The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 51 to 65.
Free Arduino Workshop (For Beginners)
https://cis-india.org/openness/free-arduino-workshop
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore invites you to a hands-on-free Arduino workshop in its office on 3 March 2012. The workshop will be held from 11.00 a.m. to 3 p.m.</b>
<h2>What is Arduino?</h2>
<p>Arduino, an Italian name meaning "strong friend", is a popular "open-source electronics prototyping platform based around a microcontroller. It accepts inputs, such as signals from sensors (light, temperature, moisture, etc.) or data from the Internet or wireless devices, and sends output signals to devices, such as LEDS, motors, speakers, MIDI sequencers, computers, and so on."</p>
<p>In simpler terms: It is a ready-to-use creative platform, designed to provide interactivity between humans, smartphones, PCs, sensors and the physical world. It is especially a boon for creative people who don't have a technical background and want to translate their wildest techno-ideas to reality in a snap.</p>
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<p><a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/YrflS">A comic by Jody Culkin, introducing Arduino</a></p>
<h2>What can Arduino Do?</h2>
<p>Applications of Arduino could include anything under the sun, from making your LED lights glow in reaction to the weather to interactive punching bags: your imagination is the limit (besides the sensors).</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/lF1s8">Check what some folk did with a bunch of cameras for an amazing music video all in one day</a></p>
<p>For other examples, <a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/tkvJz">check out the Boing Boing listing</a></p>
<h2>Who can Attend?</h2>
<p>The workshop is especially meant for interaction designers, artists or anyone else enthusiastic to get started with creative projects and don't have prior experience with electronics, interfacing and all that hack talk. It would help to have a general understanding of instructional programming languages, but this shouldn't be a problem for starts as you will pick it up as we go along. Besides, we are super-friendly and patient folk who will assist participants to demystify geek code.</p>
<h2>Apply Now</h2>
<p>We have only 20 seats for this free workshop. Participants will work in groups of two. The workshop will last 4 hours, over a lunch break. All materials will be provided, and it would be great if you could get your laptop. </p>
<p>To apply please send a brief intro about yourself and why you think you will benefit from this to yelena@cis-india.org. Selected participants will be notified shortly.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/2DM2j">A map, showing the location of CIS</a></p>
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<p><a class="external-link" href="http://goo.gl/2DM2j"><strong>VIDEOS</strong><br /></a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/free-arduino-workshop'>https://cis-india.org/openness/free-arduino-workshop</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessEvent TypeWorkshopVideo2012-04-28T04:07:50ZEventFrancis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World
https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award
<b>The Electronic Publishing Trust recently announced a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developed countries who have made significant contribution for the cause of open access and free exchange of research findings. There were 30 nominations from 17 countries around the world and Dr. Francis Jayakanth from the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was selected for the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in the Developing World by a committee that went through all the nominations. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The award function organised by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore was held at the Sambasivan Auditorium, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai on 14 February 2012. Leading luminaries such as Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. G Baskaran and Prof. K Mangala Sunder participated in the award felicitation ceremony.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Giving the welcome speech, Prof. Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at CIS said that Dr. Jayakanth works for the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has trained many students and helped a number of institutes to set up open access repositories. Prof. Arunachalam added that the event is being celebrated in India as the winner is from India and specified that it is being held at the MS Swaminathan Foundation as this was the institution that hosted the first workshop to promote open access. Prof. Swaminathan had a vital role in arranging funds for the workshop. About 50 people had learnt what open access was, how to set up open access repositories, how to use the EPrints software, etc. For this very reason it was decided to hold the event in Chennai and not Bangalore where Dr. Jayakanth is based.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Francis7.jpg/image_preview" alt="Participants in the Award Function" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Participants in the Award Function" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Felicitating Dr. Jayakanth, Prof. Swaminathan who presented the award added that it is important to highlight the contributions of those who really convert the concept of social inclusion to reality. He said that today every politician talks about inclusive growth. What is this inclusive growth, how do you convert exclusion to inclusion? Exclusion creates large problems, social problems, economic problems, etc. On a concluding note, Prof. Swaminathan said that the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh has declared 2012-13 as the year of science and he hopes that there will be a new science policy and technology policy and that he hopes that a very important component of that should be methods of ensuring open access including open access to knowledge and open access to literature.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Francis3.jpg/image_preview" title="Francis Jayakanth" height="166" width="174" alt="Francis Jayakanth" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Jayakanth said that the atmosphere was very overwhelming and never in his two-and-a-half decade old career he had the opportunity to speak amidst such luminaries and added that it was a privilege and prestige to have received the award from Prof. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India. He also added that no event in India or elsewhere is complete without the active participation and mentioning of the name of Prof. Arunachalam, the greatest advocate of open access that India has seen so far, and that he wouldn’t have been here at the award ceremony but for the timely intervention of Prof. Arunachalam. <br /></td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Jayakanth concluded by saying that he would like to thank Prof. NV Joshi, Prof. Derek Law, Prof. Alma Swan, Prof. Balaram, Prof. N Balakrishnan, Prof. Giridhar, and Prof. TB Rajashekar, and particularly the students of the information and knowledge management programme at the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, who were responsible for the growth of a repository granting more visibility to the 32,000 publications that are part of the repository.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Mangala.jpg/image_preview" title="Mangala Sunder" height="130" width="177" alt="Mangala Sunder" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Prof. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras and Prof. G Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, also participated in the event. Prof. Sunder said that it is for the kind of information that we talk about, which we want to make public for which champions like Dr. Jayakanth have been working on the sidelines but working so efficiently to get institution after institution to convert what is known as a rigid framework into a flexible more open policy of bringing their scientific content to their intellectual information content. He said that he works in the area of content development from the point of view of education and he understands the difficulty of bringing material to the public. <br /></td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are many issues, such as issues about copyright, issues about people owning the information, issues about people feeling very rigid on what they want to say in the public, etc. Dr. Jayakanth has gone through all these exercises for the last 30 years in slowly creating the “little after little” what are called the waterways to finally see that everyone benefits. The linking of science, knowledge and sustainable development to open access to information, open access to research and open access to content completes the whole cycle of knowledge.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Baskaran.jpg/image_preview" title="Prof. Basakaran" height="177" width="117" alt="Prof. Basakaran" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">Prof. Baskaran said that it is a very well deserved award and Dr. Jayakanth has definitely raised the bar for future awardees. Prof. Baskaran stressed upon the aspects of open access. He said that as a theoretical physicist he understands the need for open access very well. Physicists, when they have new research results place them in arXiv, the open access repository for preprints in physics. Some people wonder what if some physicists deposit all kinds of articles in the arXiv. Experience has shown that 99 per cent of the articles appear in good journals later. He added that once it is put in the arXiv, the whole world gets access and a bad paper will be noticed and commented upon by many. No one likes to be the author of such a paper! He urged that other sciences, especially the life sciences should have a repository similar to arXiv and requested Prof. Swaminathan to take the intiative at MSSRF. <br /></td>
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<h2>Dr. Francis Jayakanth</h2>
<p align="left"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Francis1.jpg/image_preview" alt="Francis with the Award" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Francis with the Award" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Francis Jayakanth is a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. He has played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (<a class="external-link" href="http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in">http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in</a>). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and open access journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, open access journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, and the benefits of open access to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. Dr. Jayakanth can indeed be considered an open access ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of open access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-jayakanth-presentation" class="internal-link" title="Francis Jayakanth's Presentation">See Francis's presentation on Who Benefits from Open Access to Scholarly Literature?</a> [Powerpoint, 1523 KB]</p>
<p><b>See the video of the award function below:</b><b> </b></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award'>https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaAwardOpen ContentVideoOpen AccessOpenness2013-08-03T05:36:54ZBlog EntryFirst Pune Odia Wikipedia Workshop Organized!
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized
<b>The first Pune Odia Wikipedia workshop was organized in Pune on October 27, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi recollects his experience about the events through this report.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org">Odia Wikipedia</a> (<a class="reference external" href="http://or.wikipedia.org">http://or.wikipedia.org</a>) crossed 3000 articles. After being dormant for 8 long years, Odia Wikipedia emerged as one of the active South Asian wikipedias. I visited Pune on October 27, 2012 to participate in an Odia Wikipedia workshop celebrating this success with the wikipedians and also attend the <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune/WikiWomenDay">WikiWomenDay 2012</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over the last few months Odia Wikipedia has seen many active faces. One of them is Suratha Parhi, a very active Odia wikipedian. Suratha reached out to his friends, colleagues and existing wikipedians staying in Pune to celebrate the success with an Odia Wikipedia workshop. As it was after Durga Puja only a few Odia people in the city were there to attend. We saw a gathering of 10 people at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.pai-ils.com/">PAI International Learning Center</a> for this workshop. Abhishek Suryavanshi from <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a> extended his support for organizing the venue for us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prior to the workshop I interacted with the participants to understand their interests and efficiency with Odia typing. To my surprise two of the participants were good in typing in phonetic and Inscript. Suratha took the audience through a <a class="external-link" href="http://tiny.cc/odia">presentation</a> about Odia Wikipedia explaining the history of Odia language, importance of Wikipedia, how to contribute to Wikipedia, manual of style for writing articles, dos and do nots, rules and regulations and validating articles by adding sources. After the preliminary sessions participants started asking questions about numbers of readers, how to type in Odia, use of Odia Wikipedia and various such questions. Suratha answered their questions with examples and illustrations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To demonstrate editing on Odia Wikipedia we invited one of the participants. We helped her to create her user account and others also created their user accounts on Odia Wikipedia. Then we invited Sudhir Patel, a type designer and technologist working with <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cdac.in/?id=pune">CDAC, Pune</a> to introduce Odia typing and <a class="external-link" href="https://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typing_help">how to type easily in Odia</a>. After a small hands-on training for typing, all of the participants were able to start searching for articles they wanted to edit. Some of them created new articles and some edited existing articles. At the end of the session we shared our contacts to stay in touch. We also showed them <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:">Chatasabha</a>, a friendly desk on Odia Wikipedia and demonstrated how they can ask questions and see the answered questions. New wikipedians will be also connected to the <a class="external-link" href="http://facebook.com/groups/OdiaWiki">facebook group</a> to be updated about events and activities. New Wikipedians have decided to meet once again in November for a Odia Wikipedia meetup. Sudhir and Suratha are also planning to organize a introductory session on Odia Wikipedia during the cultural gathering organized by Odia communities.</p>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/o3.png" alt="Orissa Wikipedia Participants" class="image-inline" title="Orissa Wikipedia Participants" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; ">Above is a picture of participants from the Orissa Wikipedia workshop held on October 27, 2012</p>
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<p>More pictures on <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Odia_Wikipedia_Workshop_Pune-1_27_October_2012">WikiCommons</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Press Coverage:</strong><br />OdishaDiary.com, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.orissadiary.com/ShowEvents.asp?id=37463">Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language</a> (October 31, 2012)</p>
<p>Videos</p>
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<li>Suratha Parhi explaining about Odia Wikipedia</li>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ib8ULCJ4Xks" width="300"></iframe></p>
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<li>Sudhir Patel explaining about Odia Typing </li>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1cBbYONRlKg" width="300"></iframe></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-pune-odia-wikipedia-organized</a>
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No publishersubhaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopVideoOpenness2012-11-30T12:44:44ZBlog EntryFirst Odia Wikipedia Education Program to be Rolled Out
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal
<b>Odia Wikipedians gathered at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), Dhenkanal on November 8, 2012 to start the first Odia Wikipedia Education Program. This program aims to bring students edit articles on Odia Wikipedia through a series of assessments by professors. The local community members from Nalconagar would be supporting the four month program.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Since March 2011, Odia Wikipedia has started growing in terms of readers, editors and content. Last few months have seen many new faces added to the community who are willing to take part in both offline and online outreach. Though many of the community members are staying out of state, there are community clusters in three different places: Cuttack, Nalconagar and Bhubaneswar. We approached many institutions from these three places and some of them showed interest for an Odia Wikipedia workshop to assess and evaluate students for the education program. We conducted workshops in some of those institutions in the initial level. After successive workshops and meeting with the faculty members, some of the potential institutions were chosen for the education program. One of those colleges was the IIMC in Dhenkanal. We had a meeting with the professor of this organization along with teaching associates and a visiting professor and a full day workshop on editing wikipedia. Odia wikipedians, Mrutyunjaya Kar, Manoranjan Mallick, Srikant Kedia and Kamalakanta Nayak supported for organizing the event.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">IIMC, Dhenkanal is one of the six IIMCs of India and a pioneer in the field of Mass Communication. We met Professor Mrinal Chaterjee along with teaching associates, Sucharita and Bhagaban Sahu, retired professor of Revenshaw University and visiting professor of IIMC. The college is home to 83 students across India. Students enroll for a one year diploma program for Journalism and Mass communication in Odia and English.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The full day session was made to two separate sessions: an introductory session and one hands-on training on editing. Prof. Chaterjee introduced the agenda of the session and why it is needed for the students from a student's point of view. I continued the discussion and presented the key points of wikipedia editing and details of the education program, why and how we are going to start it focussing on the key roles of students and the institution and how it will help them. We announced about the hands on training session post lunch for the interested students. Twenty one students gathered for the second session. Interestingly all of the Odia department students were present and there was one student from English department. Students were briefed about editing. During the workshop we found that majority of them knew a typing layout called "Modular layout" which is used by non-unicode ISCII/ASCII typing softwares like Leap office, I-Lipi, Shreelipi, etc. As this layout is yet to be enabled for Odia we continued explaining about typing using the default typing scheme.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img alt="The Reporter, a bilingual newspaper published by students on college noticeboard" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Odia_WEP_IIMC-10.jpg/223px-Odia_WEP_IIMC-10.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center; "><span>"The Reporter", a bilingual daily published by students on college notice board</span></p>
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<div><b><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/psubhashish/odia-education-program-proposal-iimc" target="_blank" title="Odia education program proposal IIMC">Odia education program proposal IIMC</a> on Slideshare</b></div>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the end of the workshop we had another meeting with the professor and other faculty members to assess and discuss about the further steps. IIMC has a very close student-teacher relation which we observed from the beginning of the workshop. Students were really keen and patient to learn and all of the students who attended the hands-on training session stayed back till the end of the session. Apart from their regular assignments and projects, students also publish a daily bilingual newspaper, "The Reporter".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Writing is a part of their their study and we emphasize much on getting the most of their short program. If Wikipedia could give them a global platform to and larger audience for their work to be read, reviewed and enhanced then why not adding it to their task list?", expresses Prof. Chatterjee. The only hurdle which students are going to face in the initial phase is typing in Odia. So, modular layout needs to be added in "Narayam", the typing tool integrated in Odia Wikipedia. To begin with this program an Odia Wikipedia club was formed at Nalconagar which would primarily support this program at the ground level.</p>
<h3><span>Video</span></h3>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="250" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nm7dRQ7LmVI" width="300"></iframe></p>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Read a detailed four month work plan for this program on Odia Wikipedia: <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org/s/cgk">Read in English</a> | <a class="external-link" href="http://or.wikipedia.org/s/cgj">Read in Odia</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Presentation for Odia Education Program: <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Odia_Education_Program_proposal_IIMC.pdf">On Commons</a> | <a class="external-link" href="http://bitly.com/iepiimc">Source file</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Commons picture gallery: <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Odia_Wikipedia_Education_Program">See here</a></li>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/first-odia-wikipedia-education-program-to-be-rolled-out-at-iimc-dhenkanal</a>
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No publishersubhaHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaWorkshopVideoOpenness2012-12-14T12:17:04ZBlog EntryFacebook Free Basics vs Net Neutrality: The top arguments in the debate
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-december-31-2015-facebook-free-basics-vs-net-neutrality-the-top-arguments-in-the-debate
<b>On Twitter, there's a whole conversation around Facebook Free Basics and whether zero-rating platforms should be allowed in India. Here's a look at the debate.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/facebook-free-basics-debate-the-arguments-that-are-unfolding-on-twitter/">published in the Indian Express</a> on December 31, 2015. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash were quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook’s Free Basics app, which aims to provide ‘free Internet access’ to users who can’t afford data packs, has run into trouble in India over the last two weeks. After regulator TRAI issued a paper questioning the fairness of zero-rating platforms, it also asked Reliance Communications (the official telecom partner for Free Basics) to put the service on hold.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook on its part has gone for an aggressive campaign, both online and offline, to promote Free Basics and ensure that its platform is not banned permanently. For Net Neutrality activists, zero-rating platforms are in violation of the principle as it restricts access to free, full Internet for users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On Twitter too, there’s a serious debate unfolding around Free Basics and whether zero-rating platforms should be allowed in India. Here’s a look at some of the prominent voices around this Net Neutrality vs Free Basics debate.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Watch our video</h3>
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<p id="stcpDiv" style="text-align: justify; ">Nikhil Pahwa, founder of news website MediaNama, has been campaigning for quite some time against zero-rating platforms in general and Net Neutrality. On Twitter, Pahwa points out that the problem with the zero-rating apps is that it gives telecos right to play kingmaker, and get into a direct relationship between a website and a user.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pahwa also wrote a counter-blog to Mark Zuckerberg’s <a href="http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/toi-edit-page/its-a-battle-for-internet-freedom/">column in The Times of India </a> questioning why Facebook is going with this restricted version of the web on Free Basics, rather than giving access to all websites.</p>
<p>He posted recently on Twitter, “Why hasn’t Facebook tried any model other than on which gives it a competitive advantage?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pahwa adds, “With zero rating, telcos insert themselves into a previously direct relationship between a site and user. Some sites made cheaper versus others. Said it earlier, saying it again. Problem with zero rating is that it gives telcos the right to play kingmaker through pricing. So Net Neutrality battle isn’t just about Facebook. It’s about telcos lobbying for differential pricing+revenue share from Internet companies.”</p>
<div id="stcpDiv">Check out <a class="external-link" href="http://twitter.com/nixxin/status/681731772682354688">some of this tweets on the issue of Net Neutrality</a>:</div>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash, the director for policy at Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore, has said that a total ban might not be the ideal solution and one should look at the platforms on a case by case basis.<br /><br />He writes on Twitter, “My position: We should ban some zero-rating, allow some zero-rating, and deal w/ middle category either w/ +ve obligation or case-by-case. I’m all for banning Free Basics if it harms people more than it benefits them. I’ve even proposed tests for determining this. The regulator needs more data on a) conversion rates to full-Internet; b) cost of subsidy & c) QoE (speed, etc.) of Free Basics.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Check out Pranesh's tweets below</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/P1.png" alt="Pranesh Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Pranesh Tweet" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_P2.png" alt="Pranesh Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Pranesh Tweet" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/P3.png" alt="Pranesh Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Pranesh Tweet" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham, executive director at Centre for Internet and Society, has however questioned Free Basics on Twitter. He also posted counter-points to Pranesh’s tweets about data on conversion being used to create regulations around zero-ratings. He’s also called for a ban on Free Basics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Check out his tweets below</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/P4.png" alt="Pranesh Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Pranesh Tweet" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/P5.png" alt="Pranesh Tweet" class="image-inline" title="Pranesh Tweet" /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-december-31-2015-facebook-free-basics-vs-net-neutrality-the-top-arguments-in-the-debate'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-december-31-2015-facebook-free-basics-vs-net-neutrality-the-top-arguments-in-the-debate</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaFree BasicsInternet GovernanceFreedom of Speech and ExpressionVideoSocial Networking2016-01-07T02:26:16ZNews Iteme-DIRAP Google+ Hangout on Open Government
https://cis-india.org/news/e-dirap-google-hangout-on-open-government
<b>The e-DIRAP Hangout on Open Government was held on Thursday, July 25, 2013. The Hangout brought together nine professionals from Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines to discuss open government initiatives in their respective countries, the challenges they face, and open source tools for open government.</b>
<p><b>Watch the Video below</b></p>
<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CaEKss0zC6Q" width="330"></iframe></p>
<p>The following panelists participated in the hangout. Sunil Abraham was one of them:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Danny Butt, Research Fellow in Participatory Public Space, University of Melbourne, Australia</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society, India</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Venkatesh Hariharan, Director, Knowledge Commons, India (previously, Head of Public Policy at Google India)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Maryati Abdullah, National Coordinator, Publish What You Pay, Indonesia (also Steering Committee Member of Open Government Partnership)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Yanuar Nugroho, Director and Expert Adviser to the Head of the President's Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight (UKP4), Indonesia -- to be confirmed</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Tomoaki Watanabe, Executive Research Fellow, Centre for Global Communications, International University of Japan (also Executive Director of Common Sphere - the host of Creative Commons Japan, and Co-founder of Open Knowledge Foundation Japan)</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Shita Laksmi, Program Manager, Southeast Asia Technology and Transparency Initiative, Hivos Regional Office Southeast Asia</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Alvin B. Marcelo, Co-chair, Asia eHealth Information Network</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<ul>
<li>Moderator: Khairil Yusof, Co-founder, Sinar Project, Malaysia (also e-DIRAP team member)</li>
<li>e-DIRAP Hangout Coordinator: Christine Apikul</li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/e-dirap-google-hangout-on-open-government'>https://cis-india.org/news/e-dirap-google-hangout-on-open-government</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessVideo2013-08-08T04:20:31ZNews ItemDo IT Rules 2011 indirectly leads to Censorship of Internet
https://cis-india.org/news/do-it-rules-indirectly-lead-to-censorship-of-internet
<b>Pranesh Prakash along with Dr. Arvind Gupta, National Convener, BJP IT Cell and Ms.
Mishi Choudhary, Executive Director, SFLC participated in a panel discussion on censorship of the Internet on May 8, 2012.
</b>
<p>The discussion was broadcast on Yuva iTV. See the video below:</p>
<h2>Video</h2>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/KRIJRhpW-Bc" frameborder="0" height="315" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRIJRhpW-Bc">Click for the video on YouTube</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/do-it-rules-indirectly-lead-to-censorship-of-internet'>https://cis-india.org/news/do-it-rules-indirectly-lead-to-censorship-of-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaIT ActInternet GovernanceVideoIntermediary LiabilityCensorship2012-05-31T09:00:41ZNews ItemDigitalization of Culture
https://cis-india.org/news/digitization-of-culture-nishant-shah-keynote-leuphana-university
<b>Dr. Nishant Shah did an introduction keynote to 1600 undergraduate students at the Leuphana University on October 8, 2013. </b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://startwoche.leuphana.com/faculty/#nishant-shah">Click</a> to read more about the event on Leuphana University.</p>
<h3>Video</h3>
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<th><iframe frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/JXNZHiFaxdo" width="350"></iframe></th>
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<p class="bodytext" style="text-align: justify; ">The various stakeholders of the Leuphana Orientation Week 2013 allow the organisation and proceeding of this one-of-a-kind project week. A combination of lecturers, experts, tutors, mentors and a high-class panel of judges, accompany the first-year students throughout these intensive days at the Leuphana University by informing, advising and supporting them.</p>
<p class="bodytext" style="text-align: justify; ">The 1600 newly arrived students at the University will be separated into two cohorts for the Leuphana Orientation Week, each with 60 teams. All 120 teams will each have a tutor at their disposal, who will accompany them through the project days, lead them through the tasks and help them when questions or need for clarification arise.</p>
<p class="bodytext" style="text-align: justify; ">Additionally, the teams will be supported by a total of 50 mentors and 25 presentation experts.</p>
<p class="bodytext" style="text-align: justify; ">Aside from tutors, mentors, lecturers and experts, there is also a team of 30 persons composed of staff and students who contribute to the Leuphana Orientation Week 2013.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/digitization-of-culture-nishant-shah-keynote-leuphana-university'>https://cis-india.org/news/digitization-of-culture-nishant-shah-keynote-leuphana-university</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoDigital Humanities2013-10-29T09:11:25ZNews ItemDigital Natives Video Contest
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest
<b>The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest has its top five winners through public voting.</b>
<p>
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<param name="src" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/fVa8zg2_wA8"><embed height="354" width="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/fVa8zg2_wA8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>A Day in the Life of a Digital Native: </strong>Story scripted, shot and edited by Leandra (Cole) Flor. The video is an extension of Cole's photo essay "Mirror Exercises" conceptualized for 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause' Book 1 <em>To Be</em>. <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook1/at_download/file">Download the book.</a></p>
<table class="listing">
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<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/MarieJudeBendiolaWinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJKMwinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJBurkswinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/JohnMusilaKiberawinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/mj.png/@@images/f52feb88-f69d-4482-b019-881fdf8af7c3.png" title="mj" height="138" width="102" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Top 5 winners of the Digital Native video contest selected through public votes. From left to right: Marie Jude Bendiola, T.J. KM, Thomas Burks, John Musila and MJ.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The Jury Prize for Two Best Videos goes to John Musila (Kenya) and Marie Jude Bendiola (Singapore)! Congratulations to all winners. The Top 5 winners win the grand prize of EUR 500 each!</strong></p>
<h3><strong>Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos<br /></strong></h3>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/MarieJudeBendiolaWinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Marie Jude Bendiola</strong><br />I come from a third world country where technology seemed to be hard to reach back in the 90s; especially by the not-so-privileged. As we progressed, technology has not only become ubiquitous (in malls, various institutions and technological hubs) but also, it has come to be used by the common man. My video will answer how technology bridges the gap between dreams and reality. It will be a fusion of documentary and re-enactment of real life events and dramas.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/connecting-souls-bridging-dreams" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/cijoaj2003.jpg/image_preview" title="Cijo" height="142" width="103" alt="Cijo" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Cijo Abraham Mani</strong><br />The power of digital media will be presented to audience with the help of showing tweet-a-thon panel discussions, blood aid tweets getting spread, etc. <br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-media-dance" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJKMwinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>TJ K.M.</strong><br />My video explores the spiritual aspect of digital technology and how rather than getting in the way of our spiritual expression, it is actually bringing us face to face with it, if only we choose to look. The video will be a mixture of live action and stop motion animation/puppetry where digital devices take on a transcendent character similar to nature spirits in various cultures. I plan to investigate the tendency to exclude digital devices and technology from being categorized alongside nature as if it is somehow exempt from or superior to this category. Using symbolism and motifs from various cultures such as the Native American Hopi, Balinese Hinduism and Japanese Shintoism, my video will create a world where the technology we use daily is viewed not just as a means for socio-cultural exchange and communication but is available for the nurturing of our souls if we so choose.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/with-no-distinction" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJBurkswinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Thomas Burks<br /></strong>We have a small production company in Birmingham, Alabama. I was hired on a year ago to do film and commercials for them as they expand into advertising and video coverage of events. We only have about 3 employees including myself, working out of our homes. We recently acquired a space to open a studio and retail location downtown where we live. We use Facebook, blogs, and viral marketing all the time to get our name out there. Our account executive is constantly monitoring our Facebook for client orders and bookings. We are beginning to use twitter to provide information more fluidly to people. We believe this might be a year of growth for our small company, as we are becoming able to provide much higher quality content. We're fully digital; constantly updating our websites and blogs, and I believe we would be able to tell a great digital story. We submit numerous small films and skits; we cover awesome concerts, and rely so heavily on the digital world to show our content. That will be the gist of our video.<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/alternate-visions-accessing-leisure-through-interfaces" class="external-link"></a><br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/JohnMusilaKiberawinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>John Musila<br /></strong>Map Kibera Trust is an organization based in Kenya’s Kibera slums. Using digital gadgets and technology, they have transformed the community by placing it on the map as it was only seen as forest when viewed on a map. They also film stories around the community and share them with the world on their YouTube channel and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Through this they have been able to highlight and raise awareness about the challenges the community faces. Our video would show Kibera’s role in bringing about change.<a href="https://cis-india.org/author/kiberanewsnetwork" class="external-link"></a><br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/from-the-wild-into-the-digital-world" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Andres.jpg/image_preview" title="Andres" height="142" width="103" alt="Andres" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Andrés Felipe Arias Palma<br /></strong>I think many people are digital natives unknowingly. Being a digital native is a relationship with activism and society, not as they initially thought. It was a condition of being born in specific times and external factors. In the video, I will interview people about who and what is a digital native? How to use the Internet? What are the advantages and disadvantages for society where everything is run with the power of the Internet?<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/who-is-a-digital-native" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/martingpotter.jpg/image_preview" title="Martin" height="142" width="103" alt="Martin" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Martin Potter<br /></strong>Over a period of nearly four years, moving across small towns in Australia and South East Asia, I have seen the most extraordinary innovations at a local community level. My video will focus on these local stories with global impact. I am pursuing a PhD in participatory media and this will lend a uniquely academic perspective on the concept of collaboration, community life and innovation.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/big-stories-small-towns" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/rajasekaran.jpg/image_preview" title="Rajasekaran" height="142" width="103" alt="Rajasekaran" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>E. James Rajasekaran</strong><br />I live in the temple town of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I am a social worker and the plight of people living in slims is something that my NGO is closely associated with. My video will bring out the efforts of the people who live in the slums of Madurai.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/life-in-the-city-slums" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/anan.jpg/image_preview" title="Anand" height="142" width="103" alt="Anand" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Anand Jha<br /></strong>Bangalore is home to a lot of technology start-ups. A lot of geeks, who find it limiting to work for corporations, are driving a very open source-oriented, frugally-built and extremely demanding culture. While their products are standing at the bleeding edge of technology, their personal lives too are constantly driven on the edge, every launch being a make or break day for them. The project would aim at capturing their stories, their frustration and motivation, looking at the possibilities of Indian software scene moving beyond the services and back-end office culture into a more risk prone but more passionate business of technology.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/deployed" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/mj.png/@@images/f52feb88-f69d-4482-b019-881fdf8af7c3.png" title="mj" height="138" width="102" alt="null" class="image-inline" /></td>
<td>
<dl>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>MJ</strong><br />As a digital native living in a developing country, I have carried out a series of both online and offline projects, which have always striven to benefit Zimbabweans in a number of ways since 2000. These projects have greatly increased my interactions with computers. I might say, I got married to a computer in 2000 when I bought my first PC; in a way, my relationship with my computer is intimate. Even though this computer I bought is an old 386 machine made obsolete by the faster Pentium III models, this did not change my love for the computer. My video will focus on a dream-like moment of my digital life.</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/i-am-a-ghetto-digital-native" class="internal-link">Read more</a></p>
</dl>
</td>
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</tbody>
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<h3>Jury Members</h3>
<table class="listing">
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Shashwati Talukdar</strong><br /> Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/ShashwatiTalukdar.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Shashwati" height="115" width="98" alt="Shashwati" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Leon Tan</strong><br /> Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/LeonTan.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Leon Tan" height="142" width="103" alt="Leon Tan" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Jeroen van Loon</strong><br /> Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/JeroenvanLoon.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Jeroen" height="128" width="106" alt="Jeroen" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Becky Band Jain</strong><br /> Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/BeckyBandJain.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Becky" height="134" width="107" alt="Becky" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Namita A. Malhotra</strong><br /> Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/NamitaMalhotra.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Namita" height="156" width="104" alt="null" /></td>
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</tbody>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:35:27ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities for Indian Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education
<b>The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hosted by <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/">HEIRA, CSCS</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/">Tumkur University</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tiss.edu/">Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)</a>, Mumbai the <a class="external-link" href="http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh/ccs/">Center for Cultural Studies (CCS)</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge Programme</a> of <a href="https://cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)</a>, the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/tejaswini-niranjana">Tejaswini Niranjana</a> of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Visdaviva">Vishnu Vardhan,</a> Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the first session of the day <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/profile.php?uid=140">Amlan Dasgupta</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/index.php">Jadavpur University</a>, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.</p>
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<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Ravi.png" title="Ravi Sundaram" height="297" width="397" alt="Ravi Sundaram" class="image-inline" /></th>
<td style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/faculty_ravi_sundaram.htm">Ravi Sundaram</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sarai.net/">Sarai programme</a> at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/index.php">Centre for the Study of Devloping Society</a> added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and<br /></td>
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<td colspan="2" style="text-align: justify; ">therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nishant Shah</a>, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. T<span>he critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was </span><i>about</i><span> reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data </span><i>produces </i><span>a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. F</span><span>acebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. </span><span>So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Returning to scholarship, </span><span><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy_of_sabah-siddiqui">Tanveer Hasan</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy2_of_sabah-siddiqui">Sneha PP</a> introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.</span></p>
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<p>Video</p>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_Humanities_Consultation.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="400"></iframe></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/ashish-rajadhyaksha">Ashish Rajadhyaksha</a> describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under </span></span><a class="external-link" href="http://pad.ma/CIZ/editor/BR">Pad.ma</a><span><span>, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/students-cscs/copy17_of_ashwin-kumar-a.p">Arun Menon</a> of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The last presentation of the day had <a class="external-link" href="http://presiuniv.academia.edu/SouvikMukherjee">Souvik Mukherjee</a> addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that </span></span><span><i>the </i></span><span><span>digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Summarizing the consultation, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ashwin-Profile-ENGLISH.pdf">Ashwin Kumar</a> articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherSara Morais and Subhashish PanigrahiVideoResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeDigital Humanities2015-04-17T10:53:17ZBlog EntryDarshana Mandrekar speaks on Konkani Wikipedia
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshana-mandrekar-on-konkani-wikipedia
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Goa University is working to build Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this program it organised the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program recently. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Darshana Mandrekar a participant at the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program speaks about her inspiration to edit Konkani Wikipedia.</p>
<h3>Video</h3>
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<th><iframe frameborder="0" height="320" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedians_Speak_-_Konkani_Wikipedia_Editor,_Darshana_Mandrekar.webmhd.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="320"></iframe></th>
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<td>Above: Darshana Mandrekar speaks about Konkani Wikipedia<br /></td>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshana-mandrekar-on-konkani-wikipedia'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshana-mandrekar-on-konkani-wikipedia</a>
</p>
No publishernitikaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaKonkani WikipediaVideoOpenness2013-12-31T10:38:07ZBlog EntryDarshan Kandolkar on Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshan-kandolkar-konkani-vishwakosh-digitization-process
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) in collaboration with the Goa University is working to build Konkani Wikipedia. As part of this program it organised the Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Program recently.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Darshan Kandolkar, talks about his experience with Konkani Vishwakosh Digitization Process and Konkani translation sprint.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Video</h3>
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<th><iframe frameborder="0" height="320" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedians_speak_-_Konkani_Wikipedia_Editor,_Darshan_Kandolkar.webmhd.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="320"></iframe></th>
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<td>Above: Darshan Kandolkar's interview on Konkani Wikipedia<br /></td>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshan-kandolkar-konkani-vishwakosh-digitization-process'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/darshan-kandolkar-konkani-vishwakosh-digitization-process</a>
</p>
No publishernitikaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaKonkani WikipediaVideoOpenness2013-12-31T10:47:46ZBlog EntryD:Coding Digital Natives
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives
<b>Nishant Shah was invited for a public talk at the University of California, Los Angeles. He presented the work done on Digital Natives and spoke about questions of participation and resistance. The talk has been featured in the YouTube channel.</b>
<p>Nishant spoke about the ways by which technology revolution and change has been characterised through the question of voice (how technology has enabled for alternative voices to emerge as ways by which they can be heard), question of amplification (what 10 years ago might have been local phenomena are becoming global spectacles) and the question of power (what really happens when voice and amplification comes to an end). <br /><br />Nishant said that in the last three years of revolutions we have also now witnessed this extraordinary thing where lot of promises were made of different kinds of revolution but which never materialised in terms of what they intended to. Citizen action happens but it doesn’t lead into anything concrete. One of the examples from India was the Anna Hazare’s campaign or India’s fight against corruption. There was this immense amount of campaign on the corruption in Indian bureaucracy and political society... the only instance of mass mobilisation that we saw in India in recent times apart from the cricket series...and how the campaign in seven short months has totally disappeared from public discourse.</p>
<p>For more, watch the <strong>video</strong> now:</p>
<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YvY__z3jN7M" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<p>Date: March 9, 2012<br />Time: 12 to 1 p.m.<br />Venue: Library Conference Center Presentation Room, University of California</p>
<a class="external-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvY__z3jN7M">Follow the video on YouTube</a>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/d-coding-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:30:14ZBlog EntryCreative Commons comes to India
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-comes-to-india
<b>Creative Commons team visited four Indian cities to spread the word about CC free licenses and CC affiliate program. Wikimedia India chapter was approached to join hands with Creative Commons for research and community building.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://creativecommons.org/staff#jessicacoates" target="_blank">Jessica Coates</a>, Global Network Manager and <a href="http://creativecommons.org/staff#janehornibrook" target="_blank">Jane Hornibrook</a>, Regional Coordinator, Asia-Pacific, <a class="external-link" href="http://creativecommons.org">Creative Commons </a>recently visited India. The <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access to Knowledge</a> team from the <a href="https://cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a> got a chance to join them for three of their meetings: one in Pune and two in Bengaluru.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ceative Commons is a not-for-profit organization and the base for the free licenses. More than 400 million work in the world are in Creative Commons license as of today. The foundation is looking to expand its wing of voluntary affiliates in India who would support for more outreach, community building and research. "We are excited to see the wikipedians in India and their passion to contribute to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Commons is the largest Creative Commons license use and we are looking for joining hands with the Indian wikipedians and the Wikimedia India chapter", says Jessica Coats.</p>
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<p style="text-align: center; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/CreativeCommons.png" alt="Creative Commons Bengaluru" class="image-inline" title="Creative Commons Bengaluru" /></p>
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<td><span class="description">Jessica Coates and Jane Hornibrook from Creative Commons at Centre of Internet and Society, Bengaluru</span></td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jane Hornibook, who looks after Creative Common's operation in Asia-Pacific said, "Creative Commons has many users in India. It would be exciting for us to collaborate with more academicians, wikipedians and organizations like Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS for peer research and outreach and grow our <a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_Affiliate_Network" target="_blank">affiliate network</a> in India.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Video</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><iframe frameborder="0" height="300" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jessica_Coates_and_Jane_Hornibrook,_Creative_Commons-GNUnify.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="400"></iframe><br /><br />Note: This blog post is a combination of events organized in Pune by Pune Linux/Unix User Group and Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies & Research, and CIS and the Wikimedia India Chapter in Bangalore.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-comes-to-india'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons-comes-to-india</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaVideoOpenness2013-07-17T06:49:55ZBlog EntryCelebrating the success of Wikipedia in Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013
<b>Wikipedia Club Pune, a local community based outreach user group in Pune has recently organized Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013 to spread words about “Spoken Wikipedia”, a project to add recorded audio for Indic language Wikipedia articles which will help the disabled to access Wikipedia and “Bridging Editor Gender Gap.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On January 12 and 13, 2013, I was in Pune to participate in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">Wikipedia Summit Pune 2013</a>, a two day event organized by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">Wikipedia Club Pune</a> to promote Wikipedia as an effective means of education, to empower and reach out to India, to bring the country under a spotlight through <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spoken_Wikipedia/Indic_Languages">Spoken Wikipedia</a>, and to bridge the <a href="http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/04/27/nine-out-of-ten-wikipedians-continue-to-be-men/">gender gap</a> of Wikipedia editors. Here is a summary of the activities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Day 1</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the first day, January 12, more than 100 people including students from almost 10 different schools, housewives, working professionals and free and open source activists participated. The opening ceremony began with talks from Abhishek Suryawanshi, founder member of Wikipedia Club Pune, Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President of Wikimedia India Chapter, Rishi Aacharya, Principal, PAI International Learning Solutions, and social activist Ms. Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Before the formal opening Abhishek spoke for a while about the Spoken Wikipedia project which is one main agenda of the two days event. He explained about the need of spoken wikipedia, especially for people with disabilities and how effective it would be when it spreads in 20 Indic languages. In the past wikipedians in Pune gathered and recorded articles in various Indian and international languages.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sudhanwa Jogelkar, President, Wikimedia India Chapter introduced the chapter's role for Wikimedia movement to the audience. He spoke about the chapters' in few of the national events/projects like Wiki Loves Monument, GLAM project in Crafts Museum, Delhi and many other outreach events. There were few announcements about the chapter on the MoU to be signed from the chapter with district collector of Kanyakumari, the India Chapter being partner to Springfest, IIT, Kharagpur, Commons day celebration in February and GNUnify 2013, Pune.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vibha, a social activist based in Delhi spoke about gender discrimination in many aspects of our social and professional life. Access to knowledge for free could bridge this and Wikipedia, being so known universally and accessed by millions of people every day could be the best platform for this.' says Vibha.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rishi Aacharya, Principal of PAI International brought the vedic saying "Ya vidya sa vimuktaye" to explain the real meaning of knowledge which is free of its existence in an Indian context. He spoke about open source movement and Wikipedia's part in it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the formal opening there was a Q&A session for the participants to clarify various questions they had about Wikipedia. Then they were explained about the three parallel sessions: An Open Discussion about Gender Gap, Workshop for Indic Languages, and Spoken Wikipedia. The session on gender gap was attended by many school students. Vibha and some activists coordinated this event. In the Workshop for Indic languages and Spoken Wikipedia, wikipedians helped participants for the workshop with basic editing and the participants edited Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia. Articles from various medical subjects of common interest were chosen. There were three medical professionals to support with the medical terminologies for editors contributing to Marathi and Hindi Wikipedia.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the end of the day there were separate wrap up tracks to summarize the learning of whole session. All of the participants gathered together to educate each other about the work they have done. Many of the participants spoke about their experience and learnings. Plans for the next day was announced. Wikipedians gathered for a group photo and socialized after the closing talks.</p>
<h3>Day 2</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second day, January 13, of the Wikipedia Summit in Pune was a sequel of the activities which happened on the first day. More than 40 students took part in this session. Vibha, Srishti and team were coordinating the gender gap track. Many topics related to Gender Gap, gender based discrimination, Role of gender gap in occupation, Gender gap in Wikipedia, Participation of Woman editors on Wikipedia were discussed.</p>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/IMG_4124.jpg/@@images/31ee6a90-3009-45fa-8166-6a30bbf5d590.jpeg" style="float: left; " title="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" class="image-inline" alt="A participant records his voice for an article on Marathi Wikipedia" /></p>
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<p>One of the participating Wikipedians recording his voice for a Marathi article</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Spoken Wikipedia is a project to bring out editors who are willing to contribute to Wikipedia by reading the Wikipedia articles, recording them and the uploading them to <a class="external-link" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org">WikiCommons</a>. These recorded audio could be used for articles on various Indic Wikipedias and would be really useful for users with disabilities. The first workshop was aimed for contribution for articles related to common diseases.</p>
<br />"Those who are blind and unable to read can listen to the articles and get information. This will be beneficial to a lot of people", says Atharva, a school student who has contributed to an article about Rabies on <a class="external-link" href="http://mr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%80%E0%A4%9C">Marathi Wikipedia.</a>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants of the Spoken Wikipedia session worked on the articles on Hindi and Marathi Wikipedia and moved them from sandboxes to article namespaces. After all of the articles were created they recorded them. They formed groups of 3-4 members and worked together. One of them would search information mainly from the English Wikipedia articles and some of the available Marathi (or Hindi), some others would translate and the other member would record it using a mobile phone. That was a great team effort.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over 25 voluntary organizers joined hands for making this a success. There were about 120 participants. At the end of the day participants from both the sessions gathered. Many of the participants and organizers shared their experiences and learnings. The program was concluded with socializing, taking group pictures, promises to stay in touch and taking active part in more Wikipedia activities.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This event was co-hosted by Centre for Internet and Society with a financial support of ₹ 21,600 granted by Kusuma Foundation.</p>
<h3>Also see:</h3>
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<li>Wikipedia Summit Pune: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Wikipedia Club Pune: <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Club_Pune</a></li>
<li>Pictures: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_Summit_Pune</a></li>
<li>Spoken Wikipedia Project: <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India">http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Spoken_Wikipedia_-_India</a></li>
<li>Pune Club facebook page: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune">https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikipediaClubPune</a></li>
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<h3>Video</h3>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/celebrating-the-success-of-wikipedia-in-wikipedia-summit-pune-2013</a>
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No publishersubhaDigital ActivismAccess to KnowledgeDigital AccessWikimediaWikipediaYouthVideoOpen AccessOpennessEvent2013-04-16T12:48:40ZBlog Entry