Centre for Internet and Society

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

Recap on Konkani Wikipedia Workshop

subha — 2013-09-12T10:22:44Z

Konkani as a language has seen geographical, political and religious conflicts. Being the official language of Goa and spoken widely in the Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra it is still trying to strengthen its base. Recently CIS-A2K in collaboration with Goa University organized a four-day workshop for MA, Konkani language students.

Subhashish Panigrahi's blog post was published in Startup Goa Blog on September 9, 2013.

This workshop involved 38 students creating 43 new articles on Konkani Wikipedia which is in incubation. We’re hoping that these efforts will contribute towards bringing this 7 year old project out of incubation to a live Wikipedia project.

Before any language, Wikipedia shapes up as a live project where an incubation process is involved. A community of volunteers (known as Wikipedians) gradually grow to sustain this Wikipedia in incubation with active contribution.The Konkani Wikipedia incubator started way back in 2006. But because of many reasons it could not take off and is still in incubation. One of the major reasons has been the issue with multiple script usage. Because of the political and religious reasons Konkani has multiple writing and verbal standards and also written in multiple scripts; Devanagari and Roman (known as Romi as well) in Goa where Devanagari is the official script, Kannada in the Konkani speaking regions of Karnataka (Mangalore region primarily), Malayalam in Kerala (Kochin region) and in Perso-Arabic script by part of the Konkani speaking population. The largest script usage for Konkani is in Devanagari. Goa University is world’s first University to have a masters program in Konkani language where the writing standard is in Goan Konkani (Language code: Gom) which is written in Devanagari. During the interaction with the faculty members; Prof. Madhavi Sardesai and Head of the department Dr. Priyadarshini Tadkodar, it was found that the students were very enthusiastic to contribute to their language. The students were introduced to Konkani Wikipedia and they showed interest in taking part in a workshop to learn Wikipedia editing. This was the beginning of something new after a long time. Four out of thirty eight students volunteered to coordinate the workshop on the ground. They discussed about the workshop and the prerequisites; going through the list of articles on Konkani Wikipedia, writing a unique article by collecting resources and creating their usernames on Wikipedia before attending the workshop. All of the students including four coordinators came with at least 2 pages of written content before the workshop.

Day 1: Building the Blocks

It was 10 in the morning, a big LED panel in the audio visual room of the Krishnadas Shama State Central Library, Goa was displaying the word cloud containing words like Wikipedia, Openness, Education, Open Knowledge, Global Collaboration. Soon the room was filled with 20 MA students from the Konkani department of Goa University. Prior to the workshop there was an interaction with the students in the presence of the Head of the department Dr. Priyadarshini and Prof. Dr. Madhavi Sardesai and from the Konkani department. Four of the students Supriya Kankumbikar, Fr. Luis Gomes, Vaishali Parab and John Noronha volunteered to coordinate the workshop. With their help, a majority of students signed up and created their user accounts before the first workshop. Some roughwork went on to plan for a whole day workshop.

Introduce Yourself

To start with the first day, there was an “Adjective Name” activity. It was fun to know how people judge themselves with adjective. Then there was a discussion about articles students planned to write. Few of them were not sure if the articles like social issues and biography of a writer could fit into the Wikipedia framework.

Editing time

Article titles were decided and everyone was ready with their homework write ups and books for adding sources. The next big thing was typing in Devanagari. Only four to five of them knew typing. Students came forward to try out typing. There was a glow of triumph after they typed correctly using “Transliteration” layout. The editing session began. It worked well. Students managed to type with only a little typos.


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

There was an activity break with a game called “Tumi Kashi Asat” (means How are you doing in Konkani). According to the game rules, the host has to make some body movements and ask “Tumi Kashi Asat” and bending forward. The participants have to move their body in the reverse way and answer “Ami bari ashat” (I’m doing good). This replaced the caffeine intake for the four days and kept all of us alive.

Rat and frog game

“Rat race” is a game where participants sit on chairs and one of them is made to stand in the center. The rat makes others run and replace each others seats and one among the participants becomes a rat. This rat race brought back the old childhood memories and for a moment everyone forgot their age. At the end of it students sat down to take a deep breath and were taught some of the basic wiki-codes (bold, Italics and adding references). Editing session went on until the rest of the day.

Day 2: Climbing Up the Ladder

The agenda for the day was to tell the students about the advanced options and ensure addition of more citations. Citations on Wikipedia are very essential for readers to validate the facts. But bringing this to the students who just had started typing in their language a day before was not that easy. The second day was spent giving small breaks during the editing session for small activities. Running, jumping and shouting fueled the students to be happy editors and not burdened. By the end of the first two days 22 students created 24 articles (About 42 pages of written content). Everyone clapped for their friends, they were welcomed into the Konkani Wikipedia community and were shown the facebook group they could join and be more connected before thanking and saying bye for the day with the promise of more fun for the next workshop.

Day 3: Fresh Batch, New Start


Photo: Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 3.0

16 new students from the MA course were welcomed. Four student-coordinators and one from the first batch of students joined the funday. The entire day was spent with lots of fun, creating articles and basic know how about Wiki-codes. Half the students in this batch knew typing in Devanagari Inscript. The students were then paired with those who knew Inscript and thanks to the Fedora Devanagari keyboard layout. All of the students created their first articles.

Day 4: No Need to Say Good Bye!

Seeing the newspaper coverage about the workshop featuring some of their friends was a delight for the new wikipedians after two long days. Few of them came forward to share their experience about the workshop and their vision for the Konkani language.

At the end of four days all of them bid farewell. These were the foundation days and the biggest editing rally Konkani Wikipedia Incubator has seen in the last seven years with this milestone that the students had created.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/start-up-goa-blog-september-10-2013-subhashish-panigrahi-recap-on-konkani-wikipedia-workshop

React India 2019

Admin — 2019-10-14T14:56:52Z

Bhuvana Meenakshi was a speaker at an International conference, 'React India 2019" which was the first beach conference and which was hosted at Goa on 26-28, September 2019.

It was her very first talk on how to make WebVR experiences using A-frame React which is a framework developed by Mozilla. The topic she chose was unique and also many attendees gave a positive feedback about how this was essential for them to know. For more information about the event, click here.

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

Re-releasing Konkani Vishwakosh & Building Konkani Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2013-09-25T05:48:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS-A2K) in partnership with the University of Goa invites you to this event on Thursday, September 26, 2013, 10.00 a.m. The one-hour event will be followed by a press conference.

This was originally published in the Wikipedia page here.

Upon CIS-A2K's explicit request, Goa University has approved the re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License (CC‐BY‐SA 3.0) to make it freely available to public and thus preserve Konkani language and culture in the digital era. This encyclopaedia will also serve as one of the main sources of building and writing articles on Konkani Wikipedia (which is currently under incubation).

We'd like you to be a part of this event and help showcase Konkani community and language on a global digital platform such as Konkani Wikipedia.

Please click to see the invite. We look forward to seeing you at the event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/re-releasing-konkani-vishwakosh-and-building-konkani-wikipedia

Re-release of Konkani Vishwakosh under CC-BY-SA 3.0

nitika — 2013-11-04T12:14:03Z

Goa University re-released Konkani Vishwakosh under Creative Commons License CC-BY-SA 3.0. To celebrate and further the movement of open knowledge and open access Goa University in collaboration with Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge Programme (CIS-A2K) organised an event on September 26, 2013 at 10 a.m., at the Goa University Conference Hall.

Introduction

Konkani Vishwakosh is a four-volume encyclopedia published by Goa University. It encompasses all the world information in a nutshell with special emphasis and detailed information on Goa, Konkani, Goan culture, folklore, history, geography, etc. By releasing Vishwakosh under CC (Creative Commons) license Goa University is making it freely available to public and giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done.

Goa University and CIS-A2K have signed an MoU to work together to digitize “Konkani Vishwakosh” under Creative Common license and build a Digital Knowledge Partnership in order to enhance digital literacy in the Konkani language and facilitate collaborative knowledge production and disseminate the same free of cost through Kokani Wikipedia (currently under incubation). Gos University and CIS-A2K will co-design and jointly implement relevant training programmes to achieve this objective during the months of Oct-Dec 2013. Information from the Vishwakosh will also be used to write articles on Konakni Wikipedia by the volunteers.

CIS-A2K is grateful for the support and encouragement received from the Goa University Vice-Chancellor Dr. Satish Shetye; Prof. Alito Siqueira; Prof. Priyadarshini Tadkodkar; Dr. Madhavi Sardesai; Dr. Gopakumar; and other faculty of Goa University.

We are also equally grateful to Wikipedians Harriet Vidyasagar and Frederick Noronha who have engaged with CIS-A2K team and been a constant source of support.

Snippets from the Event

"The Konkani vishwakosh covers all realms of knowledge like any other encyclopedia. The Konkani Wikipedia will act as a digitized repository of knowledge for future generations and Konkani speakers across the world. I look forward to the pleasure of going to the internet and clicking away to access a Konkani Wikipedia," GU vice-chancellor Satish Shetye said.
“Wikipedia is a global phenomenon and a platform to bring people together for making creative activities possible, which in fact, has challenged the monopoly of publishers and created a movement in order to put together knowledge, further making it accessible to public,” said Satish Shetye, Vice-Chancellor of Goa University, speaking at the launch of the project.
"Professors, students and anyone with expertise or love for Konkani can come forward to help with the project for which training will be provided. Information in the Konkani vishwakosh will also be updated as per the current developments," said Vishnu Vardhan from Access to Knowlesge Programme.
"The Konkani vishwakosh covers all realms of knowledge like any other encyclopedia. The Konkani Wikipedia will act as a digitized repository of knowledge for future generations and Konkani speakers across the world. I look forward to the pleasure of going to the internet and clicking away to access a Konkani Wikipedia," GU vice-chancellor Satish Shetye said.
“This platform will bring together Konkani speaking people of the world, besides providing an opportunity to learn about digitisation, and write Konkani of global standard.” GU vice-chancellor Satish Shetye said.

Press Coverage

Goa university re-releasing Konkani encyclopaedia on Sept 26 (The Times of India, September 24, 2013).
Konkani Vishwakosh relaunch tomorrow (The Hindu, September 25, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia from Goa University in 6 months (The Times of India, September 27, 2013).
For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, September 29, 2013).
Konkani Wikipedia in the making (by Prakash Kamat, The Hindu, September 29, 2013).
Goa University to make available online Konkani Wikipedia, within 6 months (Jagran Josh, September 30, 2013).
Goa University Partners CIS India To Build Konkani Wikipedia (by Apurva Chaudhary, Medianama, September 30, 2013).

Invitation

http://bit.ly/1aCQ8hW

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/re-release-konkani-vishwakosh-under-cc-by-sa-3.0

Random Hacks of Kindness Global December 2012 — A Report

Yogesh Londhe — 2013-01-08T16:12:07Z

A Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) hackathon in Bangalore was hosted at office of the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) in Domlur on December 1 and 2, 2012. CIS, Amnesty International India Office, Greenpeace India Office, HasGeek, Yahoo Research & Development and SimpleTechLife sponsored the event.

This report has been prepared by Yogesh Londhe, co-founder of SimpleTechLife

Every human being seeks the joy of service! It is an innate drive in every person to use own expertise to serve mankind and that gives joy like no other. RHoK as a community provides that platform for the technology experts.

RHoK is a community of innovation using practical open technology to develop solutions for problems facing humankind. This is a community where technology experts and subject matter experts come together to improve human life by harnessing power of technology to solve real world problems especially in disaster management. RHoK achieves this through weekend hackathons hosted around the globe over same weekend twice a year.

On December 1-2, 2012, 30 cities in 18 countries around the world hosted RHoK hackathons. Bangalore and Pune joined in from India to hack for humanity along with like-minded hackers with heart from other countries.

RHoK Bangalore hackathon was preceded by a high energy reception hosted at CIS on November 30, 2012 evening 7 p.m.

The reception was a simple affair to get together some like-minded people to create the synergy for the weekend hackathon. It saw a series of keynotes by people of capacity ranging from technology subjects to the subjects like spiritual aspect of mountaineering and consultation as tool to bring out the genius in the group. The keynotes seeded ideas for meaningful conversation that followed over snacks afterwards. All the present tech experts and subject matter experts from development sector appreciated the idea of hacking for humanity.

The picture above was taken during the hackathon session at CIS.	Over the weekend the office of CIS was filled with frantic keystrokes and discussions to get some proof of concept that techies had in mind to be transformed into reality. On Saturday morning at 9.00 a.m. the subject matter experts presented the problem statement they were sponsoring and the techies chose what they want to solve and how they wish to do it. After that the techies formed teams and started hacking over the weekend. Around 30 techies formed five teams, one team was working from Chennai. So totally six teams created the synergy over the weekend. The hackers made maximum out of the time they had over the weekend, some of theme stayed overnight at CIS to get some more work done.

At the end of the day and half of hacking the teams came up with their proof of concept / work in progress which was judged by a panel of judges.

The hacks developed at RHoK Bangalore on December 1 and 2 are as follows:

Help for Cause: This team was working with Sudhindra from Freenpeace. The idea of the hack is very simple to bring the NGOs (who need volunteer time) and weekend volunteers (who have volunteer time) together on technology platform including mobiles and web. The team worked over weekend to come up with iPhone app as a proof of concept.
Green Trails Project: This problem statement was presented by India Hikes. Trekkers go to the mountains for hikes, treks and take lot of necessary things along like bottles of water, food packets, etc., and many times leave the packets, paper, other debris behind in the hills polluting the hill's ecosystem. This team worked on gamification of incentives program for the trekkers who will clean up the hills out of goodwill or for incentives. The team came up with a nice web based application as proof of concept for the same.
Data visualization for NGO reports: Problem presented by Mr. Shemeer from Amnesty International India Office. This asks for data representation on map along with timeline to be available on web for creating awareness. One individual hacker worked on this to come up with a timeline to represent the report.
Micro Finance report customization: A team of developers from HP worked with Micro Finance Open Source (mifos) for extending the mifos platform functionality by developing a module to create a template to get custom reports for the micro finance institutions. The team came up with almost finished product in Bangalore and similar product developed by a team from Chennai who worked over the weekend from that location. One HP team joined in from Chennai to work on similar problem on mifos. HP employees from four locations around the world: Bangalore, Chennai, Dublin and San Francisco were working on MIFOS project at this RHoK, this whole HP-MIFOS project was coordinated by Social Coding for Good.
Missing children: A problem presented by Mr. Praveen a designer from Yahoo Labs. He narrated a story of his friend from Kanpur who was a roadside vendor. He lost his son and couldn't trace him in the city. This problem seeks to get a smart phone app where people will click snaps of homeless children on the road, railway stations, bazaars, etc. These photos will be stored on a server along with their location data and whenever some parents upload their missing child's photo, then the database of the photos will be searched for matching face and the location will be given. The team came up with server side app for uploading the photos and location data as a proof of concept.

Judging of the projects was done on Sunday evening at 5 p.m. For judging there was a panel of judges which included Mr. Vijaya Kumar Ivaturi an Angel Investor and expert in incubating new ideas, Mr. Jayanth a Director from Yahoo Developers Network, Mr. Arjun Majumdar of India Hikes, Ms Lydia Pinschter of Wikidata from Berlin, Germany, Mr. Shahzad Alam a development expert from Bihar Sherif in Bihar and Dr. Michael Brennan from Philadelphia, USA; Dr. Michael was in Bangalore as a member of RHoK global core team. He has a PhD in Computer Science and is an expert in online privacy. He coordinated the judging and kept the whole hackathon aligned with the vision of RHoK. Ms. Lydia had come to CIS to give a presentation about Wikidata and experiencing the spirit of RHoK stayed on to be one of the judges for the hackathon. The judges chose 'Help for Cause' and 'Green Trails Project' as the top two hacks. India Hikes declared that the team will get a complementary trek in Himalaya as a reward.

The hackathon ended on a high note and the hackers wish to continue the good work they started at the hackathon, the teams will be meeting over few weekends to finish the work and see it implemented in real life.

Praveen and Yogesh of SimpleTechLife coordinated all the logistics, planning and execution of the RHoK hackathon in Bangalore. The only recognition the hackers got for their participation was certificates from RHoK and bags sponsored by Yahoo. The food was sponsored by Amnesty International India Office and Greenpeace sponsored the snacks for the reception. CIS sponsored the venue, support staff and internet bandwidth.

The NGO partnership with RHoK was a good way to get real problem statements that can be solved and the solutions have high chance of materializing as useful apps.

A picture of the RHoK banner is given below

For more pictures of the event, see the links below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/random-hacks-of-kindness-december-2012-report

Quantifying India's research output - Public Lecture by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam

radha — 2011-04-02T14:54:51Z

International Strategic and Security Studies Programme, IISc. Bangalore, is organizing a Public lecture by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam on Friday, Sept 25th, on Quantifying India's research output.

International Strategic and Security Studies Programme

National Institute of Advanced Studies

Indian Institute of Science Campus,Bangalore -12

Public Lecture

Date: Friday, September 25, 2009

Speaker: Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam

Distinguished Fellow, Center For Internet & Society, Bangalore

Visiting Professor, Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

Email: subbiah.arunachalam@gmail.com

Chairperson: Dr .Lalitha Sundareshan

Visiting Professor

Title: Quantifying India's research output
Time: 11:30 am
Venue: Conference Hall 2

Abstract: Science policy makers around the world are keen to assess the research performed by different countries, institutions and even individuals. Much of such work is based on databases and is based on the premise that the literature of science is a mirror of science. A number of scientometricists have used Science Citation Index (Web of Science) and other (subject-based) databases for such studies. Often they depend on publication and citation counts. Unfortunately, many of them are not aware of the nuances involved in such studies. In this talk we will look at science indicators with special reference to India and the developing countries.

All are invited to attend

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/quantifying-indias-research-output-public-lecture-by-prof.-subbiah-arunachalam

Pushing women scientists

praskrishna — 2014-10-21T15:44:09Z

Wikipedia edit-a-thon attempts to raise awareness of the contribution of Indian women to science.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on October 19, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Ask anyone to name an Indian scientist and the answer is likely to be a man, and not a woman scientist. To let more people know about the unsung heroines of science in India, a workshop called the Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014 was held here recently. At least 15 participants added content about women scientists over two days to Wikipedia as the first step in bringing public awareness about them.

The edit-a-thon (a large number of people adding or modifying content on Wikipedia at once) concluded on October 14, which was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology and maths. The event was organised by BioScienceIndia Programme, a non-profit science outreach initiative, and Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Participants added information about at least 40 women scientists. Information on 80 more would be added in a year’s time, said Nandini Rajamani, Co-director, BioScienceIndia Programme.

The aim, however, is to go beyond edit-a-thons, to examine issues that have not received the attention they deserve. Women scientists in India are not on par with men for several reasons (see info box) and the “leaky pipeline” theory is used to describe their decreasing visibility. Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge team, CIS, said the aim is to motivate a new and younger generation of women scientists.

Karthik Ramaswamy, visiting scientist at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a participant in the edit-a-thon, said science in India has a ‘diversity problem’ with Indian women and minorities represented inadequately. “There are very few women scientists among faculty of science institutions because they have no role models. Hopefully, this (presence on Wikipedia) will provide them with role models,” he added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-renuka-phadnis-october-19-2014-wikipedia-editathon-attempts-to-raise-awareness-of-the-contribution-of-indian-women-to-science

Pushing the Boundaries in Open Governance: Insights from OGP Asia Pacific Regional Conference in Bali, Indonesia (Day 1)

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T11:16:06Z

Sunil Abraham is quoted. He said that open governance is more about citizens checking on what government leaders are doing than on government coding its citizens to exercise surveillance.

This post originally appeared on the Open Data Research Network and has been republished with permission from the author. For the republished post on OGP website, see here.

The plenary room of Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center was jam-packed at 845 in the morning, with representatives from different countries in the Asia-Pacific region and all over the globe joining the first regional conference on open data hosted by the Government of Indonesia. The conference stage backdrop depicts a million colourful cranes moving in one direction towards the OGP logo, perhaps signalling an unprecedented wave of aspirations, commitments, plans, and actions towards a more ‘open’ governance within the region. Then a few minutes later, President Yudhoyono arrived and the two-day gathering (6-7 May 2014) of roughly 500 people started.

The program was impressive. It tried to cater to the different voices of what ideally should make an open government community – government leaders, journalists, right-to-information activists, business representatives, academia, researchers, civil-society groups, funding agencies, programmers, among others. The over-arching theme of the conference “Unlocking Innovative Openness: Impetus to Greater Citizen Engagement” speaks to both the supply side and the demand side of open data where governments can make openness more innovative to which citizens can proactively engage. The people in attendance reflected this multi-dimensionality and the kind of discussions on open governance that happened in Day 1 reflects the several, differentiated, yet somehow united view and interests of the many people that were there.

The first day of the conference brings me to four main realisations, prompted by the excellent presentations of the speakers and the lively discussion at the break-out session that I attended.

Openness is not an option but an imperative. Aruna Roy, founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathanaof India, and considered one of the most influential thinkers of this decade put it more vividly using her organization’s slogan – “right to know, right to live”. While bureaucrats, like Minister Francis Maude of the UK argued that openness improve transparency, enhance public service, and stimulate growth, civil society groups claimed that openness is not something the government can do, but must do, to benefit right holders by ensuring that they are not only aware of what the government is doing but by ensuring that government leaders, to whom citizens entrust sovereignty, execute the will of the governed.
Open governance is about relations, about people, not just about technology, transparency, or data provision. Ms. Nwe Zin Win, of Myanmar National NGOs Network emphasized that as Myanmar moves towards Open Government Partnership (OGP) membership, the process should create a space for civil society groups to proactively participate. In his remarks, Director General Yoon Soon-Gu of the Republic of Korea emphasized that when his government embarked on the process of crafting Gov 3.0 as a development agenda, with the end-goal of making Koreans live a happy life, citizen consultations were conducted all across government to ensure that this plan is responsive and relevant and reflects the people’s aspirations. Anne Jellema, CEO of World Wide Web Foundation highlighted the fact that open governance is not only good for vertical accountability (government-governed) but also about horizontal accountability (agencies within the same government) and ensures that systems are working with government – judiciary, legislative, audit, executing agencies – for the common good. Open governance then, is about building that relationship of trust between government and citizens, between business and government, and between agencies in the government.
Open government has many challenges, but these are not insurmountable. Malou Mangahas of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism emphasized five “I”s in her plenary speech that she said are the main challenges to the open government story in the Philippines and in the region – implementation, inclusiveness, information, institutionalisation, and interconnectedness. In the area of inclusiveness, one of the challenges is on how to ensure that people can participate in a context when there is a large digital divide, where internet penetration is low, and broadband speed is slow to a crawl. Mr. Samadhi of the Government of Indonesia emphasized that there are many examples in his country where government information is translated to accessible formats by infomediaries so that citizens without internet connection became aware, informed, and knowledgeable. In one of the coffee breaks, Redempto Parafina of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific shared to me that non-government organizations, concerned individuals, and universities translate information in the CheckmySchool portal to information materials for distribution and use by communities without internet.
Open governance narrative should focus on making governments more responsive and accountable. President Yudhoyono uses Facebook and Twitter, apart from the traditional media as text and snail mail, to listen to the demands of his constituents. The Government of New Zealand, according to Minister Peter Dunne, sets goals on basic public services as health, education, and employment and demands regular public reporting on these goals; reports that can be accessed and challenged by the people to whom the services are intended. Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society argued that open governance should not veer away from this narrative. He made an example regarding India’s Unique Identification System, where the implementation is couched within the open data narrative. He believed that open governance is more about citizens checking on what government leaders are doing than on government coding its citizens to exercise surveillance.

It was a productive day. I am thankful that I was afforded the opportunity to attend the conference. One message that profoundly affected me was Aruna Roy’s exhortation at the end of her presentation – that we should make truth powerful, and that we should make power truthful.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-government-partnership-michael-canares-may-6-2014-pushing-the-boundaries-in-open-governance

Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala

Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2012-10-04T12:18:36Z

Patiala is the home to the famous Punjabi University. A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012.

When the veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani agreed to come forward to spread the message of Punjabi wikipedia among Punjabi speakers it opened a way to revive and build the Punjabi Wikipedia community. Once Guglani's support was confirmed we looked for suitable places to conduct the introduction workshop for Punjabi Wikipedia. Guglani himself suggested Patiala, Ludhiana, and Amritsar as the probable places to conduct the Punjabi Wikipedia introduction workshops. Prof. Rajinder Brar, Head of the Punjabi Department agreed to provide full support to conduct a workshop at Patiala.

About 30 participants including students and teachers attended the workshop. Guglani played a pivotal role in organizing the workshop. Shiju Alex gave ample support. The workshop began with a welcome message by Prof. Rajinder. Guglani then took the participants through a brief presentation (http://bit.ly/Rnki2r) and explained the history and current status of Punjabi Wikipedia. To our surprise two of the participants, Satdeep Gill and Paramjeet Singh were already aware about the Punjabi Wikipedia and they had created their accounts sometime back even though they didn't do much editing. The presence of Satdeep and Paramjeet and their previous experience with Punjabi helped us during the course of the workshop. Guglani taught one of the participants to create a user account and do the wiki editing. He showed them Punjabi typing and basic wiki editing.

This was followed by a question-answer session where the participants asked about typing, editing, referencing and many other contribution related questions. The workshop ended with a small photo session.

We are happy to share that Satdeep has become quite active after this workshop and as of now is one of the very active users in Punjabi Wikipedia. We are sure his presence will attract more Punjabi people from Patiala to Punjabi Wikipedia.

More pictures of this workshop is available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Punjabi_Wikipedia_Workshop-16Aug2012

Note: Although the workshop was conducted prior to the grant period, the report was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring this.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/punjabi-wikipedia-workshop-at-punjabi-university-patiala

Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar

Shiju Alex — 2012-10-04T16:11:34Z

After Ludhiana and Patiala we came to Amritsar, which we all know is home to the Golden Temple and the spiritual centre of Sikh religion, to introduce Punjabi Wikipedia. The workshop was held at the Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar on August 17, 2012.

When we decided to conduct a Punjabi Wikipedia introduction workshop at Amritsar, the location was an issue. We tried to contact many institutes (mostly colleges) over phone. We couldn't get the permission. Finally, Punjabi Wikipedian G.S. Guglani directly approached the Spring Dale senior school management with the request for a space to do the Punjabi Wikipedia introduction workshop. Spring Dale is a famous English medium school in Amritsar. The school principal, Rajiv Sharma not only agreed to host the workshop but also made arrangements to bring selected students and teachers from eight other schools in Amritsar to join the workshop. Actually this was a bonus for us since we asked just a meeting place to host our workshop but not only we got the meeting place, we got assured participation from eight other schools and the permission to use the computer lab to conduct the hands-on wiki editing session.

Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop. One of the active and long-time Punjabi Wikipedian Guglani Gurdip Singh lead the workshop with the active support from Shiju and Subhasish.

The event started with a formal opening talk in Punjabi by a student of Spring Dale. The Principal of the Spring Dale Senior School Rajiv Sharma introduced the guests to the audience and briefed the participants about the workshop. Guglani took the participants through a brief presentation (http://bit.ly/Rnki2r) and explained the history and current status of Punjabi Wikipedia.

Few participants were invited to create user account in Punjabi Wikipedia. Guglani demonstrated Punjabi typing and basic wiki editing. There was a question-answer session where participants asked about typing, editing, referencing and many other contribution related questions.

Participants asking questions in the Question-Answer session

After a short break and students and teachers gathered in the computer lab. Booklets containing Punjabi typing scheme were distributed among the participants. Guglani, Shiju, and Subha supported them with editing various articles in Punjabi. As none of the students was exposed to Punjabi typing before they took much interest to type Punjabi. We were able to see the surprise in the eyes of the students and teachers when Narayam converted the typed words to Gurumukhi Punjabi. However, all the present typing tools integrated to Punjabi Wikipedia have some issues. After getting inputs from users I logged some bugs to enhance it. Bug 1 (Phonetic keymap update), Bug 2 (My Best Keyboard update). Hope WMF developers will look into it.

At the end of the session email addresses were exchanged for future communication. New wikipedians were given pointers to stay in touch and ask questions when they face problems with editing.

This workshop involving school childern was really a very good experince for us. I would like to thank the Spring Dale Senior School management for the warm hospitality that they extended to us. We are touched. I could see the possibility of doing programs there.

After conducting three workshops for Punjabi (two workshops (Luhiana and Patiala) involving college students and one workshop (Amritsar) involving school children), I am sure there is bright future ahead for the Punjabi Wikipedia if community can come forward to build the community further. From the statistical report of last year we can see that it was only Guglani editing Punjabi Wikipedia. Now Guglaniji and Surinder came forward to build it and we have around 6-7 active users now. For a language with almost 3 crore speakers 7 active users is not an encouraging number. So we need to have more programs to build it further. Hope community will be able to come forward for that.

More pictures of this workshop is available at: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Punjabi_Wikipedia_Workshop-17Aug2012