Centre for Internet and Society

Meeting on the Refreshable Braille Displays and Copyright Frameworks for Open Hardware Development

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T04:49:49Z

A meeting on Refreshable Braille Displays and Copyright Frameworks for Open Hardware Development will be held in the office of the Centre for Internet and Society on 4 December 2010.

This meeting in Bangalore will bring together three inventors who have concurrently been working on different ways of building refreshable braille displays to collaborate, share their knowledge, skills and abilities. Representatives from the disability sector will be present to articulate the needs of the disability community and provide feedback on the designs and concepts.

We will also be examining a copyright framework based on the GNU General Public License and will attempt to evolve a similar license for all future Open Hardware development.

The Centre for Social Innovation is a project by Braille Without Borders which aims to build ultra low-cost products for the developing world. Collective ownership, development and a high social-impact are the core tenets of this centre.

Keyword: accessibility

For more information on the programme, please contact:

Rahul Gonsalves
Administrative Director
Centre for Social Innovation, Braille without Borders
e: rahul@iiseconnect.org
m: +91 94 00 33 22 51

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/notices/meeting-on-the-refreshable-braille-displays-and-copyright-frameworks-for-open-hardware-development

UID elicits mixed response

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T06:32:44Z

Which is the root cause for pilferage of welfare funds in India: fake identity or corruption?

Can the Unique Identity Card (UID) project solve this problem or will it create other more serious issues like infringement of constitutional rights, etc? These were the points fiercely debated at a panel discussion on UID organised by the Centre for Internet Society and Citizens' Action forum.

Chief Electoral Officer M N Vidyashankar, who made a presentation on the progress of the UID project in the State, at times, struggled to convince the audience on the necessity and feasibility of the project.

According to Mathews Thomas of the Citizens' Action Forum, the UID project creates more problems than it is expected to resolve.

“First, it was launched bypassing Parliament. It will only store biometric and other data of all citizens. This could result in illegal migrants claiming citizenship. Further, it will not prevent corruption in Public Distribution System or other schemes. The huge expenditure it will incur is also a matter of grave concern,” he said.

Defending the project, Vidyashankar said it was necessary to weed out discrepancies in multiple identity documents.

“It's well known that inconsistencies in a person's name, father's name, address, etc, creep in multiple documents. For instance, there will be different spellings of a person on a voter ID card, a driving Licence, a passport, and a PAN card. The UID will help in checking such discrepancies,” he asserted.

No operator will be able to tamper with the data. The laptops will have two screens to help the applicant see the entries. Data will first go to the Grameen Business Centre from where it will head to the Central Identity Database Repository which will issue a randomly generated number, he added.

Former Minister Prof B K Chandrashekhar said that there were several concerns in the UID project which need to be addressed properly.

Read the original in Deccan Herald

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/uid-mixed-response

Information Security Summit 2010

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T06:33:18Z

The Information Security Summit 2010 will be held between 2-3 December 2010 in Chennai. The following is the agenda for the event.

Day 1		2-Dec-10
TIME	SESSION	AGENDA
9:30am to 10:30am	Inaugural Session	Summit Theme Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI Welcome Address Mr. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM Keynote Address Mr. Jeffrey Carr, Principal, GreyLogic, United States
10:30am to 11:15am	Plenary Session	Encryption – No more a paradox Secure Business Transaction v/s National security Role of Policy Makers Session Chair Dr. P.K. Saxena, Director – SAG, DRDO Panelists Mr. Hitesh Barot, Director, Intel Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI Dr. Sachin Lodha, TCS Mr. Ashutosh Saxena, Principal Research Scientist, SETLabs, Infosys
11:15am to 11:30am		Tea/Coffee Break
11:30am to 11:50am	Session I A	Securing Data & Systems with Trusted Computing Now and in the Future Mr. Brian Berger, TCG Promoter Board Member, Executive Vice President Marketing & Sales, Wave Systems Corp.
11:50am to 12:10pm	Session I B	Take Control of Identities & Data Loss Mr. Vipul Kumra, Consultant, CA Technologies
12:10pm to 12:30pm	Session I C	Security and the Cloud Ms. Smitha Murthy, Head of Product Management, McAfee India
12:30pm to 1:15pm	Session II	DSCI Data-Centric Approach: Information Visibility Moderator Ms. Nandita Mahajan, CISO &CPO, India & South-Asia, IBM & IBM Daksh Presentation Mr. Vinayak Godse, Director – Data Protection, DSCI Panelists Mr. Pradeep Verma, CISO, FirstSource Solutions Mr. Bhaskar Parashuram, Head – Information Security CoreLogic Mr. Agnelo D’souza, CISO, Kotak Mahindra Bank
1:15pm to 2:15pm		Networking Lunch
2:15pm to 2:30pm	Session III	DSCI – KPMG Annual Security Survey 2010 Mr. Akhilesh Tuteja, Executive Director, KPMG
2:30pm to 3:15pm	Session IV	Leveraging Cloud to deliver Security Services Session Chair Mr. Felix Mohan, CSO, Bharti Group Panelists Mr. Geoff Charron, VP Software Engineering, CA Technologies Mr. Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions – India, Verizon Business Ms. Smitha Murthy, Head of Product Management, McAfee India
3:15pm to 4:00pm	Session V	Security 3.0 – Embedding Security in Design – Trusted Computing, Trusted Environment Session Chair Mr. P.S. Venkat Subramanyan, Head – Data Protection & Privacy, CSC India Panelists Mr. Mark Schiller, TCG Promoter Board Member, Director of HP Security Technology, Hewlett Packard Corp. Mr. Sanjay Bahl, CSO, Microsoft India Mr. Avinash Kadam, Lead Instructor, (ISC)2 and Director, MIEL e-Security Mr. Chris Leach, CISO, ACS Inc
4:00pm to 4:45pm	Session VI	Securing Business Transactions Session Chair Mr. B. Sambamurthy, Director, IDRBT Panelists Ms. Smitha Murthy, Head of Product Management, McAfee India Mr. Shankara Narayanan, Head – Professional Services, Verizon Business Mr. Kartik Shahani, Country Manager – India and SAARC, RSA
4:45pm to 5:00pm		Tea/Coffee Break
5:00pm to 6:00pm	Session VII	DSCI Study Reports Session Chair Mr. B J Srinath, DIT Presentations Theme Introduction – Rahul Jain, Sr. Consultant, DSCI Insider Threats – Sivarama K, Executive Director, PwC Service Provider Assessment Framework – Terry Thomas, Partner, E&Y Reasonable Security Practices – PVS Murthy, Global Head IRM Consulting Practice, TCS Security and Privacy Issues in Cloud Computing – Sai Lakshmi, General Manager, Information Security, Wipro
:30pm onwards		Networking Cocktail and Dinner
DAY 2		3-Dec-10
TIME	SESSION	AGENDA
9:30am to 10:30am	Session I	Economics of Security – ‘Business Flexibility’ and ‘Security & Investment’ in the wake of Cyber crime and expanding compliance regimes Session Chair Mr. Brian J. Manning, President and Managing Director, CSC India Panelists Mr. Laxmikanth Venkatraman, Head – India Operations, Broadridge Financial Solutions Mr. Kumar Rao, Global Head, Cards & Payments Practice, Tata Consultancy Services Prof. Anjali Kaushik, MDI Gurgaon
0:30am to 11:15am	Session II	Panel Discussion – DSCI Best Practices Advisory Group Session Chair Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI Panelists Mr. B.J. Srinath, DIT Ms. Nandita Jain Mahajan, IBM Mr. Abhay Gupte, Deloitte Mr. Anurana Saluja, Infosys Mr. Rahul Biswari, HP Mr. Chalam Peddada, Fidelity
11:15am to 11:30am		Tea/Coffee Break
11:30am to 12:15pm	Session III	Evolution of Privacy in India – ITAA, UIDAI, Privacy Laws, Global Regulations Session Co-chairs Dr. Gulshan Rai, Director General, CERT-In Mr. Rajeev Kapoor, Joint Secretary, DoPT, Govt. of India Speakers Mr. Hitesh Barot, Director – Global Public Policy, Intel Corporation Mr. Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society Mr. Vakul Sharma, Advocate, Supreme Court of India Mr. Vikram Asnani, Sr. Consultant – Security Practices, DSCI
12:15pm to 12:30pm	Session IV	Deloitte’s India Security Survey Mr. Sundeep Nehra, Sr. Director, Deloitte
12:30pm to 1:30pm	Session V	Technology Challenges To Fight Data Breaches and Cyber Crimes: Collaboration through Public Private Partnerships – The Way Forward Moderator Mr. Pratap Reddy, Director, Cyber Security, NASSCOM Principal Speaker Mr. Michael West, Member of the Board, NCFTA (National Cyber-Forensics Training and Alliance), USA and Strategic Technology Investigator, Fidelity Investments Panelists Mr. Krishna Sastry Pendyala, Cyber Forensics Expert at GEQD, Central Forensics Sciences Laboratory, MHA, Government of India Dr. Srinivas Mukkamala, Sr. Research Scientist Institute for Complex Additive Systems Analysis (ICASA) Adjunct Faculty New Mexico Tech., USA and Advisor Cyber Security Works Pvt. Ltd. Mr. Anil Kona, Specialist and Sr. Manager, Analytics and Forensics Technologies, Deloitte Mr. Samir Datt, Founder CEO, Foundation Futuristic Technologies
1:30pm to 2:30pm		Networking Lunch
2:30pm to 3:15pm	Session VI	Security Technologies in Focus Session Chair Mr. Srikant Vissamsetti, Vice President – Network Security, McAfee India Panelists Mr. Prashant Gupta, Head of Solutions – India, Verizon Business Mr. Kartik Shahani, Country Manager – India and SAARC, RSA Ms. Rashmi Chandrashekar, Vice President, Accenture India
3:15pm to 4:00pm	Session VII	Making their Presence felt in the Security Market: Indian Vendors Session Chair Dr. Gulshan Rai, Director General – Cert-In, DIT Panelists Mr. Prakash Baskaran, CEO, Pawaa Software Mr. Ajay Data, CEO, Data Infosys Ltd Mr. Arnab Chattopadhyay, VP Technology, iViz Technosolutions Mr. Tushar Sighat, Vice President, Cyberoam – India and SAARC, Elitecore Technologies
4:00pm to 4:15pm		Tea/Coffee Break
4:15pm to 5:00pm	Session VIII	E-Security Strategy for the next 5 years – The Way Forward Session Chair Prof. N. Balakrishnan, Chairman, DSCI Panelists Dr. Gulshan Rai, Director General, CERT-In, DIT Mr. Kumar Ranganathan, Principal Engineer and Manager, Intel Labs Mr. Sanjay Bahl, CSO, Microsoft India Mr. Y.D. Wadaskar, Managing Director, WYSE Biometrics Systems Dr. Kamlesh Bajaj, CEO, DSCI
5:00pm to 5:15pm		Closing Remarks by DSCI

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/security-summit

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson to lecture at Development Café meet-up

praskrishna — 2011-03-07T11:11:25Z

Development Café (DC) is hosting its second meet-up at the Centre for Internet and Society on Friday, 3 December 2010. Mr. Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, serial entrepreneur and founder of Akvo, a non-profit foundation with focus on water and sanitation, will give a lecture.

In Akvo’s newest attempt at breaking ground on transparency, and setting an innovative standard on open governance in the capital intensive field of water, Thomas and his team have harnessed the use of mobile technology – the Akvo Phone – a new, neat tool to break barriers and establish fresh standards of reporting.

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson is the founder, managing director and acting chief technical officer of Akvo which he founded with the mission to inspire a global open source knowledge and collaboration platform for the water sector. A serial entrepreneur, Thomas is a computer software and environmental scientist who began developing software ventures in the UK and California in the mid-1990s. Thomas is acting chief technology officer and steers the team to harness the maximum potential from open source methods. He refines our methodologies and tools to meet the needs of financiers, field-based NGOs and global development institutions.

Follow Thomas on Twitter @bjelkeman.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/pettersson-talk

This Is All India Radia

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:28:26Z

Our news media blanked it out, but the Internet forced the issue, says Debarshi Dasgupta in an article published in the Outlook Magazine.

If you depend on just the Times of India or Hindustan Times for your daily news fix, chances are you have missed the story that has put Indian journalism under its fiercest gaze ever. For it turns out that a majority of Indian journalism censors news about its own indiscretions. After Open and Outlook magazine published transcripts of conversations between Niira Radia and high-profile journalists, much of the mainstream media erased the coverage about the controversy. Even the few papers and TV stations that covered the issue in the days to follow did not name names and avoided the meat of the story, hiding behind the sophistry of the transcripts being “unauthenticated”.

Among the few that did, The New Indian Express and Mail Today (it did not name a former editor at the group though) picked up pieces of the conversations and the Deccan Herald carried an editorial on November 22. Among the vernacular papers, Sakshi and Andhra Jyoti in Andhra carried some excerpts. The Malayalam news channel Asianet picked up the story, but the English news channels were deafeningly quiet. CNN-IBN had a show on November 22 that claimed to “break the silence” but neither identified the people involved nor featured the transcripts; instead it pontificated on where to draw the line between lobbying and journalism. G. Sampath, deputy editor at Daily News & Analysis, Mumbai, wrote on his blog, “What is really scary is that, despite living in a ‘democracy’ that boasts of a ‘free press’, if you were dependent only on TV and the big newspapers for the biggest news developments of the day, you would never have known about the Niira Radia tapes, and the murky role of media as political power brokers.”

Sevanti Ninan of The Hoot, an online media watch website, latched on to this “great media blackout”. “The list of those who took no note is long and illustrious: The Indian Express, always quick off the mark on sensational disclosures. The Hindu, The Times of India, Hindustan Times, India Today, all those Hindi news channels,” Sevanti wrote. “Not a story that three prominent journalists were trying to help a lobbyist get A. Raja a ministerial berth in the second upa government.” Filling the gap, the site has opened a forum to debate the ethical transgressions in the Radia tapes.

Despite its blackout in print, the story has largely survived because of the tremendous interest among India’s netizens. The news was also carried prominently online in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Huffington Post. Blogs are abuzz with indignant reactions to this censorship. The ‘Radia Tapes Controversy’ is now even a rapidly evolving and fairly detailed Wikipedia entry. YouTube throws up 35 matches for Radia and Barkha (Dutt), with one video (a transcript of one of the conversations) viewed close to 72,000 times. There are also numerous Facebook groups with discussions on how to “fix” the media. Google Barkha Dutt and the engine throws up Niira Radia as a prompt. And there’s no dearth of tweets about “Barkhagate”—there are several every minute asking for these journalists to resign and some even call for them to be jailed. For some, especially among the Right, the controversy has come as a boon, lending credence to their argument that the “pseudo-secular” English media has sold its soul.

Finally, when the ToI reported online on November 25 about how the internet had kept the story alive, there were bursts of self-congratulatory messages and tweets exchanged online. For Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, the Radia tapes controversy illustrates the “tension and disconnect” that exists between the internet and traditional media. “This is unlike on 26/11 when there was a kind of synergy between the two in their coverage,” he says. Yet Net users deserve some credit for having made the debate interactive and infusing it with a much-needed spunk and pluralism. “For me, the most exciting thing about the ‘Barkhagate’ controversy is not the internet’s influence on the attention economy,” adds Abraham. “It’s actually been its crowd-sourcing ability to bring together the intelligence of many amateurs from across the world and to put their insights into one collective analysis of the controversy.” While the Net, with just about 20 million users, is yet to rival the traditional media’s hold on India, the latter undoubtedly have a force it must now reckon with.

Read the original article in the Outlook

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/all-india-radia

The Niira Radia Tapes: Scrutinizing the Snoopers

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:29:21Z

There’s been plenty of outrage in India over taped phone calls between corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and local journalists, revealing what some people believe is evidence that star reporters at the country’s newspapers and TV channels are too cozy with the subjects they’re supposed to be reporting on.

Amid that firestorm, though, there’s been much less scrutiny of why and how the wiretaps happened in the first place, whether they were justified or a governmental overreach, and how these infamous tapes got from the government into the hands of media companies.

Here are just a few questions that merit more consideration: Who orders telephone surveillance in India and on what grounds? How often is it done? What protections are in place to ensure government officials don’t abuse their surveillance authority to settle scores with journalists, corporate officials or ordinary citizens they have a beef with?

The quick answer to all of these: India trusts its bureaucrats to do the right thing. The central government’s Home Secretary, along with some intelligence agencies and state officials, has the authority to approve wiretaps. Unlike in the U.S. and other countries, where investigators must generally obtain court warrants for surveillance to pursue matters ranging from drug-trafficking to insider trading, in India there is no such legal tradition or rule.

“There is no oversight infrastructure, either in parliament or in the judiciary,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society. There is only “post facto” protection in the sense that you can sue the government later if you feel you were wrongly wiretapped, he said.

According to local media reports, industrial giant Ratan Tata on Monday petitioned the Supreme Court over the leaking of the tapes, on which he is heard bantering with Ms. Radia (his lobbyist) about a range of topics related to the $70 billion Tata Group. The reports say he feels the episode violated his privacy and wants the leakers to be punished. (While there’s no explicit constitutional protection of privacy in India, the Supreme Court in some cases has held it is covered by Article 21 of the Constitution, which says, “No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.”)

A report in the Economic Times Monday said government is going to investigate the leak. A Home Ministry spokesman declined to comment on whether an inquiry has been launched but said India’s system of allowing a handful of security and intelligence officials to approve or deny wiretaps sufficiently guards Indian citizens’ privacy. “It isn’t an unchecked kind of thing, that anyone can just do it,” the spokesman said.

India draws its wiretap authority from a few laws, including the 1885 Telegraph Act and a separate information technology law enacted in 2000 and amended in 2008. The government can tap phones or intercept emails for reasons such as “any public emergency” or “in the interest of the public safety” – pretty broad language that gives a lot of leeway to bureaucrats, critics say.

A report in the Hindu last week claimed that more than 5,000 Indian phones are being bugged daily, citing anonymous sources. Mr. Abraham, of the Center for Internet and Society, says that breadth of surveillance in a country of 1.2 billion people wouldn’t be unreasonable. But his organization is planning a Right to Information request to find out more about the scope of government wiretapping.

The government may have had good reasons to conduct the wiretaps of Ms. Radia, which local media reports say were done by the income tax department for two four-month stints in 2008 and 2009, during which time they reportedly logged 5,851 calls.

The income tax agency hasn’t stated publicly what the rationale was and its officials declined to comment Monday.

Media reports suggest that the material was supposed to help probe the irregular allocation of mobile phone spectrum in 2008 to several Indian telecom firms. (The official in charge of that allocation, A. Raja, resigned as telecom minister Nov. 14 amid charges that he rigged the process to favor some companies over others.)

But much of the content in the several hours of so-called “2G tapes” that have leaked to Indian news organizations has little or nothing to do with taxes or 2G spectrum. There’s talk of the billionaire Ambani brothers’ natural gas pricing dispute, mining policy, a dog who is named Google because he is good at finding things, which corporate honchos are easy to get on the phone, and plenty of titillating exchanges between New Delhi’s power brokers on the politics of cabinet appointments. Some pretty top-notch gossip, in other words.

To be sure, the content on the tapes does raise disturbing and serious questions about whether some elements of the Indian media carry water for particular government ministers or corporations. And it pulls the veil back on how the titans of Indian business and politics shape policy away from the public spotlight, as Siddharth Varadarajan explained in Monday’s edition of the Hindu when he made a clever analogy to the movie The Matrix. (We’ve separately parsed the contents of some of the tapes for their potential significance.)

But it’s still worth asking tough questions about the legal and ethical foundations of wiretapping citizens, because, as Indian civil liberties expert Lawrence Liang said in an email, “if this can happen to a Nira Radia, then it can easily be used for a Nida Nobody.”

Update, 5:09 p.m.: “A Home Ministry spokesman confirmed the ministry has asked the Intelligence Bureau and Central Board of Direct Taxes to conduct a probe into the leak.”

Read the original in Wall Street Journal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/niira-radia-tapes

City in the Internet 1: Geography Imagined (Part 2)

praskrishna — 2011-08-02T06:06:43Z

In the last post, I have articulated the nature of understanding and imagination of our urban and rural geography. As mentioned, the understanding of the land, its water and people is an essentially one, that comes through living and experiencing. In this post I will be posing issues around the historical legacy of maps in the Indian context. The issues of imagination of our cities is very much related to this legacy along with the shift that we are witnessing in geographical representation of maps on the Internet.

Story: The elusive government maps

The Survey of India office on the first floor of the Janpath Office and Shopping complex is a curious location for an outlet distributing maps of all the parts of India. Right in the middle of the capital city’s colonial pride (Cannought Place), the Survey of India office is perched in one of the first floor rooms of the complex. Paritosh Mukherjee had been going around the building for ten minutes to find the elusive office, but like all things “Dilli” and “sarkari”, you got to be a man to find it. When he asked the person selling the “imported” shoes in the shop below, he got a rude answer “age chalta ban. yeh enquiry office nahi hai bhai”. Somehow Paritosh was always reluctant to ask directions in this city. Maybe it was his small stature or perhaps his accented hindi he picked while at Doon that made him stand out. He knew being so self conscious in this big city doesn’t help, but deep inside he feared the public places and would rather prefer the comfort of his office or his barsati in Greater Kailash. The pan stain in the stair was a relief, and its aroma immediately alerted his neuro-sensors on the right side of his brain that intuitively told him a government department is very near.

“Aap kaha se aarehe hai?” (Where are you coming from?) asked the lady at the counter wearing the red lipstick. Paritosh was about to say Saath; the NGO where he was doing his research project but some of his Delhi training took over, and he said “Madam sirji ne kutch map mangaye hai; Department of Agriculture, Delhi University. Main unke leye research kar raha hoon” (Sir has asked me to get some maps. I am doing research for the Department of Agriculture, Delhi University) . The red lipstick warmed up and gave him the catalog of Maps. Wow! he said to himself; he just crossed the first hurdle to reach the circle of bureaucratic trust. He remembered how his local friend had once explained the nine concentric circles of babus trust that need to be crossed to reach the inner sanctuary of the Indian government bureaucracy. He called it the Garba Graha (the sanctum of a Hindu temple), where all the prayers are answered. Being a son of a Lajpat Nagar contractor, he knew the value of being in the center!

“Bhiaya yeh to out of print hai, aur koi chaiye to bataiyee?” (They are out of print. If you need anything else, let me know?) said the thin bespectacled man at the payment counter, who reminded him of Ritwik Ghatag’s film characters. He sat behind the heavy wooden counter with glass partition separating the rowdy public from the sacred babus space. The counter was the symbolic physical manifestation of the 8th circle of trust. The bespectacled babu looked surreal in the inner circle; as if he had always been there, since India became independent from the Bristish Raj. Piles of files behind him, ashtray that came as a gift from a Karol baug stationary trader, the dak-dak of the fan above, the filtered sunlight from the concrete jali exposing the dusty layer on the counter where Paritosh stood trying to make sense of the situation. Of late he had begun to enjoy these excursions in these old government departments. Even though things got done at its own pace, he found them more honest than the new corporates offices that pretended to be clean and efficient.

The exercise was becoming frustrating now. The maps were either out of print, or out of stock or restricted. He tried hard explaining to the clerk that the maps are important for his research but he was not moved at all. Moreover the the clerk was getting more and more irritated by him and in a second snapped; “the Government is not making maps for you. Moreover with the security concern these days, do you think we will give all these to the terrorists on a silver plate. Do you know these maps were measured by the British and Indian engineers for years together and are some of the finest maps in the world? Do you know that we have details in 1: 5,000 where you spot the difference between a cow and a buffalo. Sir aap naye lagto ho yaha pe. Yeh map jo aap ko chaiye restricted hain. Appne department walo ko bolo ki letter likhe Director saheb ko. Aesai nahi melete yeh maps. Proper channel se aaiye!” (Sir, it seems you are new. These maps are restricted. Tell your department people to write a letter to our director. You cannot get these maps like this. Please come through proper channel)

The clerk was merely following orders, Paritosh said to himself. “Maps of a cities are very informative and important and hence the secrecy around it. They are perhaps the instruments that can be used by some evil minds to blow up our cities or worse occupy India or perhaps these guys are just purely sarkari and hence do not want to help. Maps are not my right, are they? Maybe I am being too naive in thinking they will give them to me”. Soon enough though, he discovered the “proper channel” to get them.

The state is the proprietor of the “scientific” and “authentic” imagery of the space. It is perceived to be so important and authentic that it is denied to common citizens. The accuracy of the documentation is in fact an important condition that becomes the reason why the state is perceived to be in the position to decide future development, present taxation and other policies applicable to various parcels of land. The claim to scientific accuracy coupled with secrecy is a potent combination that a state perhaps deploys to control space. Maps are the perfect instruments of such control, not to forget many others like Census data, Archaeological information, Geological data, etc.

The map as a state function

Maps have traditionally been associated with the state in the form of local government bodies, its survey departments and scientific arms. The initial mapping exercises in India for example were efforts as part of the larger objective to control and rule over the colonized territory by the East India company and then the British empire. The first survey of India during the 18th century was carried out by the Army of the East India Company. The survey themselves were done under various categories such as revenue survey, topographical surveys, economic survey, The reliance on the correct scientific methods for accuracy and speed were important considerations. For example the use of geodetic survey by Colonel William Lambton while initiating the “Great Trigonometric Survey of India”. The British took extreme pride in their work, as evident by the words of A. S Waugh the Survey General of India, “This magnificent Geodetic understanding, which at present times extends from Cape of Camorin to Tibet and from meridian of Calcutta to that of Kashmir…”. The survey amongst other activities of documenting was in some sense concerned with the efficient management and utilization of all the resources. This was also the means by which the “native” population was dominated both at economic and cultural realm. The idea of the superior western scientific culture that is extremely accurate, precise and understands the geography of a place (unlike the uneducated locals) got further reinforced in the process of surveying and production of maps. In the process the rich history of the Indian traditions of geographical representation was perhaps seen as inaccurate and not scientific and hence not of much use. The older traditions of maps making were perhaps almost forgotten and relegated to background.

Fig 1: Historic Map: Sawai Madhavpur

The above image is a historic map of Sawai Madhavpur old town indicating the water management and engineering plans for the area. Notice the qualitative visual description in the map by the use of colors, textures, text and landmarks. The visual representation techniques are consistent with the place, expressing the qualities of space.

Fig 2: Historic Route Map; Shahjahanabad to Kandahar

Fig2 shows a more utilitarian map for finding ones way from Shahjahanabad to Kandahar; a route map. The route is abstracted as a straight line and important landmarks and rest areas are marked on the line with description as to what to expect. A very creative expression indeed; the map expresses the challenges of the journey.

Fig 3: Map of Puri

Above is a beautifully painted map of the religious town of Puri. It shows the temple complex and also expresses the context of its existence; the mythological stories, the festivals, wars and imagined position of the town in the regional geography of forest, animals and water bodies. It expresses the geography in a poetic fashion loaded with anecdotes; much the way in which common people understand it.

All the three maps are from the book “Indian Maps and Plan: From earliest times to advent of European Surveys” by Susan Gole, Manohar Publisher, 1989, New Delhi. These maps are very different from the survey maps that the British made in India. Obviously the later is based on accurate ground survey hence claims to be true representation of the exact physical condition as it exists on the surface of the land. The older maps on the other hand, almost always told the story of the place, its people and their belief systems. They were perhaps more contextual to the place and not merely physical representations.

Interestingly enough the surveyed map of the British India also became the basis of the partition of India and Pakistan. In some sense the arbitrary line drawn on a piece of map for the partition of India leading to displacement of some 12.5 million people and perhaps a million deaths, demonstrates the power of the “scientifically measured maps” in the hand of few

Maps for National Identity

The British maps were part of the large legacy, India received apart from efficient Railways, Post and Telegraph, Census and so on. But maps were important as they were the tools for forging a new national identity at one level, but also the tool to reinforce cultural identity (especially language) through drawing up of new sate boundaries. The map was the mediator of the imagination of our territory; “The Indian subcontinent extends from the great high Himalayan mountains in the North, seen here as green undulations to the tip of the Southern coast of Kanya Kumari where the three seas meets”, as said by our school geography teacher. The good old map was the perfect companion of the children that had to be taught about the diversity of India, its flora, fauna, people and their distinct culture. We grew up imagining a lot of India through these maps. It was the tool for national integration at one level and for reinforcement of regional and state identity at another level.

Apart from the fact that all the maps that were available in the pre-internet era had similar visual quality (and seem to be offspring of the mother map), the information of the map was essentially the function of the state. The state was the surveyors, authenticator and producer of these maps. Access to maps is not necessarily your right. The state has the right to refuse to general public the sale of map of certain areas like restricted border zone till this date.

The state was central to the imagination of national, state and city spaces which as mediated through maps.

More often than not, maps became the medium in the hands of the state to “teach” or orient the citizen of India the wonders of India, like the uninterrupted Himalayan mountain ranges, holy rivers, western ghats and the long coastline. Maps really were seen as important means for maintaining national identity and pride. Apart from their symbolic value maps also had some practical value for navigation and locating spots.

Maps were essentially line drawing with or without color fills. The natural features were depicted using various graphical hatch like the grasslands, marshes, water or hills. Transportation networks depicted through different thickness or type of lines; the broken one for pedestrian trails, the toothed one for the railway line and so on. Essentially elegantly abstracted diagrams of space in the true tradition of cartographic representation as perfected by the Western World. It is obvious that depiction is abstract and refers to space that exists which you wish can visit to see, feel or touch if need be. The medium that carried this visual were also varied but the image was more or less constant. For example school textbooks, stand alone maps or maps of various government departments to name a few. The visual construct of the map had many constants like use of lines, fills, landmarks, natural and man-made features to name a few.

Why in some culture people prefer asking direction than use maps?

Use of map to find directions is essentially the result of the western modernist framework where the individual is the center in the imagination of the society. The individual with his preference, freedom and choices has to be preserved at all cost. The self becomes the center of existence and must never be violated. The use of map to navigate in cities or countryside is the perfect way of preserving the “self” in a public domain. Why be dependent on the advice of the person on the street when one can get the job done in a more efficient fashion? In contrast to this people in many other cultures love to ask directions and most like to give direction in most animated and excited fashion. There is no fear or shame in asking directions, and in bargain people often strike a conversation about family and kids. This chance interaction, the meeting of strangers, the conversation about life, the meeting of the eye and a shared smile is the glue that binds our cities and creates the public realm. The “public” of cities is not defined through spaces alone but how people interact on the streets. The reliance on people rather than a piece of paper for locating oneself in city space is a symptomatic case, that very much explains the nature of our cities.

Indian cities are as much defined by community action in public places as much by their form. The conversation with strangers or casual acquaintances on the road is the glue that perhaps binds the Indian cities.

The other issue that gets raised is about how people, their verbal description, and animated gestures are preferred to visualize a route or landmark in space of cities. So the imagination of space is not always mediated through the “top view” of a map. The personal interpretation and description are as important as the spatial triangulation.

The use of place-markers, text and pictures in google maps and similar such sites seems to be mimicking this aspect of the city; the opinions of people, their memory and impressions.

Fig 4: Users Opinions in Google Earth

Fig 5: The users view on Google earth

All of a sudden we are able to hear people in maps. This is an important development and needs further examination. The fundamental attitude is towards looking at our surroundings; in this case from the top. The “gaze” is an important conceptual phenomenon that will be need to be accounted for while understanding the deployment of any such image as a way of exploring geographical space. “The gaze is outside; I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (Lacan, 126).

These maps (Figure 4 & 5) as such show the worms eye view superimposed on the bird eye view. The individual interpretation in space which is common (Cities; belongs to all) is a consistent pattern that one finds in most of the geographical representation of space on the internet. Two conditions come together here; the representation (in this case a satellite picture) of space that claims to be accurate and neat along with individuals marking there engagement with the same.

In some sense it (satellite maps on internet) presently represents two extreme scales; that of a large neat space of the city and the individuals readings of the space. Maps have, after a long time broken from the clutches of the state but still do not necessarily connect with larger social cultural processes of the city like the old maps did. It is still “work in progress”, but offer immense opportunities in creating representations of space that can tell lot more stories of our cities. Like many other mediums that have transformed due to the internet (like collaborative music, videos etc), there seems to be a possibility of creative expressions in generating new maps that may represent the rich vitality of our cities.

Maps perhaps were never tools to find directions. Are they not the story tellers of a place?

References

Gole, Susan. Indian Maps and Plan: From earliest times to advent of European Surveys, Manohar Publisher, 1989, New Delhi

Lacan, Jacques. What is a Picture? in The Visual Culture Reader by Mirzoeff Nicholas. Routledge, 2002. New York

Read the article in Pratyush's Blog

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/geography-imagined

Time to bury e-mail?

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:30:10Z

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, had a simple message to the world: email is outdated since it can no longer handle the sort of digital communication that we’ve got used to. Facebook Messages, which integrates email, SMS, instant messaging and social networking, is the way forward, he claimed.

Zuckerberg isn’t the first one to point out the limitations of email. Last year Google too said that email, a technology invented in the ’60s, was not equipped to serve our current needs. “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today,” Google proclaimed during the launch of Google Wave.

As it turned out, Wave was a great product but served an entirely different purpose — collaboration. While this made sense at the enterprise level, it didn’t offer much added value to email users engaging in one-to-one conversations. Google Wave today is defunct since users didn’t buy into Google’s argument. Will Facebook Messages suffer the same fate?

The answer depends a lot on whether users face the problem that Zuckerberg claims they do. “A lot of people are trying to solve the problem of email. But I don’t know what that problem is,” says Mahesh Murthy, CEO, Pinstorm, a digital marketing agency. According to Murthy, there are three main issues with email: storage space, spam filtering and prioritising messages. And modern email services such as Gmail have evolved to address these concerns.

Facebook obviously thinks otherwise. According to the company we need one inbox for all our digital communication, which includes emails, chats and SMS. Second, messages from your Facebook contacts will be considered more important and will go into Social Inbox. All other messages will go into a separate folder. Third, messages will be threaded according to people and not subject lines as is the case with Gmail and other email services.

According to Gaurav Mishra, head, social media practise, MS&L Group, these are compelling reasons to start using Facebook Messages. But enough to ditch your email account? Not quite, say experts.

“Integration is a marketing myth,” says Nishant Shah, director, Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based research organisation, “Many of us like to keep our information in different silos. We have heard of young people getting fired from their jobs because they were not able to keep personal information compartmentalised.”

Secondly, giving greater priority to messages from people in your contact list may be misplaced. “The nature of conversation on Facebook is casual and the criticality of a message and hence the need for an immediate response may not be that high,” points out Murthy. An email from, say, a client or a prospective recruiter who may not be on your friends list, may be more critical.

There’s no doubting that Facebook Messages could change the way we conduct our casual conversations. But email serves basic and universal needs. For example, while introducing the new service, Zuckerberg pointed out how school kids felt email was too slow. According to Shah, however, it is important to understand what the kids found email slow for. A movie plan can be made quicker through SMS, but the same kids might submit their assignments via email.

Of course, Zuckerberg has not claimed that Facebook Messages will be an email — or more specifically Gmail — killer. But Facebook’s PR machinery would have known how the media would react. By undermining the very concept of email — one of Google’s strongest products — Facebook has managed to make Google look like the hero of yesteryears.

Analysts agree that Facebook Messages is really about retaining users on its website — if Facebook can give its users a reason to spend more time on its website rather than that of an email service, it can serve more ads. “It is about economics. But Facebook is trying to turn it into a cultural argument,” says Shah.

Still, one thing is certain; Facebook Messages will not suffer the same fate as Google Wave, partly because it is simply an update (and a rather good one) to an existing feature within Facebook. But it is far from a replacement to email. As Mishra puts it, “I will not close down my existing email ids. But I will start using Facebook to message my relatives and friends. It is going to be the future of messaging, not the future of email.”

Read the original in DNA

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bury-email

Mobile banking set to get a boost from IMPS

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:38:54Z

Customers will now be able to transfer money from their accounts to any other account in the country using their cellphones, through the National Payment Corporation of India's Inter-bank Mobile Payment Service (IMPS). The facility allows transactions without the need for a computer or an Internet-enabled phone.

Experts say the service introduces a new form of customer-friendliness that a developing ICT nation like India requires. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India records more than 670 million registered mobile subscribers; with the penetration of Internet technologies through mobile phones being higher than the spread of the Internet through broadband connections, the service, they reckon, is expected to boost banking transactions better than Internet banking.

“Though the Internet banking services are user-friendly, they are actually restricted to a limited number of tech-savvy, English-speaking Internet users in the country. With the IMPS, the mobile phone, which is ubiquitous, becomes a handier device for the average user,” says Nishant Shah, director (research), Centre for Internet and Security.

The service provides an inter-operable infrastructure for banks to offer a real-time money transfer facility to customers through mobile phones in seven seconds, says A.P. Hota, CEO and Managing Director of the NPCI. The mobile fund transfers offered by banks and technology providers take 24 hours, and are allowed only if the sender and the receiver hold accounts in the same bank, a hiccup the IMPS seeks to overcome.

With mobile phone-based applications popular and more inclusive in their reach, Mr. Shah says, it might be not only more far-reaching to have banking services available through encrypted SMS systems, because it is a medium that people are familiar with, but also the application-based systems are going to benefit a lot of people, especially who live in areas with inadequate access to banking systems.

Citing South Africa and the Philippines where the IMPS has been successfully launched, experts say the banking and telecom sectors are equipped with the latest security measures for launching the service. With most banks now using a Java-based robust system which works on some kinds of phones and is supported by a limited number of Operating Systems, the system is said to have tried-and-tested security features with double layers of encryption. Hence, the responsibility of caution is more on the side of the user than on technology, experts say, citing cases of sharing of passwords, leaving phones unlocked and sharing of sensitive information with strangers as causes for financial crimes online.

Seven banks have already been offering the IMPS. Seven more are linking up through this network. Gradually, all 50 banks licensed by the RBI are expected to offer the service, which will be free of cost till March 31, 2011.

Read the original in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/mobile-banking

The internet’s new billion

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:31:19Z

New web users — in countries like Brazil and China — are changing the culture of the internet.

The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice.

New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. Registering online was the only way.

“If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. “Nowadays, internet in Brazil is a necessity.”

Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. The newest billion people to venture online are doing so in developing countries rather than North America or Europe.

And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. For businesses nimble enough to serve markets as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, the shift promises a staggering number of new customers.

But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. The new users are changing the culture of the internet itself. Researchers say the web as it was originally, if idealistically, conceived — a largely free, monolingual space where a shared digital culture prevailed — may soon be a distant memory. And it’s happening remarkably fast.

“Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth. He’s a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group’s Sao Paulo office who co-authored a report released in September called “The Internet’s New Billion.” It concludes the number of web users in developing-world “BRICI” countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia — will jump from 610 million this year to 1.2 billion by 2015.

When the internet crossed the billion-user threshold just five years ago, the developed world commanded a 60-40 majority online, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. Today, that proportion has roughly reversed.

The new users are younger, poorer and more numerous than ever before, BCG’s analysts said, and increasing numbers will need web access and won't be able to afford broadband in their living room.

As Fabina da Silva pecked away on a keyboard to register her sons for school, she was in many ways typical of low-income Brazilian users. Those who don’t have web access at home often pay small fees to use ad hoc cybercafes known here as “LAN houses.” Many began as rooms full of connected computers, or local area networks, for multi-player gaming, but their customer base has since broadened.

In India, those following the trend say a huge portion of the new billion will enter the web via mobile devices.

“If you look at our broadband figures in India, it’s quite pathetic,” said Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. “And less than 1 percent of the population has ever accessed the internet.”

But recently, many Indian telecommunication firms have begun giving out free data plans with their mobile devices — a move Sunil said will instantly send millions of Indians onto the internet. “The moment an end user acquires a smart phone they become a data user because they’re not paying for it,” he said. “But they’re not coming onto the internet like you and I know.”

Instead, phone companies only provide access to a few sites, such as Wikipedia and Facebook Zero, a stripped-down mobile version of the social networking site that omits photos but allows messaging and status updates. “They’re coming onto a network that, from the beginning, is a complete walled garden,” he said.

The new walls dividing regions of the internet aren’t likely to stop there. Even as more users join the web worldwide, they are increasingly separated by language. What the nearly 400 million users in China experience as the internet is vastly different than the web surfed by Americans. Much of the software and websites on the Chinese web are produced domestically in the local language. That’s also how it works in Russia and Indonesia.

Some observers say this difference has political consequences. “Many of the local companies provide far better service than the likes of Google and Facebook in those markets,” said Evgeny Morozov, a digital technology researcher at Stanford University. “But also those local websites are much easier to censor because the corporate entities behind those sites all have some domestic presence.”

Morozov is author of an up-coming book “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” and he said there’s a dark side to be found in the internet’s new billion, too. Because poorer users resort to more centralized methods for getting online — cybercafes, cell-phone towers — their activity will be much easier to monitor.

“The fact that so much of this is happening in cybercafes and mobile devices actually empowers the government because those two things are much easier to control than a desktop computer in your house,” Morozov said.

Morozov is also skeptical of notions that greater diversity of cultures online will lead to more cultural dialogue. “There is very little interaction between communities and it’s not because the tools are lacking. It’s just that modern-day Indians and modern-day Russians have nothing to talk about most of the time,” he said. “There may simply be no demand for joining that global village.”

More optimistic web scholars argue there will be cultural conversations, but bridging the gaps between communities will take effort. “The internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “There’s some interface between them but there’s a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.”

Instead of becoming the world’s biggest tool for cultural exchange, Zuckerman said the web could become its principal medium for mutual misunderstanding. “We’re mostly talking to people like ourselves rather than talking across cultural boundaries,” Zuckerman said. “And when we do cross cultural boundaries, it’s often in a way where we’re overhearing something that really pisses us off.”

Take for example the 2005 scandal after a Danish newspaper posted cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, sparking riots across the Muslim world. Zuckerman said such incidents may become routine. “It’s a problem of unseen audiences,” he said. “We always have to be aware there are other audiences out there listening, and they’re particularly listening for mentions of themselves.”

For a more amusing and recent online snafu, Zuckerman prefers citing a topic that went viral on the micro-blogging site Twitter this summer. The topic, the Brazilian Portuguese phrase “Cala boca, Galvao,” was mysterious to many English-speaking users. Asked to explain, a few mischievous Brazilians claimed the Galvao was a rare Amazon bird being slaughtered to extinction for its colorful feathers. For everyone who re-tweeted the phrase, so the pranksters claimed, 10 cents would be donated to a global effort to save the bird.

The encouragement helped catapult the phrase into the ranks of Twitter’s top-trending topics, or most-repeated phrases worldwide last June. But in reality, Galvao was the first name of Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian sports commentator on the Globo network, whose pronouncements during the World Cup had irritated many of his compatriots. In Brazilian Portuguese, “Cala boca” roughly means, “shut up.”

“There’s an entirely different conversation going on that’s so incomprehensible to Americans that the Brazilians make fun of us when we try to understand,” Zuckerman said. “In many ways that sort of characterizes for me what’s going on with the contemporary ‘net.'”

But Zuckerman still believes virtual borders can be crossed. In 2005, he co-founded Global Voices, an aggregator and translator of blogs from around the world, in part to help the next billion web users communicate.

“These billion users are sort of proxy for the global middle class,” he said. “They’re an increasing economic force, an increasing cultural force, and they are the people we need to negotiate with and have a conversation with if we want to address problems like climate change.”

In the run-down Engenho da Rainha neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, some of the LAN house customers seemed more interested in using the web to play games than solve the world’s problems.

One wiry teen in a blue baseball cap barely glanced away from his screen to answer questions. “I’ll spend all day, all night on the internet if I’m allowed,” said Carlos Wallace Cruz, 16. “I’d say I’m 98 percent addicted.”

Cruz’s drug of choice isn’t likely to ring a bell with Americans his age. It’s a video game available only on Orkut, a Google social networking site, wildly popular in Brazil and India but less so in the United States.

When a visitor asked if he ever spent time on Orkut’s much more famous rival site, Cruz responded with earnest puzzlement.

“What’s Facebook?” he asked.

Read the original in the Global Post

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-new-billion

‘Piracy is now a mainstream political phenomenon'

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:44:40Z

“Piracy has become a mainstream political phenomenon,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in the city. The piracy that he was referring to was not the piracy of the high seas but the piracy of intellectual property.

Mr. Abraham was speaking at the ‘Resource mela and meet of documentary centres' at the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED). The three-day mela ended on Sunday.

He argued that the process of documentation was a political matter. The theme of his talk was on the tussle between knowledge in the public domain versus its restriction by copyright. Mr. Abraham explained that documentation centres can have four positions vis-à-vis intellectual property restrictions.

The first position could be to agree with the existing law on intellectual property and defend the interests of those who own those rights.

A second position could be to acknowledge the usefulness of copyright laws while balancing it with the interests of the creator, entrepreneur, consumer and the general public. This balancing act is being further pushed by three important global campaigns — the right of persons with disabilities to read, the right of student communities to bypass certain copyright restrictions, and the necessities of archivists and librarians.

Moving to the other side of the spectrum, a third position that documentation centres can have is a ‘position of openness' by supporting only freely licensed intellectual property material. The extreme position that can be taken is to dismiss all the laws that exist around intellectual property and freely “pirate” knowledge.

‘No longer shameful'

Arguing from this position, Mr. Abraham said that it was no longer shameful to be known as a “pirate” today. “There are elected members of parties advocating piracy in certain European countries such as Sweden and even in the European Union.”

Mr. Abraham openly advised documentation centres not to greatly concern themselves with copyright issues in their work, as in India no two lawyers would agree on copyright laws while very few cases of copyright infringement actually came up in Indian courts.

He concluded his talk by indicating that there was no global model that could be applied to intellectual property rights “as there is no model that works for everyone everywhere”.

The resource mela was intended to be a multi-dimensional sharing centred around a national network of documentation centres called DCM. The programme was organised by Akshara, Aalochana and CED.

Read the original article in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/piracy-political-phenomenon

Open standards policy in India: A long, but successful journey

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:40:53Z

Last week, India became another major country to join the growing, global open standards movement. After three years of intense debate and discussion, India's Department of IT in India finalized its Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, joining the ranks of emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa and others. This is a historic moment and India's Department of Information Technology (DIT) deserves congratulations for approving a policy that will ensure the long-term preservation of India's e-government data.

A major victory for the Open Source community is that the policy now says, "4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard."

This victory is really important to the open source community because open source and open standards have a symbiotic relationship. While open source is the freedom to modify, share and redistribute software source code, open standards refer to the freedom to encode and decode data and network protocols. One freedom without the other is a limited freedom.

In the Indian policy, proprietary software vendors wanted to define open standards in such a way that even royalty-based standards would be included. Due to stiff opposition from the free and open source software community, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), academia and others, this proposal was rolled back.

Under the National e-Government Action Plan, the Indian government is spending more than 10 billion dollars on e-governance. Some of the largest greenfield e-governance projects are in India. For example, one project aims to give a unique ID to more than 700 million Indians. Given the scale and scope of e-governance in India, the storage, archival and retrieval of e-governance data is a critical state responsibility. The standards selected by India also have global implications because the sheer volumes of usage in India, could make those standards the most popular standards in the world.

It must be remembered that while software changes every few years, the underlying data (birth and death records, census data, tax data etc.) is fairly static and might have to be preserved for centuries. If the government stores its data in a closed format, it could permanently lose access to that data if the owner of that format goes out of business or refuses to provide access to that format. If the government stores its data in proprietary formats that require royalty payments, the negotiation power of the vendor goes up as more and more data is stored in that proprietary format; a situation that no sovereign power should tolerate.

The Indian policy also states that a single open standard will be used for e-governance. This clause is also extremely important. For example, if a Central Government Ministry requests a certain set of information from state governments in India, and each state government submits the data in a different format, enormous amounts of time will be wasted in converting the data into a common format. There is also risk that data could be lost in the process of converting data from one format to another. Therefore, the usage of a single, open standard for an application area is the backbone that will unify these applications and enable the sharing of data across different applications. This will drive more efficiency in e-governance enabling policy makers and e-government practitioners to quickly pull together data from different government departments and take more informed decisions.

It was a very tough fight and the proprietary vendors used their market clout and strong field presence in their attempts to subvert open standards. For example, in the previous draft policy dated 25/11/2009, the wordings of the key section read,

"4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard. However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered."

Commenting on the final policy, veteran journalist, Glyn Moody said, “As you can see, there is no room for doubt here, no quibbling with 'RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND)' or 'Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND)' as the earlier version suggested: just a clear and simple 'Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard'.”

So how did the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community succeed against tremendous odds? Some key actions that helped us succeed are:

   1. We worked long and hard to educate the public and the media. At first, some journalists shied away from writing on this subject because they found it too arcane and complex. It took over six months of talking to mediapersons before one of the mainstream publications carried an article on open standards. Once that happened, the dam broke and other publications also started to write about this “arcane” subject.
   2. The academic community, especially in the prestigious Indian academic institutions, were very supportive of open standards. Many academicians have influential positions on government committees and their support helped.
   3. India has a very vibrant set of Civil Society Organizations. The FOSS community worked with leading CSOs like IT For Change, Center for Internet and Society, Knowledge Commons and others that are founded by people who have tremendous experience in working on technology policy issues. A loose-knit coalition was formed under the title of FOSSCOMM and some excellent representations were made to the Indian government.
   4. Many sections within government itself were firmly in favor of open standards and the community worked closely with them.
   5. The community made common cause with sections of industry that supported open standards. This helped counter the pressure from industry associations that were supporting proprietary standards.

It was a long but extremely rewarding issue to be involved in and I am documenting this in the hope that other countries can benefit from the experiences we gained in fighting for open standards in India. Jai Ho! (May you be victorious!)

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-standards-policy

Just Where We Like It

praskrishna — 2012-01-03T10:25:08Z

The micro space for status updates might become the new public space for discussion. Nishant Shah's column on Digital Natives was published in the Sunday Eye of the Indian Express on 21 November 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting the mecca of digital native research — The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University. In a workshop on digital safety, questions were cropping up faster than fractals on a screen-saver: What are the tools that digital natives use to mobilise groups? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environment? Are they using popular social networking sites and Web 2.0 applications for mere entertainment? Are these tools helping them re-articulate the political realm? While thinking through these questions, I glanced at my Facebook feed, to find a friend, a respectable professor in Taiwan, announcing, “I like it on the table.” I blinked thrice to ensure I was reading it correctly. Soon more female friends announced how some liked it on the floor, some liked it on the couch, some liked it in closets.

On Facebook, almost all users engage in updating their status updates. These updates can be varied — capturing moods and emotions, reporting on striking things, offering political opinions, suggesting movies and books to friends, and often making public announcements of important events. The updates appear as a live feed, in almost-real time, letting people in networks know, discuss and share information about their personal lives. Often, to outsiders, these updates would appear pointless; I remember somebody asking me, “But why would I want to know what you had for breakfast?”

However, status messages are also constantly used as a form of political mobilisation to raise awareness, to spread the word or to gather people around a common cause. In the early part of 2010, we saw a colour meme, which invited women users on Facebook to have a colour as their status update — “Black!”, “Green!”, “Red!”, “White!” without any other explanation. It was a viral phenomenon, with colours appearing from across the world, spanning different languages, cultures and contexts. It created discussions and conspiracy theories. Blogs discussed it, people tweeted about it and eventually, the word came out.

It was a meme — an internet gene (because it replicates), which spreads virally by inviting people to participate in a series of actions, either to answer a question or perform a certain act, and pass it along. The colour updates were part of a breast cancer awareness campaign that invited women to update the colour of their bra in their status and pass the note across to other women in their network.

The new meme with people writing suggestive messages about “I like it on my...” is a follow-up on the older one, where “it” stands for a purse. There is much critique of these kinds of games, where it seems all fun and sometimes dissociated (the coy suggestiveness plays with the female stereotype of women’s love for purses). However, this critique misses out on how digital natives, through a gaming mode, are able to generate discussion on the prevention of breast cancer. What was just a space for personal ramblings suddenly became a place of political mobilisation and participation. Both men and women, reading these memes, took a moment to think about breast cancer and generate a buzz. Discussions that started with curiosity ended on a note of reflection.

Memes like these, whether on Facebook or any other social networking site, generate discussions, capture attention and create awareness campaigns without any apparent funding or infrastructure. Digital natives who start and participate in such memes might not think of themselves as activists in the traditional sense and yet they are making interventions that would otherwise require support from traditional organisations.

As digital natives grow with new technologies, they change the ways in which we engage with the world. The micro space for status updates becomes the new public space for discussion and engagement.

I know digital natives who raise an eyebrow at holding a public rally on the streets, because to them, these don’t seem to be effective solutions. I am not suggesting that digital natives do not engage in those forms of civic protest. They do, and often in a style and scope that is effective. They organise, not using pamphlets and petitions, but by using tools like memes which might be obscure, funny, absurd and strange, and to an outsider meaningless. However, memes are here to stay.

Read the story in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/just-where-we-like

Information, the world's new capital - Digital Natives

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:41:31Z

Information is the new capital and currency of the world, Nishant Shah, of the India-based Digital Natives with a Cause, told Bizcommunity.com yesterday, 10 November 2010, as the three-day workshop on digital and internet technologies that brought together young delegates from nine African countries ended in Johannesburg, South Africa. "If the 20th century was the age of the industrial revolution, the 21st century is now actually the age of the knowledge information," Shah said.

The workshop, hosted in collaboration with the Netherlands-based Hivos Centre for Internet and Society, aimed at analysing how young Africans use the digital tools and platforms at their disposal to create social change in their environments. Delegates came from countries such as South Africa, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Egypt, Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya.

Youth need to be more involved

However, despite the power of this newly-found capital and currency, there is a general impression out there that not everyone is getting access to the information or being part of the discussion of how that information is produced. Fieke Jansen, of Hivos, said research shows most of the young people growing in the south are not being part of the discussion, as policymakers, academics and practitioners act on their behalf, thus influencing their lives.

Jansen said: "We told ourselves we should break this cycle and include them in this discussion, as we strongly believe that there is a need for young people to grow up and intersect with technology in the aim to create social change."

Shah said: "Look, worldwide there is a huge pressure on young people to become economically active. You can see how governments all over the world are putting more resources into pushing populations to get access to the digital.

"Excluding the youth by, for instance trying to censor the internet, could only mean that there is a lack of understanding of how internet works.

"Older people can no longer ignore the youth in this age of digital revolution because exposing young people to digital technology can give them more voice that could help bring change, for example they can get involved in issues such as government accountability and transparency."

Gap between academic, practice

Furthermore, Jansen said research also shows that a huge gap exists between academic and practice, something she said her organisation and its partners were working hard to address. "We need to bridge that gap because academic and practice need each other," she pointed out.

Digital Natives with a Cause, which is based in Bangalore, is a research company specialised in the intersection of internet into society. The two organisations organised another workshop in August this year in Taipei, Taiwan, attended by young delegates from several Asian countries. A third workshop is due to take place in early December in Santiago, Chile's capital city.

It is estimated that the global youth population now stands at 1.2 billion this year, 85% of which live in developing countries.

Jansen said: "There is no limit on what young people can do with digital. And age doesn't matter in technology, it is the way you approach technology that matters."

Youth, agents of change

Shah said nobody can produce change in isolation. "It is time the world saw young people not only as beneficiaries of change, but also as agents of change. So it is time we start listening to them. While the older generation needs to teach the youth, young people also need to tell them if you don't build a new army, society will be in trouble."

The Johannesburg workshop was also made possible with the help of their local partner, South Africa-based The African Commons Project.

Download and read Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report.

For more information, contact the Hivos Centre for Internet and Society at www.hivos.net, the African Commons Project at www.africancommons.org or go to www.digitalnatives.in/africa.

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

Archive and Access: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

The Archive and Access research project by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran and Abhijit Bhattacharya is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The project that attempts to look at the ways in which the notion of the archive, the role of the archivist and the relationship between the state and private archives that has undergone a transition with the emergence of Internet technologies in India has been put up for public review.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.

The monograph has emerged out of the "Archive and Access" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 15 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archive-and-access