (governments, large companies, experts) and the new style of innovation with the arrival of the internet (users contributing to open source and open content projects). To joi, the internet is made of various layers and stacks. Creative Commons is the next stack. It basically lowers the costs and creates an explosion in knowledge and innovation. He gave examples of organizations that are using Creative Commons including Wikipedia, Aljazeera, and Governments in New Zealand and Australia.

Chris Dibona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google, spoke about open source. He outlined the motivations behind releasing code by developers. He described how Google practices open source projects such as “Chromium”. One audience member asked Dibona about Google’s attention in the region in relation to open source. He replied that Google needs to learn more about the region and the culture of the Middle East. His full presentation is available here.

Professor Michael Nelson, a visiting professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University spoke about “open clouds”. He emphasised that we are living in new world where small countries can make big impact in technology world. Estonia is the most “wired” country in Europe. Skype changed the way we do business. Qatar can provide the seed for the magic cloud. This can be achieved by having the right policies in the right time.

The second panel entitled “Openness in Science and Technology” was moderated by John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons. He gave introductory remarks to the use of CC in science. His full presentation is available here.

Shaikah Al- Jaber, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel International gave a presentation entitled “Open Innovation for Telecom Companies in the Middle East”. She mainly spoke about innovation in the telecommunication sector and how it can be achieved. Her full presentation is available here.

Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat, gave a presentation entitled “From Linux to Beyond”. He went through the history and development of “open source”. Redhat was the first cooperation to take “open source” into the commercial arena. It was founded in 1983 and it currently employs 3500 employees with offices in 29 countries. He also discussed other issues related to open source community and open source adoption. His full presentation is available here.

Habib Hadid, the founder of Yalla Startup and Yamili.com did not give a presentation, but instead spoke spontaneously about business and how innovation and openness can help it. He recommended at the end to consider “innovation as a human right”.

Lucio Rispo, a strategic research director for the Qatar Science and Technology Park, spoke about the internet technological revolution and how it is changing the world. He described several initiatives that were taken in Doha, Qatar including IQRA to spread technology and innovation. His full presentation is available here.

The third panel was about “Openness in Government” that was moderated by Professor Michael Nelson. Sunil Abraham, executive Director for the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India provided interesting remarks about the internet and openness from the perspective of developing countries especially India. He also mentioned the importance of putting government funded research under open transparent and open models.

Paul Keller, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain, Knowledgeland, Netherlands, discussed the ways to promote openness in the public sector through the use of Creative Commons licensing model. To view his presentation click here. Marwan Marouf Mahmod, Executive Director of ICT Industry Development, ictQATAR spoke about his experience and the initiatives that they have taken in ictQatar.

The final panel was entitled “Culture, Creativity and Openness”. There were 3 speakers in this panel. Eric Steuer, Creative Commons Director and the moderator of the session gave an introduction to CC. He described how CC is being used in Education, music, museums, design, films and journalism. His full presentation is available here.

Addulrahman Al Qataba is a web and application developer from Qatar. He presented his philosophy on “open life”. He developed several projects that serve the open source community in mobile applications. The full presentation is available here.

Arend Kuster, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation (BQF) outlined the initiative that Bloomsbury Publishing is taking in Qatar to spread knowledge through printed books and journals published in Arabic and English.

Roger Mandle, spoke about museums and his experience as a director of the Qatar Museum Authority.

CC Arab World Second Meeting
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Sharq Village
12:30 p.m – 9:00 p.m.

The CC Arab world was attended by lawyers from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and also users and enthusiasts supporting CC from across the region. The meeting was divided into two sessions. The first was for all attendees and the second was divided into two groups one for users and another for lawyers.

The first session started with a welcoming note by Joi Ito, who stressed the importance of reaching consensus decisions on important matters related to CC in the Arab world. He noted the difficulties associated with organising such an event and the efforts that CC has invested to bring all people together. Donna thanked the organizers and the supporters of the event particularly ictQATAR. She also set out the agenda for the meeting. Diane spoke about the Affiliate Enhancement Program and Michelle gave details on drafting road maps for each jurisdictions. Speakers from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the UAE presented their road maps to CC.

After discussion and questioning, Diane gave an introduction to CC naming policy in other jurisdictions including Spanish speaking countries. The discussion of CC naming policy started with Rami Olwan writing in Arabic suggested terms for English CC licences. There were two views in relation to the translation of the English terms to Arabic. The first view came from lawyers who want to use legal words that might not sound appealing to Arabic users of the licences. The second view came from users who want to use words that might not be legal and enforceable in courts. After discussion that lasted three hours, a decision was reached on each term. It was agreed to either to use المشاع الإبداعي (creative Commons) or use the English version alone. Attribution: نسب المصنَف; ShareAlike: الترخيص بالمثل, NoDerivatives: منع الاشتقاق; NonCommercial: غير تجاري.

I attended the second meeting of the session for lawyers. Diane and Joi were present at this session. Diane spoke then allowed each of the jurisdiction leads to speak. Hala Essalmawi from CC Egypt spoke about the A2K project in the library of Alexandria, Egypt and how it was important to start the project there.

I spoke also about the importance for CC in governments and education. Pierre El Khoury and Mohammed AL Darwish spoke about their upcoming events that will feature Lawrence Lessig as a speaker to the Lebanese Bar Association. Mohammad from CC Lebanon also spoke about his involvement in the Consumers International and the reports that he produced for A2K in Lebanon.

Omar Al Taweel presented his views to CC of how CC should proceed in Jordan. Several questions were asked by the lawyers and Diane gave answers. The meeting ended as some of the attendees had to leave for the airport.

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/report-digitally-open-innovation-and-open-access-forum-23-oct-2010-doha-qatar

Report on Wikipedia Hackathon held in Hyderabad

Yuvi Panda — 2012-12-03T06:37:11Z

BITS Hyderabad had a tech fest from October 25 to 27, 2012, and wanted to conduct a technical wiki hackathon. We decided to do it on October 26 — all night.

We had a Google form that people filled up with a few simple questions — and picked out 12 from the 70 that signed up. This was important since I was the only one conducting it — and I wanted to keep it to a manageable number. It was an all night event that started at 7 p.m. in the evening and was supposed to go on till 6 a.m. next morning.

Hackathon

The hackathon started as scheduled around 7.00 p.m. As people trickled in I talked to them individually and mentally sorted them into two groups — 'people who are already programmatically competent enough to contribute code' and people who were not. A lot of people who were not selected but applied also showed up — since we had not sent rejection emails. I got them started on learning either Javascript or Python — and helped push them along. However, a good amount of time was spent with people who already had prior coding experience.

Most people worked on Gadgets, and a few on Python — exploring the API. We started off with basics of how to customize your Wikipedia experience with JS and CSS, building a very basic user script that changed colours / added new links. Some of the participants spent the entire night building this and others finished this in a few minutes and were on to the next project. Everyone worked at their own pace — and since there were smaller number of people I was able to (mostly) provide individual attention.

As people started working on stuff past hello world, I introduced them to IRC (#wikipedia-en and #mediawiki) and had them say 'hi' to editors. I also introduced them to a bunch of local hacker channels on IRC — and quite a few of them stayed on.

A fair amount of people left at around midnight — but a 'core' group seemed to have formed that stayed on. We hacked on to the wee hours of the morning, and even took small naps. We wound up at around 6 a.m., and staggered back to the hostels (and then proceeded to have long conversations about Linux, history of programming, and graphical raytracing).

Outcomes

We had some students who contributed substantially including Thomas Matthew, Vishwajit Kolathur, Aravind Peddapudi and Varun Chappidi. Most of them have been introduced to the local hacker community via IRC, and I see reports of continuing participation — after accounting for their ongoing exams. They all are technically very competent and have expressed interest in doing Google Summer of Code this year. Among the projects did at the hackathon are:

'Reading mode' gadget
'Reading mode' Chrome Extension that is wikipedia specific
Major work on a '3 hours later' type extension (a tool to produce graphs like (http://xkcd.com/214)

The fact that these people went from having no experience with Wiki related programming to being able to build code for it in a few hours time makes me very happy.

Learnings

Make sure people know that 'Hack'athon has nothing to do with cracking wifi passwords or breaking into Facebook accounts. We had a 'lot' of people apply thinking that was this despite a clear description. I was told that some of the people evangelizing the event also thought the same — so clearer messaging around this was needed.
Send rejection emails. We missed this, and sent only acceptance emails. A lot of people who weren't accepted turned up and we had to figure a way to engage them.
More organized followups. Currently all I can do is introduce them to the local hacker community and hope they 'stick'. GSoC is a good spot, but is too infrequent — and too high stakes.
Find more things for them to do. We had to actually stretch a bit to find them things to do — they were all raring to go, but we found it hard to find 'easy' bugs for them to fix that were actually useful to editors. Clearly editors have a lot of things in their mind that would make their lives better — but they are not listed anywhere public. Having a publicly available list of such things would be helpful. (There is a Gadget requests page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests), but it hasn't been updated in ages).

Finally, I would like to thank the Centre for Internet & Society for supporting my travel for the event, Thomas from BITS for organizing most of the logistics and Ravi Chandra from the Tor community for helping provide technical mentorship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-hackathon-hyderabad

Report of Wiki Workshop in Mangalore

praskrishna — 2013-04-16T06:14:42Z

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

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

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

Report of Aaron Swartz Memorial Hacknight

zainab — 2013-03-02T13:32:25Z

On 19th and 20th January, HasGeek organized a hacknight to commemorate the life and works of Aaron Swartz. Zainab Bawa from HasGeek shares with us the developments.

Why host an Aaron Swartz memorial hacknight? In the aftermath of Aaron’s death, some people began expressing doubts, uncertanties and misinformed opinions about his activist causes. They questioned whether Aaron committed a ’crime’ by downloading articles from JSTOR and whether the means he used for liberating data were wrong in the first place. It was important to dispel these doubts and provide people with a better understanding about issues such as IT laws, copyright rules and access to information, and how these are implemented in different parts of the world.

Aaron had initiated several coding projects during his lifetime. Anand Chitipothu, who collaborated with Aaron at the Internet Archive and maintains his web.py framework, suggested that the hacknight could also be an opportunity where people get familiar with Aaron’s coding projects and work on some of them.

The hacknight: 87 people registered for the hacknight. Approximately 40 people turned up. Some participants proposed projects to liberate different kinds of public data such as electoral data, weather data, information about train timetables and crawling data from government and NIC websites. Developers worked on these projects to make the data searchable and usable.

Discussions during the hacknight: The hacknight started at 3 PM with a discussion about the life of Aaron Swartz and the political and legal implications of his coding projects and activism.

This discussion was led by Anand and Kiran Jonnalagadda of HasGeek.

Kiran gave an elaborate background about Aaron’s life starting with how he established RSS 1.0 as a standard and the collaboration between Aaron and Lawrence Lessig on using the RDF format for Creative Commons licensing, leading to Aaron’s work with Reddit and its acquisition by Condé Nast. Shortly after Reddit’s acquisition, Aaron left Reddit and began a career in activism. In this period, he started freeing data funded by public money which constitutionally belonged in the public domain. He published data from the catalogue of the Library of Congress and the US case law archives on the Internet Archive. Later, Aaron downloaded articles from JSTOR to release academic papers whose research was funded with public money. Before he could sift through the downloads, Aaron was caught by the police. He returned the hard disk containing the downloads. JSTOR and MIT did not pursue cases against him, but the United States government charged Aaron for breaking into the MIT campus and faking identity by changing the MAC address of his computer.

At the end of Kiran’s presentation, participants asked several questions about activism, what constitutes offensive speech, framework of IT laws in India, and the process of law-making.

At 5 PM, Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) joined the hacknight. He made a presentation about copyright laws, the Indian IT Act and Aaron’s work.

Sunil explained how Aaron believed in the importance of access to information by releasing data from copyright and thereby enabling freedom of expression. According to Sunil, Aaron Swartz is a very troublesome hero because his data liberation projects do not fall into one neat category. Moreover, the means he used for his activism are questioned by different activist groups. This makes it difficult to pinpoint exactly what one must credit Aaron for and what category of activism his work falls under.

After Sunil’s presentation, there was a half hour discussion about the scope of copyright laws in India, copyright exemptions and what constitutes copyright infringement. Participants agreed that the trouble lies with the broad interpretations of copyright and IT laws. This enables the state and private parties to target and harass a person, often on frivolous grounds.

Discussion about hacknight projects: At 6 PM, participants with project ideas and those who wanted to join projects gathered in the garden. Over tea and snacks, groups / pairs were formed. Participants reported two difficulties here:

There weren’t enough projects to choose from i.e., fewer problems to solve
Not everyone who proposed projects could break the problem down into tasks for individual team members to work on.

This affected participants’ motivation to stay through the night.

Web.py workshop: After the tea break, Anand conducted a workshop on web.py.

Some participants came to the hacknight mainly to attend this workshop. The code used in this workshop is available on github.com/anandology/webpy-workshop.

Anand also worked on the database module of web.py to decouple it and make it into a separate python module. This project requires more work before it is completed. The code is available at: http://github.com/anandology/sqlpy

Projects at the hacknight: A complete list of projects that participants worked on during the hacknight are available on the hacknight website. We talked with some of the teams and individual participants to understand their projects, the process they followed for solving the problems, and outcomes at the end of the hacknight.

Liberating electoral data: Arun Raghavan, an open source enthusiast, and four other participants (Arun K, Praveen, Mikul and Sumant) worked on scraping electorial data from http://ceokarnataka.kar.nic.in/. They planned to build a frontend which will make it easy for users to search their names and polling booth information. Currently, the electoral roll is published as a PDF document for each polling station along with a search form (which is unreliable and fails often) for individuals to find their names on the roll and the location of their polling station.

It was difficult to parse the data because the PDFs were not designed for machine readability. Hence, the team had to spend time understanding how to extract the text. The other problem was that the person’s name was written above the father’s name, but if the person’s name was very long, it overlapped the father’s name. This made it difficult to determine where the person’s name ended and where the father’s name began. The team managed to come up with a heuristic to distinguish between the person’s name and father’s name based on slight differences in the way the text was printed on each sheet.

Arun Raghavan and other team members used Python to parse data from the PDFs. They also tried extracting data by using the search form and saving results whenever it returned them (since it failed often). The search form required a JavaScript submit, so Praveen Kumar and Arun K learned to use casper.js to emulate a browser and extract data. Praveen also used casper.js to liberate his friend Aram Bhusal’s blog from Sulekha.com. Aram made a presentation about this at the January edition of the Bangalore JS meet.

At the end of the hacknight, the group almost managed to get a dump of an entire electoral roll. The project repositories:

Other data liberation projects:

Indexing Government websites by category of information: Elvis D’souza worked on crawling government websites and indexing them by category, for e.g., education, import-export trade, science and technology, etc. According to him, government websites contain lots of information including documents and spreadsheets. At the hacknight, Elvis completed the indexing process and ran some statistics about information contained in these websites. He eventually wants to build a portal where people can access this index and the documents.
Railway timetable data: Anand scraped data from the IRCTC website. Supreeth Srinivasmurthy worked with this data to plot a map. Bibhas Debnath also worked on the timetable data to build an API. A demo of this API is yet to be released.
Parsing weather data: Asok Padda converted weather data from HTML format to Excel sheets. Hourly weather data for all weather stations in India during 2012 is parsed and uploaded to Internet Archive: http://archive.org/details/www.imdaws.com-2012
Other projects: Kashyap Kondamundi started building an app which will help people to calculate the current values of their mutual funds. He built 70% of this app at the hacknight.

HasGeek has requested participants to post updates about their projects and share links to their code.

Overall achievements from the hacknight: Participants reported the following outcomes from the hacknight:

Learning about new libraries and their applications
Awareness about IT laws and copyright frameworks in India
Opportunity to meet and network with other coders who have an interest in data-related projects or working on new project ideas.

Participants appreciated Anand’s presence as a mentor during the hacknight. He interacted with the teams and helped them when they were stuck with their projects, either with his expertise in Python or by suggesting alternative ways of approaching the problem.

HasGeek thanks CIS for sponsoring the venue and providing logistical support during the hacknight.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hasgeek-blog-zainab-bawa-feb-6-2013-report-of-aaron-swartz-memorial-hacknight

Report from India: Relicensing books under CC

subha — 2014-05-05T09:13:15Z

My name is Subhashish Panigrahi. I am an educator currently working in the community and communication front at The Centre for Internet and Society’s Access To Knowledge program (CIS-A2K), an India-based catalyst program to grow Indic language communities for Wikipedia and its sister projects. Prior to my work at CIS, I worked for the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program, a predecessor to the current CIS-A2K project.

Read the original published on Creative Commons Blog on April 18, 2014 here.

While building ties with higher education and research organizations, I also try to get educational and encyclopedic resources licensed under Creative Commons licenses so that communities can use them to enrich Wikimedia projects. Currently, there is a low level of content available across all the Indic languages and the need for Unicode-based content is extremely crucial.

	While negotiating with authors for relicensing their books in Creative Commons license, I started identifying certain motivation areas for any author for such free content donation. Some of the authors, publishers, and copyright holders have started learning about open access to scholarly publications. However, the readers who are likely to buy a hard copy of a book are likely to buy it even when a free, virtual version is available – that’s the idea authors who are skeptical about CC licenses need to understand.

While negotiating with authors for relicensing their books in Creative Commons license, I started identifying certain motivation areas for any author for such free content donation. Some of the authors, publishers, and copyright holders have started learning about open access to scholarly publications. However, the readers who are likely to buy a hard copy of a book are likely to buy it even when a free, virtual version is available – that’s the idea authors who are skeptical about CC licenses need to understand.

Open source book publishing in India has gained much interest and focus, primarily because of the lack of foresight of the possibilities that are tied to the release of books. It was Pratham Books that first came up with the brilliant idea of “One book book in every child’s hand.” The subsequent release of multilingual books under free licenses was the beginning of a new era in Indian publication.

Book publishers should also think of the target readers of print and web media. Releasing content in free licenses doesn’t affect the mainstream print publications. When it comes to books, there is always a scope for reprinting and making money. After negotiations with two authors and getting 13 books about children’s literature, travelogues, popular science, and linguistic and historical research, I am sure the publishing community has not been educated in the right way about providing free access to content.

It generally takes a long time and effort to negotiate with the copyright holders to get the books out with a CC-BY-SA tag. But it is a permanent and a significant value addition for the open knowledge movement. I believe with more online readers and reviewers getting complete access to books, authors gain more respect in the society and popularity which in turn helps them to sell more of the reprints. Two prime fears are keeping many publishers away from releasing their books online for free: the fear of going out of business and the fear of losing ownership of content. But at the same time, some of the publishers are becoming aware of the mass media outreach and winning hearts of many readers by releasing content for free without copyright restrictions.

Case studies:

Release of a four-volume encyclopedia in Konkani

In 2013, Goa University released Konkani Vishwakosh, a Konkani-language encyclopedia in CC-BY-SA 3.0 license that they had published. This is the largest encyclopedia compiled in the language. The book is being digitized on Konkani WikiSource and content from it is being used to enrich the Konkani version of Wikipedia. The project additionally brought about 20 active contributors for digitization.

Release of 11 Odia language books

11 books from Odia author and academic Dr. Jagannath Mohanty were re-released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license by the “Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa,” a trust founded by Dr. Mohanty for literary discussions and upbringing new writers. His wife and trust’s current chairman Allhadmohini Mohanty formally gave written permission to release and digitize these books. The Odia Wikimedia community is planning to involve undergraduate students of an indigenous educational institution, Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences, to digitize these books. The trust is also reaching out to publishers who published more than 150 of the author’s books to give permission for re-releasing them under a CC license.

Relicensing “Classical Odia” under a free license

The book is heavy and expensive for any normal reader. Enormous copies were sold after Odia was declared as the sixth Indian classical language; however, this did not stop the authors Dr. Debiprasanna Pattanayak and Subrat Prusty from changing the license term from All Rights Reserved to CC-BY-SA 3.0. 600-plus pages full of historical documents and manuscripts along with many undiscovered areas of Odia language’s literary heritage of more than 2500 years are now going to go on WikiSource and enrich Wikipedia articles apart from being great resource for language researchers.

Relicensing books and conversion of ISCII to Unicode font

Two Odia language books by linguist Subrat Prusty, “Jati, Jagruti O Pragati” and “Bhasa O Jatiyata,” have been relicensed. These are few of those thousand books in those the text are typed with fonts with ISCII standard and not Unicode. ISCII standard fonts have glyphs with Indic characters that are actually replacements of the Latin characters by Indic characters. So, a computer with one particular font not installed will display absurd characters. The publication and printing industries still use these fonts as the desktop publishing software package they use for typeset do not have Unicode engine to render the fonts properly. The conversion from these ISCII fonts to Unicode is a way that is going to be used for digitizaing these books to convert the entire book with searchable Unicode content.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-subhashish-panigrahi-april-18-2014-report-from-india-relicensing-books-under-creative-commons

Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight

nishant — 2013-01-28T04:51:58Z

I encountered the Aaron Swartz memorial the other day that helps ‘liberate’ a randomly selected article from JSTOR, as an act of civil disobedience, to commemorate both the legacy that Swartz leaves behind, but also the high-profile witch-hunt case which was a crucial factor in him taking his own life.

Nishant Shah's blog post was published by DML Central on January 24, 2013.

Much has been said about Swartz and much more will have to be said about him, and about his work, to make sure that the good that men do does not get interred with their bones. And there are people more articulate, closer to him in personal and professional capacities who will do a better job at making sure we have an archive of memories to fill up the ‘Aaron sized-hole’ that his untimely death has introduced into our lives.

So instead of attempting to write a eulogy I am ill-equipped for, I want to mark the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz by talking about causes and everyday politics. And I might have to do it through a mode of collective self-flagellation because it is a point that needs to be driven home. I am sure that almost everybody would agree that the ideals that Swartz held were unimpeachable, even though they might not always agree with his tactics. There would be a general consensus that in our rapidly growing information societies free knowledge leads to better, stronger, and more equitable societies. In fact, there is a whole generation of younger users who are so used to having unlimited and unrestricted access to digital information that they often get frustrated and infuriated when they encounter media cartels and Intellectual Property Regimes that insist on locking up knowledge -- especially publicly funded academic resources -- behind paywalls.

We have all grumbled, at different points, about the essay we wanted to teach in class, the book we needed for a research paper, the movie we wanted to remix, or the song we wanted to sample, locked up behind (often) unaffordable access systems. We recognise that in the building of this gated knowledge landscape, we are creating uneven, corrupt and corrupting hierarchies of information control and access. And yet, when it comes to actually responding to these questions of closed intellectual property, restricted information access and media monopolies exerted by information cartels, we generally have a comfortable sense of distance. These are other peoples’ problems. These are battles somebody else will fight.

Even within academia, where we have been the most active in questioning and contesting the notions of power and knowledge, there is also the highest complicity in creating these monstrous behemoths that we feed regularly with research that is more often than not, publicly funded. In our quest for tenures, careers and popularity, we have voluntarily given up our rights to private and closed access journals that in return give us the symbolic capital to gain power in the system. In the 1980s, when the Subaltern school was writing against colonial legacies and cultural imperialism, Homi Bhabha had described this condition of granted agency and borrowed power as mimicry. In his own hyphenated way, he had suggested that the new subaltern, who is often seen as engaged in critically responding to the colonial masters and their legacies, only exists in a structure of mimicry -- where he emptily gestures towards the problems of colonial inheritance, without any power to actually overthrow or challenge it. Within South Asian feminisms, Kumkum Sangari has described this status of granted agency within patriarchy -- a condition that gives us a sense of power and a space of negotiation, as long as we uphold the very structure that oppresses us in the name of our empowerment.

It is time to realise that within academia, and the social sciences and arts based academia in particular, we have now perfected the art of mimicry. Where we pull our pens instead of our swords and talk (often indecipherably) about conditions of power and geographies of inequality and the need to do something about it. We attend conferences where proceedings go into closed access journals, and publish books with publishing houses that charge us and our students exorbitant sums of money to access the knowledge in those books. We publish not to be heard but to be cited, not to create open publics but closed communities of interlocked interests. And we feel smug about being politically committed, separating the conditions of our knowledge production from the content of our knowledge, as if the two have nothing to do with each other.

In other sectors that I dabble with but am not such a rank (and hence equally complicit) insider, I see similar distances. This alienation of our intellectual work from its political content is just one of the separations we make. The other separation is between our discursive communities and everyday practice. So embedded is our description, explanation and analysis of the world, in languages inaccessible to any but the privileged few who are trained to understand it. The advice we give our students -- follow the grandmother rule: write clearly so that your grandmother will be able to understand it -- is a standard we rarely practice in our academic writing.

These are symptoms I see in other sectors that are also committed to political questioning and change, working towards building better worlds and societies. Specialised lawyers fight their battles in closed court-rooms and write in obscure law journals which are not accessible or intelligible to the common public. Activists often get bogged down into appropriating the same language to be taken seriously. Advocates of causes fear over-simplification of the complex issues, keeping the everyday person outside of these battles around information and knowledge. We have built gated politics where the threshold of investment and engagement is so high, that the only response to that is detachment.

This brings me back to talking about Swartz and his dream of liberating information from the clutches of exploitative information houses. Swartz’s crime was not that he broke the law -- I wonder if the public prosecutor has never pirated material online; statistics would suggest otherwise -- but that he didn’t find allies in spaces which profess political commitment but then mimic it in their content rather than in practice. It is not surprising that even when JSTOR, the affected party, refused to push for criminal or civil charges, the University where the ‘crime’ occurred and the federal authorities decided to pursue him as a felon. Many people have wondered about why a well-loved and popular cult figure like Swartz would feel so lonely as to take this drastic step to end his life, and we now have to take responsibility that this separation of what he believed as the central tenet to life is something that his natural allies have separated out from their work.

Swartz is a folk-hero and he shall live as an icon for the groups working around internet freedom and information openness. But maybe it is time to stop waiting for another martyr to the cause. Maybe it is time to recognise that these battles around knowledge and information are not specialised fights to be played out in sombre tones by zealots on opposite sides. These are human wars, and they affect not only our everyday sense of who we are and the societies we live in, but also who we want to become and the worlds we want to create for future generations to inherit. Swartz embodies a whole generation of digital natives who fail to understand why the ethically wrong and morally reprehensible practice of protected intellectual property, that goes against the very grain of building information societies, continues to find silent supporters rather than vocal protestors. The grief and sense of loss we have with Swartz's passing is not easy to remedy. But Swartz will also be a moniker that every digital native will have to wear, as they traverse a treacherous terrain, persecuted by IP watchdogs and punished for what seems to be a natural order of things in their information worlds.

There is a lot of growing commentary with people expressing anger, shock, and sadness for the 26 year old man who died fighting a battle that we did not even become an audience to. And that commentary is necessary because we need to cope with the fact that we live in a world where somebody who believed in the most beautiful idea of a world that has free knowledge was persecuted to an early death. But at some point, we also need to stop talking and realise that we don’t have to come to arms for a moment only once-every-heroic-death. That the last disservice we will do to this everyday battle against intellectual property regime is to wait for the next icon to be trapped in this Greek tragedy structure of being punished for doing what he felt was right. It is time to start thinking of these questions of knowledge and information in our everyday life, negotiate with them beyond the narratives of convenience, and hope that there will be no more need to produce martyrs for a cause that is not just about books and music, but about being human.

Banner image credit: Maria Jesus V http://www.flickr.com/photos/favina/8377387022/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-jan-24-2013-nishant-shah-remembering-aaron-swartz-taking-up-the-fight

Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age

praskrishna — 2014-05-06T07:09:41Z

The Intellects, a Delhi based organisation of Odia intellectuals, and Shree Jagannath Mandir and Odisha Art and Cultural Center co-organized an event in New Delhi on April 20, 2014.

Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event and gave a talk about "Re-modelling Bhagabata Tungi in the present context of a digital society". About 600 Odias attended the progremme, including Dr Anita Panda, Prof Saudamini Barik, Jayaram Samal, Indubhushan Lenka, Odia Radio founder Sitanshu Mohapatra, journalist Asit Ranjan Mishra, OdishaDiary (www.orissadiary.com) founder Prachee Naik, Rashmi Ranjan Parida, The Intellects members Sangram Dhar, Smrutidhara Rout, Anasuya Sahoo, Aditya Mohanty, Nirmal Dhal, Sanjaya Parida, Pankajamala Sarangi, Premanda Swain, lawyer Sanjeeb Kumar Mohanty and Tarun Samantray.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/relevance-of-bhagabat-tungi-in-evolution-of-odia-language

Regional Open Data Agenda-Setting Workshop 2015

praskrishna — 2015-02-07T10:14:12Z

Open Data Lab Jakarta Web Foundation hosted this workshop from February 4 to 6, 2015. Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Priorities, opportunities and challenges for securing developmental outcomes from (open) data driven approaches vary across continents. It is important for the agenda for research and development in each region to be set, owned and driven from within that region. We are therefore convening a meeting of 1520 regional stakeholders with either strong open data, T/A and/or sectoral expertise.

Through an Outcome Mapping approach, the workshop will identify key issues to be addressed, and changes sought, both at a highlevel of creating solid foundations for open data impacts in the region, and at a practical level in particular sectors and countries. The workshop will emphasise the importance of an inclusive agenda for open data, and on ensuring the distribution of benefits from open data is equitable, and prodevelopment. It will also contribute to one of the Project’s overall goals of building towards the strengthening of a network of selfsustaining and southernowned organizations working on open data research and development, supported and coordinated by the Web Foundation’s Open Data Labs under the Open Data for Development Network.

The Regional Agenda Setting Workshop is conducted as part of the IDRC funded Harnessing Open Data to Achieve Development Results in Africa and Asia project and organized by the Web Foundation’s Open Data Lab Jakarta.

Objectives

Refine the selection of sectors to engage in and key issues to be addressed for creating solid foundations for open data impacts in the region, and at a practical level in particular sectors and countries.
Shape the design of CfPs, including sectors, countries and specific challenges, for a) sectoral scoping studies and b) labs action research projects to be conducted throughout the duration of the Project.
Build and foster relationships with strategic partners to expand and strengthen the network of organizations working on open data in the region4) Ensure that the agenda for open data research and development in each region is set, owned and driven from within that region.
Engage with stakeholders to act as mentors and advisors in the development and implementation of studies and action research projects conducted by partners with the support of the Jakarta Lab.

The outcomes of these workshops will also be fed into the Open Government Partnership Open Data Working Group, and where appropriate we will broker support for emerging leaders from Africa and Asia to engage in global open data conversations and action.

See more on the Open Data Labs website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/region-open-data-workshop-2015