Centre for Internet and Society

Meeting for FOSS Advocacy Coalition

sachia — 2009-02-18T13:33:05Z

A half-day meeting to discuss a FOSS advocacy coalition and items for immediate action

The Centre for Internet and Society, on behalf of Anivar Aravind, Gurumurthy K, Renuka Prasad, Sunil Abraham, and Vinay Sreenivasa, invites you to a half-day meeting to discuss a FOSS advocacy coalition and items for immediate action by such a coalition.

Many of us have been advocating for several years the adoption of FOSS applications and platforms, and FOSS related advocacy has been gathering momentum. Last year, we had advocacy processes relating to software patents and the OOXML debate, apart from RMS and Eben Moglen visiting various places in India sharing their views on FOSS.

Yet we do have a long way to go before FOSS is widely used in India. We believe that bringing together different groups of actors (who believe in the principles of Free Software), including academic institutions, NGOs and CBOs, research and advocacy groups, professional associations, and FOSS enterprises providing services in different areas as development, training, support and maintenance, will help in supporting and cohering a positive discourse in favour of FOSS.

Some of us feel that a loose national coalition of such individuals/organisations and associations should be formed to work towards the widespread adoption and promotion of FOSS. Such a network of organisations working along a broad consensus on promoting FOSS will provide stronger and more effective responses to events relating to FOSS and initiate more proactive actions than individuals or institutions acting in isolation.

Agenda

The proposed agenda for the meeting is a discussion as follows:

Formation of a national coalition of organisations advocating for FOSS

The goals, scope, priorities, approaches, structures, issues/risks, alternatives, resources for such a coalition, name of the coalition, etc, will be discussed.

Working with government departments and public sector units advocating them to adopt and promote FOSS

When we speak individually to any of our contacts/departments in the government, the impact may not be significant. However, if we send collective representations to departments such as the e-Governance, IT, Education, and RDPR departments, and seek meetings to explain the issue and the advantages of FOSS, it would help and motivate them to look at the issue in depth.

FOSS initiatives in the country, including the Gujarat ICT in schools program

Many state governments across India are in different stages of adoptiong FOSS, and we can share our understanding and views on the current situation. The Gujarat government, for instance, is implementing a 500-crore ICT plan in school education program but have not yet taken a final decision on whether to use FOSS. There are also plans for a FOSS workshop in Delhi, to which different groups, including political parties and government officials could be exposed to discussions of the advantages of adopting and promoting FOSS.

FOSS initiatives in Karnataka

There are also some initiatives in Karnataka for which we can work together to help in the adoption of FOSS. We have an informal request for a proposal for a pilot project to train government staff and vendor staff in Bangalore on the GNU/Linux platform that has been chosen for the ICT in schools program. We also need to work on the issue of using Nudi on FOSS. A serious impediment to getting the government to use FOSS is that Nudi works only on MS Windows and not on FOSS distributions. Lastly, we should explore what could be done to help VTU adopt FOSS over proprietary technologies. Engineering colleges adopting FOSS will have a significant impact on the creation of the FOSS ecosystem in the state.

We can also discuss other means and methods for the promotion of FOSS.

Please email in your suggestions and ideas on the agenda for the meeting. If you are interested in participating in the coalition, but are unable to attend the meeting, please do let us know.

Date and Time

Sunday, 22 February, 2009; 3.00-6.00 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/meeting-for-foss-advocacy-coalition

Measuring the effectiveness of online activism

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:56:15Z

Article by Sruthi Krishnan in The Hindu, 21 June 2009

There are forms of social activism, which are not looked upon favourably

After the Iran elections, social networking sites are used by supporters of Opposition candidate

For the success of an online campaign, the power of the message also counts

CHENNAI: Sit-ins and police arrests. Placards hoisted high and slogans rippling through the crowds. Pamphlets distributed at the dead of night. It was called activism and is still called that — just that the cat and mouse game with the Big Brother has a binary code underlying it.

Social activism in the world of Web 2.0 follows most of the rules of the real world. But the nature of the medium does have an impact on the message, and the jury is still out on how effective activism is online.

After the Iran elections, social networking sites are being used extensively by supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has challenged the validity of the elections. As the Iranian government has placed restrictions on the traditional media, the supporters have sought refuge in the electronic world.

If you search for #IranElection, which is the tag on Twitter, a messaging service, for any update related to the Iran elections, there are minute-by-minute posts by users around the globe. The effects of this decentralised campaign are manifold.

“This raises the awareness of the issues among the people who may not have been exposed to these issues because of the space constraints of traditional media,” says Sunil Abraham, director-policy, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. “It encourages activists on the ground in Iran because it clearly demonstrates global solidarity.” The increased transparency also has a pre-emptive effect by making it more difficult for states and corporations to engage in repressive activities without attracting international condemnation.

But there are forms of social activism online, which are not looked upon favourably.

Campaigns urging you to ‘Click on this link and eradicate world hunger’ lead to an oxymoronic state of sedentary activism or ‘slacktivism.’ Evgeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute at New York, has coined this term to describe “feel-good online activism” that has no political or social impact. On the one hand, it will be easy to dismiss the click-to-participate campaigns as being useless. But they could attract people who would have normally not bothered with the issue. Mr. Morozov concludes that the only way to resolve the debate is by surveying campaigns to analyse impact.

“As far as I know, there are no such studies. But there is anecdotal evidence that clicks on a Web 2.0 system can lead to deeper engagement with social campaigns,” says Mr. Abraham. He cites the example of Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa, who was able to get some members of the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group (with over 90,000 members) to raise questions during open houses called by Canadian Members of Parliament. Thanks to this campaign, the government backed down from legislating anti-consumer intellectual property laws, he says.

For the success of an online campaign, the power of the message also counts. Here, Mr. Abraham refers to the Pink Chaddi campaign. “It did not directly respond to the arguments of the Ram Sene. It used humour to mock the fundamentalists into irrelevance.”

Though there is no clear path to an effective online campaign, the successes have demonstrated the potential of the medium that promises to connect millions with a click. But just as a message can grow stronger as it reaches more people, it can also be spread wafer-thin and lose significance.

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To read the original article on the website of The Hindu, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/measuring-the-effectiveness-of-online-activism

Madhan Muthu

sachia — 2009-04-27T07:33:18Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/copy_of_madhan.jpg

Madhan Muthu

sachia — 2009-07-16T07:01:52Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/madhan.jpg

Letter to Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, Advocating Adoption of FOSS in State IT Academies

sachia — 2011-08-23T02:55:16Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is a signatory to a letter being sent to the Education Secretary, Government of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of FOSS at state IT academies.

The state of Karnataka has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft under which three IT academies have been established in the state, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga, in 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained at these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum at these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers. This MOU will expire in the coming academic year. Therefore, Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India are sending a letter to the Education Secretary for the state of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of a FOSS-based curriculum in these IT academies, and explaining why this would be a useful move.

The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the signatories to this letter, which is reproduced below.

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The Education Secretary

Government of Karnataka

MS Building

Bangalore, Karnataka.

Sub – Microsoft IT Academies in Karnataka

Dear Sri Nadadur,

Karnataka has a MOU with Microsoft under which three 'IT Academies' have been established in the State, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga during 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained in these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum in these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers.

There are a couple of issues with this program.

Firstly Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS. Free software is software which gives the users the freedom to use, study, modify and share, while in the case of proprietary software, the vendor prevents the study, modification and distribution of the software. The freedoms of FOSS provide users and the rest of society with several important advantages, which are briefly listed below:

a. With proprietary software, the teachers only learn be superficial 'users'. This is because, proprietary software companies prevent access to the “source code” that goes into the creation of software. With FOSS, students can learn not only how to use software, but also how create and modify the software applications. Hence with FOSS, students will not just be passive users but will actually construct knowledge. As we know, 'Constructivism' is a key feature of the National Curriculum Framework 2005.

b. FOSS supports the creation of local language versions of the software. For example, Kerala has locally created software in Malayalam for its IT@School program. Similarly the Kannada community Sampada has created a complete Kannada distribution by customising existing FOSS software.

Though Microsoft has provided Windows and Microsoft Office gratis at these academies, it does not provide the same software to the teachers who are trained at the centre. Hence the teachers who intend to purchase computers would need to shell out considerable amounts for the software which they have become used to in the schools. However, if the teachers are trained on FOSS alternatives to Windows and Office, at at negligible price (the cost of a CD which is around Rupees ten), each teacher can be a given a copy of the software. The training can also cover the installation of the software, if required. In this way, the teacher training can lead to the actual use of computers in the schools and teachers homes and make the training meaningful and lead to the greater dispersion of ICTs. Currently, most teachers learn to use these products but have no continuity of learning which makes the training futile.

Of course, the issue of FOSS is not only one of cost. Even if proprietary software were offered free of cost, our nation will eventually have economic losses, due to permanent dependency on software monopoly.

These are some of the reasons why Karnataka has chosen FOSS in its own ICT@Schools program. The computers in Karnataka schools run on GNU/Linux platform under this program. We would like to submit that the teacher training in the IT Academies at Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga also need to be aligned to the IT@School program, and hence teachers should be taught on the same FOSS software platforms as well.

We had a meeting with Ms Vandita Sharma last November, along with Dr Richard Stallman, the founder of the global Free Software movement, and explained these issues. She was sympathetic to these arguments on the public benefits from FOSS and mentioned that the department would take appropriate action in this regard as is consistent with the public interest and those of the teachers and children in our government schools. She mentioned that the MOU with Microsoft is expiring in the coming academic year and and requested us to formally write to her in this regard, hence this letter.

We request that the Government take a firm stance in favor of adopting and promoting FOSS and chose FOSS in its software procurement to align the department to the government schools.

A few months back, organisations that are working to promote FOSS came together to establish a 'Coalition of the FOSS Community in India' whose goal is to collaborate with governments and other organisations to promote the adoption of FOSS, specially in the public sector. Several of the member of this coalition are based in Bangalore, including the Centre for Internet and Society, Sampada, Swatantra Malayalam Computing, Deeproot Linux, IT for Change etc. Faculty from IIM-B, Bangalore University as well as other academic institutions are also members of this coalition. Members of this coalition are willing to provide any technical support or guidance that the government may require in this regard. For eg, FOSS curriculum for both schools and for teacher training is available in Kerala and can be adapted to Karnataka schools. It should be noted that FOSS is already being used in many institutions in Karnataka, including IISC, IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IITK and many engineering colleges.

We hope our submission will be considered by the education department as well as by the government and we look forward to working with you to help bring these ideals into reality. If you think it would be useful, we could plan a small workshop / interaction, or even a series of workshops for different stakeholders, to discuss the issue in more detail and look at the implications of the choice of the software platforms for the ICT programs in the department.

We look forward to your response.

Yours truly

Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India (list of signatories is provided overleaf)

May 9^th 2009.

Copy - Commissioner for Public Instruction, Sri Kumar Naik

Copy - State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Sri Selva Kumar

Copy - Principal Secretary, DPAR (Dept of Personnel and Administrative Reforms) e-Governance

Copy - Principal Secretary, Department of IT

enclosed:

Why Government of Karnataka should adopt and promote FOSS

Kerala IT@Schools project

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/letter-to-education-secretary-may-2009

June 2009 Workshop Report

sachia — 2009-06-26T05:57:32Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/uploads/NWAccessibilityJune2009.pdf

Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:28Z

Prof N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, discusses open access in his keynote address at the 26 March 2009 one-day conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons'.

On 26 March 2009, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, organised a day-long conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons', as a way to highlight the need for Open Access in Indian academia and research. The speakers and panellists included Prof N. Mukunda of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dr D.K. Sahu, MD and CEO of Medknow Publications, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow with CIS, Dr A.R. Upadhya, Director of NAL, Mr N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD. of Informatics, and Mr Sunil Abraham, Director of Policy at CIS.

Prof N. Mukunda gave the keynote address, which is reproduced below.

“Journals, Open Access, Copyright, Repositories – Some Viewpoints from an Academy”

Invited key note address at the Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons (Open Access)’ on 26 March 2009, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore

N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

1) Dr. Upadhya, Dr. Goudar, Prof. Arunachalam, Dr. Poornima Narayana, Prof. Chan, Prof. Willinsky, Prakash, Chandramohan from the Academy, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, may I on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences express a warm welcome to all of you to this one day Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons’. This is the Academy’s Platinum Jubilee Year, and for NAL it is the Golden Jubilee; and it is a pleasure for the Academy to join NAL and the ‘Centre for Internet & Society’ in hosting this meeting. Thanks also to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for their initiatives in organizing this event. I am here substituting for Prof. D. Balasubramanian, President of the Academy, as he has to be at a meeting at Chennai today. If only the fanciful Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were correct, the world could have split into two copies, and Prof. Balasubramanian also into two copies, one in Chennai and one here; and he could have spoken in both places simultaneously! In the tea break, I can tell you more about this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if any of you are interested.

I am used to giving seminars and colloquiua, on subjects of my research, but never have I given a key note address or an Executive Summary. These are new to me. Also, as you all know, President Obama always needs a teleprompter while giving his fine speeches. Similarly, I cannot speak without a written text in front of me, so please permit me this luxury. Let me also add that I believe in the well-known saying — levity is the soul of wit.

2) The Academy’s efforts in the Open Access direction go back to 1998. It was then that the journal Pramana was made available on the Academy website completely free for all to read. Thereafter all the other Academy journals have also been made freely available online, so now all ten Academy journals are available. Quite recently the speed of access has been considerably improved. In 2006 the Academy entered into an agreement with Springer to co-publish the international online and print editions of the ten journals, but with the proviso that world-wide open access on the Academy website would continue. So now there is the version on the Academy site, which is accessible world-wide and free, and also the value-added SpringerLink version available to paid subscribers. This arrangement is working quite well. The download figures from both sites are quite encouraging, and in any case the visibility of the journals world-wide is much better than it used to be. INSA by the way has signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration and its journals are also freely accessible.

3) Two important things happened in April 2008, just about a year ago. INSA arranged a meeting on Open Access and Copyright issues on 26th April, 2008, again thanks to Prof. Arunachalam’s initiative; and Prof. Balaram wrote an editorial in Current Science on 10th April 2008 on the subject ‘Science Journals: Issues of Access’. I must confess I am completely ignorant and totally naive in all these matters, so whenever necessary I turn to one of Prof. Balaram’s numerous beautiful editorials – and get educated about the finer points of English literature at the same time – I also read some of the steady stream of emails from Prof. Arunachalam which arrive each day. He is constantly exhorting us to do various things – like Mr. This or Mr. That we should give him the honorary title “Mr. Open Access”, it is a onepoint agenda with him. So I learn a lot from both these sources which are at least openly accessible to me. Incidentally a collection of Prof. Balaram’s editorials is likely to be published soon, and several of us have been asked to write editorials to introduce his editorials on various subjects. Science journals are proliferating in number and spiraling in costs. So these raise difficult problems of affordability for libraries and institutions. There are also issues of judging quality, and looking at the economics of the entire process, the whole information chain – overall costs of dissemination of research results, journal publishing and production, refereeing, circulation… who pays for what, who profits, is it reasonable or exorbitant? There is the impact of technologies on all this – these are times of extremely rapid changes, with new undreamt of opportunities appearing all the time. These are true of other arenas of life as well – in education, governance, entertainment, in news communication and so on. As a physicist I cannot help remembering that all this began in 1948 with Claude Shannon’s Classical Theory of Information – a major conceptual revolution which showed that information could be measured, and so could its transmission and fidelity and so on. Such a beautiful set of ideas – a fascinating mathematical structure embedded within the classical theory of probability. And this was accompanied and later followed by technical advances, transistors (1947), semiconductors and so on. Balaram’s view is that Institutional Repositories are more easily achievable than Open Access. This may greatly change the structure and traditional roles of libraries as we know them, at least as far as the sciences are concerned. He mentioned the recent much-heralded Harvard University faculty decision which ‘authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member’s work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost’. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a similar even wider step very recently, on the 18th of this month.

There is also discussion of who pays – or should pay – for the costs of publishing research results – a shift from the traditional ‘researcher pays’ era through ever increasing subscription costs to a new ‘author pays’ arrangement. The idea is that agencies that fund research – whether private or public – should include costs of publication in their support. Balaram mentions that for some high impact journals, the cost to the author for one paper can be as much as Rs. 2.5 lakhs! When I saw this, I could not help wondering – what would someone like Albert Einstein do in such a situation? He was working in a Patent Office in Berne as an assistant third class about a hundred years ago, and of course he had no research funding of any kind; but in his spare time he wrote papers that revolutionized physics! His papers were all published, he even received free reprints – but how would he fare today? One gets the impression that subscription costs for well-known journals in those days were quite reasonable; and in historical accounts one reads that people like Julius Springer were in frequent contact with figures like Arnold Sommerfeld and others in a mutually beneficial and enlightened atmosphere.
It seems we have to accept and acknowledge that the methods of doing science, the costs, the sociology of the scientific enterprise, have all changed enormously. It has become intensely competitive, one can even say that cut-throat methods are common, it seems the scientific enterprise is no longer the domain of scholars alone. Claims for priority are severe. In a piece that appeared on 9th February 2009 in the New York Times, celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, the writer said:

“One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; and for 12 years more before its sequel, ‘The Descent of Man’, which explored how his theory applied to people.”

The old times are gone forever, the times of Darwin and Einstein. The game has become a game, with new rules of play. The new patterns and methods however seem more natural for the younger generation to adjust to, but some of us of an older generation cannot forget the past so easily.

4) The INSA meeting discussed many aspects including the need to educate working scientists about their rights with respect to copyright. There is a recent email from Arunachalam on this from Amsterdam. Again I think younger scientists are aware of their rights more than old fogeys like me, we are the ones needing education. There is a need for change in Copyright patterns, especially for books out of print, to decide when something should move into the Public Domain, and so on. Some of the major INSA recommendations are to granting agencies to mandate Open Access for results of publicly funded research, and to scientists to publish in Open Access journals by choice.

Some tasks are set for the Academies too, such as setting up Institutional Repositories, and to work toward Open Access in all possible ways. In this context, it is possible that the three national Science Academies of India – IASc, INSA and NASI – may try to cooperate in these matters, as they have been doing in the case of science education recently.

5) From its inception, publication of journals has been a major effort of the Indian Academy of Sciences. There has always been a striving to maintain standards. Today we can say about our ten journals, they are reasonably good, about the best from India. The main concerns – in these times of very rapid change and impact of new technologies – are: how do we maintain refereeing and review standards, how to tackle increasing cases of plagiarism, and while coping with all these how do we move in the Open Access direction? Quality of journals is most precious for the Academy, this is hard to achieve and to maintain, the whole enterprise seems to be under pressure.

6) Let me end by returning to Balaram and INSA and mention a recent initiative of the Academy. With generous help from the Indian Institute of Science, we are trying and hoping to set up an Institutional Repository covering all publications of all Fellows past and present. Starting since 1934 – the total number of Fellows is about 1500, 900 present and 600 past. And the total number of research publications may be around 60,000 or 75,000. The hope is that in this Platinum Jubilee year this effort should get started and make some progress. We should try to get a substantial number of entries into the Repository within this year, catch up as soon as possible, then make it an ongoing automatic process. Otherwise many of us here today will also become past Fellows before the job is done. Getting titles and abstracts seems easy, with full text there may be problems, but here Arunachalam tells us authors have more rights than they realize. Let us see what we can do. It seems about 50 institutions in India already have set up such repositories, but we have miles to go before we sleep!

I am happy to have given the first key note address of my life today – I am sure the day’s discussions will be full of ideas and fruitful. It has been a pleasure to have been here, my thanks to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for inviting me, and most of all to Prof. Balasubramanian for asking me to be here in his place.

Thank you.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/journals-open-access-copyright-repositories

Is NASSCOM anti-Open Standards?

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:43:31Z

Article by Shalini Singh on techgoss.com, 10 July 2009

NASSCOM has been set up to consolidate and promote the interests of the booming IT-BPO industries in India. NASSCOM members account for 95 percent of the industry revenues in India and employ more than 2.5 million professionals. While NASSCOM is credited for doing a great job for the Indian IT-BPO sector, some of its actions are hard to understand.

While most are in agreement that Open Standards are good for the world and especially developing countries like India, NASSCOM has been quite half hearted in supporting it.

Bangalore-based The Centre for Internet and Society is dedicated to ensuring digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices in India and the region. This public interest organization is staffed by many highly qualified, idealistic people who have given up lucrative careers in the private sector to work for the betterment of society.

When the Indian Government proposed a draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, most key players in India sent in their views. These would be multi-billion dollars contracts and would affect the lives of hundreds of millions of Indians.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is pushing for more open standards. It is an accepted fact that such a system ensures lower cost and higher quality. On the other hand, you have large software companies who want to lock in Indians into proprietary software.

NASSCOM has succumbed to the lobbying of some tech companies, and has become reluctant to whole heartedly support Open Standards.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has told the public:

“Second Response to Draft National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance
By Pranesh Prakash

The government is in the process of drafting a national policy on open standards for e-governance. The National Informatics Centre recently released draft version 2 of the policy, and CIS sent in its comments on the draft.

CIS has been following the drafting of the national policy on open standards for e-governance with much interest. Last year, we offered our comments on the first draft of the policy. The policy has since gone through two more iterations (copies of which are kept on the Fosscomm site), labelled versions 1.15 and 2, and we have again offered comments on the latest version. The evolution the draft policy has been mired in controversy, as documented by Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat. It seems that the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has been trying to nullify the effect of the policy by pushing for recognition of proprietary standards within the policy, and that too without consultation with its members.

We believe that proprietary standards go against the interests the government, which as the primary consumer of the standards would have to pay royalties and would face vendor lock-in, of small and medium enterprises, which provide direct and indirect services to the government, since they would be required to invest in those closed standards to service the government, and most of all, of the citizens of India."

Techgoss had learnt that the NASSCOM committee which drafted their opinion did not consult IBM India, Sun and Red Hat - all of whom are strong proponents of Open Standards.

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To read the original article at the techgoss.com website, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/is-nasscom-anti-open-standards

Internet, Transparency and Politics

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:36:59Z

Talk by Barun Mitra

The 2009 general elections in India have been preceded by various initiatives that seek to provide information to the voters about candidates contesting the elections. The aim of providing this information is to help voters to make 'informed choices' when casting their votes. This talk is being organized in the context of the research that CIS-RAW fellow Zainab Bawa is carrying out on "Internet, Transparency and Politics". Why has the Internet become an important space for publishing information that is streamlined for facilitating interaction between citizens and the state? What is the impact of making such information available to citizens? How does it transform their relationship with political actors and government agencies? Simultaneously, how are elected representatives and political parties responding to these 'transparency' initiatives?

Speaker

Barun Mitra is the Director of Liberty Institute, a think-tank based in Delhi. He has conceptualized EmpoweringIndia.org to enable voters to cast their votes thoughtfully during the elections and to use the information on the site to hold their elected representatives accountable after they have been voted in. Barun Mitra also writes on issues of environment, health, trade and democracy in publications such as The Mint, Economic Times and Business Standard.

Time and Date

Wednesday, 15 April 2009; 5.00-6.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/internet-transparency-and-politics

International School at the Digital Media program of the University of Texas at Austin - Portugal Collaboratory (CoLab)

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:08:59Z

Applications are now open for the first International School on Digital Transformation, to be held July 19-24, 2009, at the University of Porto in Porto, Portugal. The School is accepting applications from advanced students and recent graduates from around the world with an interest in how digital technologies are changing societies and the world as a whole.

The International School on Digital Transformation will be an intensive six-day residential program, conducted in English and bringing together emerging and established scholars and professionals from around the world. During the week-long session, innovators in digital communications will serve as teachers and mentors, presenting their current projects and research and participating in discussions with advanced students and professionals beginning careers in the field. Presenters and students will be regarded as peers during the School.

The School will focus on these themes:

• Democratic transformations of society through digital media
• Innovations in transparency and political participation using new online tools
• Grassroots civic activities using digital technologies
• Building effective communities with the Internet
• Reaching out to new users with mobile and online technologies
• Prospects for digital communication in developing regions
• Digital arts and culture in a globalized, online world

The goals of the International School include:

Combining lectures on current research and innovation with practical experience, using accessible, low-cost digital technologies
Providing an informal venue for sharing expertise, perspectives, and best practices and for mentoring advanced students
Fostering a sustainable network of scholars and activists in the field of digital technology, communication and social change

Program

The basic daily schedule will consist of one 90-minute session of lecture and discussion in the morning: free time for teachers and students to interact, converse and explore the city in the afternoon; and two more 90-minute lecture and discussion sessions in the evening, folowed by a communal meal.

The confirmed speakers for the International School on Digital Transformation include:

Sunil Abraham
Director of Policy at the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India; and current board member of Mahiti Infotech
Patricia Aufderheide
Professor, School of Communication, American University; director,
Center for Social Media at American University
Warigia Bowman
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy Leadership,
University of Mississippi
Fiorella De Cindio
Associate Professor, Computer and Information Science Department,
University of Milan
Martha Fuentes-Bautista
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
Stephanie Hankey/Marek Tuszynski (tentative)
Co-founders and directors, Tactical Technology Collective
Lisa Nakamura (associate faculty)
Professor, Institute of Communication Research; Director, Asian
American Studies Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tapan Parikh
Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of California
at Berkeley
Tiago Peixoto
Researcher, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Alison Powell
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
Andrew Rasiej
Founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident
Nicholas Reville
Executive director, Participatory Culture Foundation
Scott Robinson
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Jorge Martins Rosa
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Sciences; Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, New University of Lisbon
Christian Sandvig
Associate Professor, Department of Communication; faculty member,
Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doug Schuler
Program Director, Public Sphere Project, an initiative of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility
Leslie Regan Shade
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University
Maripaz Silva (associate faculty)
Laura Stein
Assistant Professor, Radio-Television-Film Department, University of
Texas at Austin
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Associate Professor, University of Virginia, Media Studies and Law;
Fellow, Institute for the Future of the Book
Katrin Verclas
Co-founder and editor of Mobileactive.org

The International School on Digital Transformation is a program of the University of Texas Austin-Portugal Colaboratory, or CoLab. The co-directors of the School are Drs. Sharon Strover and Karen Gustafson, and Gary Chapman, of the University of Texas at Austin.

The School will be held at the Rectory, a building of the University of Porto in the center of the city. Student housing will consist of nearby hotels, and the cost of the School will include a shared hotel room, two meals per day (breakfast and dinner) and the program itself. The week will also include a cultural activity offered to all School participants.

The estimated cost of the International School on Digital Transformation will be between €300 and €400. Travel to Porto, Portugal, is not supported; students must find and pay for their own travel to Porto.

The student application, and more specific information for students, are available at this link.

Porto, Portugal

Recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996, Porto is known for its spectacular architecture and medieval alleyways, and it is also compact, allowing visitors to easily explore the central city on foot. Porto is on the Douro River and also near the Atlantic Ocean. It is famous for its port wine from the inland Portuguese wine region along the Douro River valley.

During the free afternoons, students and teachers may explore the sidewalk café culture on Santa Catarina Street, a nearby pedestrian shopping area, or walk across the Dom Luís I Bridge spanning the Douro River to the promenade, restaurants, and port houses in Vila Nova de Gaia, directly opposite central Porto. Short river cruises may be taken in barcos rabelos, flat-bottomed boats traditionally used to ferry shipments of port wine.

While Porto is famous for its ancient Roman ramparts and Gothic churches, it is also home to the Casa da Música concert hall, a superb example of modern architecture, finished in 2005, that has become an icon of the city. The Serralves Museum is a major cultural institution which hosts rotating exhibitions of contemporary art and which features a world-class garden.

In the late evenings, Porto hosts a thriving clubbing culture, and the city’s nightspots attract DJs from around the world.

Porto has an international airport and is also served by trains from Lisbon and from Spain. By train, Porto is approximately three and a half hours north of Lisbon.

Please direct questions regarding the program to Karen Gustafson, at kegustafson@mail.utexas.edu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/international-school-at-the-digital-media-program-of-the-university-of-texas-at-austin-portugal-collaboratory-colab-1

International School at the Digital Media program of the University of Texas at Austin - Portugal Collaboratory (CoLab)

sachia — 2009-03-27T09:55:53Z

The School will focus on these themes:

The goals of the International School include:

Combining lectures on current research and innovation with practical experience, using accessible, low-cost digital technologies
Providing an informal venue for sharing expertise, perspectives, and best practices and for mentoring advanced students
Fostering a sustainable network of scholars and activists in the field of digital technology, communication and social change

Program

The confirmed speakers for the International School on Digital Transformation include:

Sunil Abraham
Director of Policy at the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India; and current board member of Mahiti Infotech
Patricia Aufderheide
Professor, School of Communication, American University; director,
Center for Social Media at American University
Warigia Bowman
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy Leadership,
University of Mississippi
Fiorella De Cindio
Associate Professor, Computer and Information Science Department,
University of Milan
Martha Fuentes-Bautista
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
Stephanie Hankey/Marek Tuszynski (tentative)
Co-founders and directors, Tactical Technology Collective
Lisa Nakamura (associate faculty)
Professor, Institute of Communication Research; Director, Asian
American Studies Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Tapan Parikh
Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of California
at Berkeley
Tiago Peixoto
Researcher, European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Alison Powell
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University
Andrew Rasiej
Founder of Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident
Nicholas Reville
Executive director, Participatory Culture Foundation
Scott Robinson
Professor, Department of Anthropology, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Jorge Martins Rosa
Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Sciences; Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, New University of Lisbon
Christian Sandvig
Associate Professor, Department of Communication; faculty member,
Project on Public Policy and Advanced Communication Technology,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Doug Schuler
Program Director, Public Sphere Project, an initiative of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility
Leslie Regan Shade
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Concordia University
Maripaz Silva (associate faculty)
Laura Stein
Assistant Professor, Radio-Television-Film Department, University of
Texas at Austin
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Associate Professor, University of Virginia, Media Studies and Law;
Fellow, Institute for the Future of the Book
Katrin Verclas
Co-founder and editor of Mobileactive.org

The student application, and more specific information for students, are available at this link.

Porto, Portugal

In the late evenings, Porto hosts a thriving clubbing culture, and the city’s nightspots attract DJs from around the world.

Porto has an international airport and is also served by trains from Lisbon and from Spain. By train, Porto is approximately three and a half hours north of Lisbon.

Please direct questions regarding the program to Karen Gustafson, at kegustafson@mail.utexas.edu.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/international-school-at-the-digital-media-program-of-the-university-of-texas-at-austin-portugal-collaboratory-colab

International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009: A Report

sachia — 2011-08-18T05:01:34Z

Open Access activist Madhan Muthu recently attended the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, held in Amsterdam, 16-17 March 2009, in company with CIS Distinguished Fellow Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. In this entry, as a guest blogger for CIS, he files a report on the proceedings at the workshop.

I was in Amsterdam for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam of CIS and other participants from UK, USA, Japan, and Australia. The workshop was funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER Project. The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for the future course of international repositories’ action.

The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories infrastructure. Soon after the keynote, participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to draft action plans on the following topics:

International Organization
Identifier Infrastructure
Citation Services
Repositories Handshake

I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’ group. The handshake group, which consisted of mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh. Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered: one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and interoperability.

On the second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit opportunities' on the principles of more (content), better (quality metadata), easy (uploading) and rewarding (for depositor). The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use cases like:

Easy deposit method for multi-authored papers, with different affiliations from different countries, in multiple repositories
Communication between institutional, subject and funding repositories
Publisher deposits in repositories (IR/SR)
Institute induced deposits

We had two breakout group presentations during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.

Finally, all participants assembled at the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation Services group. Leslie Carr, who was the moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull references from a document in repositories.

The next impressive development came from the Repository Identifiers group. The moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation here). Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.

Clifford Lynch of CNI summed up of the outcomes of the break out groups in his closing remarks. He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs. He also prioritised 'Identifier Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on it.

There was a funders' meeting after the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface. With pre-workshop wiki discussions on repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.

During the workshop, I met a few key people involved in the DRIVER project, particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from ISTI-CNR, Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about DRIVER, which has come up with a set of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines have been translated into three other languages, showing their international acceptance. To streamline repository developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a DRIVER-like initiative to ensure metadata uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.

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Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/international-repository-infrastructure-workshop-amsterdam-16-17-march-2009-a-report

International Communication Association Pre-Conference on 'India and Communication Studies'

sachia — 2011-04-02T15:56:35Z

Sunil Abraham, Director-Policy, CIS, is to take part in a panel discussion on 'Media, Technology, and Governance' at the International Communication Association Pre-Conference on 'India and Communication Studies' on 21 May 2009, 1.00-2.15 pm.

PRECONFERENCE #2

Sponsored by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University for Pennsylvania, and Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi

Title: India and Communication Studies

Time: Wednesday, May 20, 13:00 – 19:00 and
Thursday, May 21, 8:00 – 17:00

Limit: 50 persons

Cost: $100.00USD (Includes refreshment breaks, lunch and reception)
$50.00USD Students

Organizers:

• Monroe Price, Director, Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
• Biswajit Das, Director, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi
• Aswin Punathambekar, Assistant Professor, Communication Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
• Radhika Parameswaran, Associate Professor, School of Journalism, Indiana University, Bloomington

Overview:

India plays an increasingly important role in the processes of globalization, including the global production of culture and the communications technology industry. At the same time, the field of communication studies in India is expanding. Yet there is no Indian Communications Association and little in the way of considered and formal review of contributions to the field.

This pre-conference is an effort to create a new coherence and a new salience for this subject by mapping the area of communication and culture studies in India; to strengthen ties among leading and emerging scholars and institutions in India and elsewhere; to develop and cultivate a research agenda for the field; and to explore the creation of an Indian Communication Studies Association.

The pre-conference will take place over 2 days. The first day will be dedicated to paper presentations from emerging scholars on a diverse range of issues, including media and cultural representations, gender, minorities, issues of nationalism and culture, and structural questions of governance.

The second day will be centered around three panels, which will address the development of communication studies in India; issues of technology, governance and development; and a discussion of scholarship about India. The organized panels will draw from academia, business, civil society, and government/policy-making circles.
Schedule for India and Communication Studies ICA Pre-Conference:

May 20 (Day One):

13.00 – 13.15 Opening Remarks, Monroe Price and organizers
13.15 – 14.30 Paper presentations: Session 1
14.30 – 15.45 Paper presentations: Session 2
15.45 – 16.00 Break
16.00 – 17.15 Paper presentations: Session 3

Moderators for paper sessions: TBC

17.30 – 19.00 Reception for pre-conference participants and guests

May 21 (Day Two):

8.00 – 9.00: Breakfast for pre-conference participants

9.00 – 10.15 Opening Keynote Discussion -- India and Cultural Pathways: Reflections on Identity, History and Scholarship:

The opening keynote will address the history of communications/media studies in and about India, placing it in the broader context of global communication studies and globalization and international relations.

• Biswajit Das, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University
• Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green University
• Sevanti Ninan, Honorary Secretary, The Media Foundation (TBC)
• Arvind Singhal, University of Texas (TBC)
• Daya Thussu, University of Westminster

Moderator: Monroe Price, Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

10.15 – 10.30 – Coffee Break

10.30 -- 11.45 Panel One: The Complex Challenge of Developing Communications Studies in India

This panel will seek to begin mapping the intellectual network of scholars that has informed communications scholarship in and about India. Panelists will discuss the history and development of "Indian" communication studies, including the approaches taken towards this subject; the competition between production and commercial goals and theoretical study; and the institutional and other pressures and challenges encountered by emerging programs..

• Biswajit Das, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University
• Vinod Pavarala, University of Hyderabad
• Anjali Monteiro, Tata Institute of Social Sciences
• Atul Tandon, MICA
• Peng Hwa Ang, MICORE

Moderator: Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University

11.45 – 13.00 –Lunch

13.00 – 14.15 Panel Two: "Media, Technology & Governance"

This panel will be approached through cases as presented by the panelists. It seeks to (a) open the door to the growing work on the IT industry and ICT for Development; and (b) outline a tighter set of analytics to encourage a stronger connection between academic research & public policy in India.

• David Page or William Crawley (TBC), Media South Asia Project, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex University, UK
• Victoria Farmer, Department of Political Science and International Relations SUNY-Geneseo
• Steve McDowell, Department of Communication, Florida State University
• Sunil Abraham, Director (Policy), Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore

Moderator: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Associate Professor, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia University

14.15 – 14.30 Coffee Break

14.30 – 15.45 Panel Three: Nodes of Contact: How to Map Scholarship about India

This panel aims to map the intellectual patterns and trajectories in media and communications scholarship on India. Panelists will address specific areas within communications research--gender and interdisciplinarity, new media, diaspora, television, and media production and reception--to chart and analyze the theoretical and empirical terrain that scholars have covered, and to suggest new and productive directions for future research.

• Radha Hegde, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University
• Shanti Kumar, Department of Radio-Television-Film, The University of Texas at Austin
• William Mazzarella, University of Chicago
• Ananda Mitra, Department of Communication, Wake Forest University
• Hemant Shah, School of Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Moderator: Radhika Parameswaran, School of Journalism, Indiana University

15.45 – 16.15 Concluding Remarks and Wrap-up

This last part of the ICA Pre-Conference Program will feature open discussion and commentary from the organizers and audience.

For more information about this pre-conference, please contact Susan Abbott, Associate Director, Center for Global Communication Studies: sabbott@asc.upenn.edu

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Click here to read this information on the ICA website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ica-preconference

Inclusive Planet

sachia — 2009-07-09T08:51:28Z

Context

There are approximately 75 million differently-abled persons in India. This community is largely excluded from civil society and persons with disability continue to have to depend on family members or others to meet their basic needs and wants. Neither the Government nor private enterprise has had significant success in including this community in mainstream society.

Vision

Inclusive Planet (“IncP”) aims to create India’s largest cross disability community for the 75 million differently-abled people in India and their support groups. IncP will also thereby become the largest provider of products and services to this community.

InclusivePlanet.com

The primary delivery platform for IncP will be www.inclusiveplanet.com (not yet operational), a Web 2.0 portal. Supplementary delivery platforms will be channel partner web sites, vendor websites, Inclusive Planet franchisee stores (brick and mortar), partner stores and mobile phones. The portal will be a ‘one-stop shop’ for the specific requirements of people with disabilities. The portal will also comprehensively address the daily needs of persons with disabilities, including specific requirements for information, everyday requirements of life, employment, entertainment and assistance. In short, the portal will assist persons with disabilities with obtaining access to facilities available to the public at large.

The portal will have channels that specially cater to the disabled and their support group, for the following: medical information, legal information, policy information, news, shopping, service provider listings, career listings, career guidance, medical expert panel, social networking (blogs, forums and chat), and entertainment. IncP is working with several of India’s largest NGOs to provide the back-end for several of the features of the portal.

The Entertainment Channel

This channel of the portal is aimed primarily at the visually-impaired community. Visually impaired persons cannot enjoy the same content in the same format as sighted persons and have to rely on audio content such as audio books and content in specific computer readable formats. The entertainment channel is loosely based on the YouTube model and provides for users to upload and share audio books and other content with each other. This channel will also have a feature allowing users to request any specific item of content; this content can be uploaded by other users or volunteers. This channel will be an integral part of the community building aspect of IncP.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/inclusive-planet/inclusive-planet

Hindi translation WCAG

sachia — 2009-07-06T08:36:42Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/uploads/English%20to%20Hindi%20UNICODE%20FILE.pdf