Centre for Internet and Society

Events

sumandro — 2015-10-25T04:16:13Z

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

Publications

sumandro — 2015-10-25T03:49:47Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/publications

Crowdsourcing Incidents of Communication Privacy Violation in India

sumandro — 2015-10-16T10:49:17Z

In the context of several ongoing threads of debates and policy discussions, we are initiating this effort to crowdsource incidents of violation of digital/online/telephonic privacy of persons and organisations in India. The full list of submitted incidents is publicly shared, under Creative Commons Attributions-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. Please contribute and share with your friends and colleagues.

Report an incident: http://goo.gl/forms/8Xcf0zcWZW

Collected incidents: http://bit.ly/privacy-violation-india (CC BY-SA 4.0)

You are welcome to cross-post this to your website or other online forum. Please provide attribution, and link back to this page. For any clarification, write to Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, CIS, at sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/crowdsourcing-incidents-of-communication-privacy-violation-in-india

Strategic Issues Emerging from Open Access Dialogues - Final Report

sumandro — 2015-10-11T04:39:10Z

A series of discussions - on the Chat Literacy forum of ELDIS and on Twitter - was organised during November 2012 to March 2013 to identify the global challenges in 'Navigating the Complexities of Open Access'. The discussions were facilitated by Eve Gray and Kelsey Wiens, in partnership with The African Commons Project (South Africa) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), through support from the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. On behalf of CIS, Sumandro Chattapadhyay co-coordinated and contributed to these discussions.

The final report of the Open Access Dialogues was published by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and can be accessed here.

A sub-report summarising the experiences and arguments expressed by the Indian participants in the Dialogues was prepared by Sumandro, which can be read below or downloaded here.

Strategic issues emerging from the comments of Indian participants

1. Lacking OA awareness, even among scholarly communities

Many, if not all, commentators emphasised the unfortunate lack of awareness about the notion and possibilities of Open Access across India, including among the scholarly and/or higher education related communities. Often the notion of Open Access is quite familiar, especially among scholars, but without a clear understanding of its benefits and how to make one's scholarly works openly accessible.

2. Uneven geography of OA success stories

The above point must be read along with strong success stories emerging from Indian OA journals, mostly from science disciplines. A recent study reveals that 970 Indian OA journals are included in the 'Journals Citation Report 2011' (science), and the Impact Factors of these journals are on the rise. This indicates towards a very uneven geography of OA awareness and adoption in India, with the OA agenda being pursued successfully by specific scholarly communities but not translating into widespread support across the higher academia landscape.

3. Global businesses of scholarly works and complicity of Indian researchers

The role of global businesses of scholarly works in impending the Open Access agenda in the India was mentioned by most of the commentators. The publication, and especially distribution, of publicly funded research is dominated by global publication houses. Additionally, the complicity of Indian researchers in reinforcing the culture of exclusive and 'prestigious' journals published by global publishers is also well understood and criticised.

4. Citation Indexes as necessary evil

While the discussants argued against an over-emphasis on Impact Factors in judging a quality and success of journals, especially for IF being biased against new journals, and thus against newly started OA journals. At the same time, measurement of citations remains a crucial way of understanding readership and impact of scholarly works. There was a strong recommendation of article-level metrics as opposed to journal-level ones. Studies were suggested to argue that article-level impact increases with OA journals. Another concern is bibliographic malpractices, including biases against citing works from Indian (or, developing world) scholars and against citing works published in non-'prestigious' journals.

5. Open Access must not only be about access to journals

A strongly expressed opinion was that the OA agenda must move beyond journal publications. The journal-centric approach emphasises the supply side of knowledge but fails to appreciate the demand of knowledge, especially in a country like India where primary and secondary education remain vital challenges. Further, even within higher academic circles, OA agenda must expand into other forms of scholarly works beyond journal essays, such as primary data and other research materials, especially since all such forms are also produced by public funds. Open Access to 'gray literature' (produced by private and non-profit research organisations) is also crucial, as much policy-making tends to be shaped by such works.

6. Open Access and the consumers of knowledge

The commentators emphasised the nature of OA to knowledge as a public good. The OA agenda must address the consumers of knowledge outside the university system, and especially across socio-economic classes. While open university education and participation in MOOC-models of learning are on the rise in India, there is a threat that this digital-centric approach reinforced existing digital divides in access to knowledge.

Policy Suggestions

1.'Mainstreaming' the OA agenda: Instead of locating OA as a separate agenda, it will be useful to 'mainstream' it within larger development/research related funding initiatives by making OA publications of research outcomes a necessary grants condition.

2.OA as the entry point to a broader 'open' agenda: The OA agenda can build upon its existing institutional and governmental acceptance and implementation to promote a broader 'open' agenda, including open sharing of research data, open formats for and sharing of bibliographic data etc.

3.Moving the OA discussion and knowledge organisation beyond higher education communities: Addressing non-university circuits of learning, of both institutional (primary and secondary education) and non-institutional (informal learning groups around MOOC courses) varieties, is a crucial challenge for the OA agenda in the developing world. Another crucial community of potential OA supporters would be the non-governmental and non-profit organisations working in the field of education in particular, and development in general.

4.Removing policy biases against Open Access journals in academic administration: Combined global and local efforts remains important to reshape national academic administration policies to stop discrimination against OA publication of scholarly works, such as higher academic benefit for publication in closed 'prestigious' journals.

5.Encouraging and supporting scholarly communities (often with a disciplinary and/or thematic common ground) to undertake OA knowledge production: Promoting the OA agenda must also adopt a bottom-up strategy in the developing world, and this would require capacity and community building exercises involving local and global scholarly colleagues and enthusiasts gathered around thematic and/or disciplinary focii, as well as institutional and governmental recognition and support.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/strategic-issues-emerging-from-open-access-dialogues-final-report

Sumandro C - Open Access Dialogues - Strategic Issues Emerging from the Comments of Indian Participants

sumandro — 2015-10-11T04:34:19Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/sumandro-c-open-access-dialogues-2013

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Banner

sumandro — 2015-10-07T13:07:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_IRC16_Banner.png

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India- Call for Sessions - Poster

sumandro — 2015-10-07T19:11:01Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions

sumandro — 2015-10-07T10:31:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Poster

sumandro — 2015-10-07T10:24:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_IRC16_Poster01.png

Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:48:17Z

With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.

Call for Sessions document: Download (PDF)

Call for Sessions poster: Download (PNG)

Internet Researchers’ Conference

The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.

This conference series is founded on the following interests:

Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.
Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.
Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.
Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.

Studying Internet in India

The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (to be confirmed) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.

The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?
What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?
Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?

Sessions

The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.

Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.

In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.

In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but not speaking.

Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.

Writing Sprint

At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.

Final Round Table

This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.

IRC Reader

The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.

Proposing a Session

To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:

The name of the session: It should be created as a hashtag, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.
A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.
If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.
If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.
Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.
CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.

We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the researchers@cis-india.org mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to raw@cis-india.org.

All session proposals must be submitted by Sunday, November 22 (extended), 2015, via email sent to raw@cis-india.org.

Selection of Sessions

All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by November 30. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before December 15. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on December 31, 2015.

Venue, Accommodation, and Travel

The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on February 25-27, 2016. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by December 31, 2015.

The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.

Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by December 31, 2015.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call

Practice

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:13:26Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/practice

Learning

sumandro — 2015-10-05T14:55:54Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/learning

Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015

sumandro — 2015-10-05T15:00:16Z

We are very excited to be contribute to a join submission with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." Please go to the submission page and support our project. The text of the proposal is available below. It was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and I. The 'Where's My Data' banner is created by Nisha using icons from the Noun Project.

Please support our project by visiting and 'applauding' it on the Knight News Challenge website: https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data. You will have to log in to the website though, apologies for that.

Where's My Data? Search, Demand, and Collect Data

In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.

An application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises.

Full Description

The proposed application aims to solve two key problems in accessing reliable data faced by citizens, journalists, and researchers. The first problem is knowing where a required data set can be found, and the second problem is collecting the required data set if it does not exist in the first place.

Many individual initiatives have been developed to collect specific data. For example, Powercuts (http://powercuts.in/) was a Ushahidi installation to crowd-source data using Twitter, Kiirti (http://www.kiirti.org/) was used to map complaints about auto drivers, IChangeMyCity (http://www.ichangemycity.com/) is a platform that collects general complaints from around Bangalore. However, these apps were either short lived because they could not sustain their one premise or they do not give insight into what people want to know and what data is important to them. Also, they often did not open up this data to be used by others, beyond visualisations offered on the sites.

Citizens have many questions regarding their urban surroundings - how much water is coming to the neighbourhood daily, where are the waste pick up trucks, what is the status of a road repairing process, etc, the answers require data that either is difficult to get or doesn't answer their query in the way they want. Journalists and researchers are also interested in collecting and analysing these same data sets. A one off platform for one issue won't properly represent the demand for information in modern day (data starved) India.

For example, a local residents’ group wanted to impress on their elected rep the seriousness of the incidence of a disease, as the local government was not taking concrete steps to manage the emerging epidemic. In the absence of official data on suspected cases of illness, this application could help them to reach out through e-mails and social media networks to do a quick survey on how many residents or their family members have got affected.

The application will not only make it easier to undertake such crowd-sourcing efforts, but also to share the data back and make it open for usage by others, including journalists and researchers.

We are already building an Urban Open Data Platform for Bengaluru, India. The application will allow searching this portal and any other such portal, especially if any is developed by the municipality. It will also pipe the crowd-sourced data to this Urban Open Data Platform.

This tool will reduce duplication of data gathering, gives data a longer shelf life and acts as a source of public data that feeds into a city-wide urban Open Data Portal under development by a consortium that we are part of.

How will the Application Work?

The application will allow the user to search for data across the data catalogues connected to the application.
If the data is not found, the user can post details about the required data, which other users in her/his networks can see and comment on. They can either point the person towards an existing data set, or support the need to collect the data being demanded.
When the user finds out that the data set s/he needs does not exist, the application will allow her/him to start a crowd-sourcing exercise, using various channels such as e-mails, social media posts, web-based questionnaires, etc.
For each of these channels, a separate plug-in will be developed so as to open up the software development process. For this project, we will focus on developing plug-ins for two channels: 1) questionnaires integrated with the Citizen Matters website, and 2) use tweets to collect replies using a unique hashtag.
User can share the crowd-sourcing request within her/his own social networks, or use one of the groups (say, the Citizen Matters group focusing on local journalism, or the DataMeet group focusing on open data enthusiasts in the city) to share their calls for data collection.

Briefly Describe the Need that You're Trying to Address

A common cry in Indian cities is the lack of datasets required to understand issues, either at local or at national scales. This tool will be the place to voice demands, ask others about potential sources, or an easy way to create data sourcing activities.This will enable journalists, advocacy organisations, and researchers to search for data and help others to find the data they are looking for. It also records demands for non-existing data and helps take initiatives to collect such data.

What Progress have You Made so Far?

The team is already working on an Urban Open Data Platform, that will host public data, and a data catalog. We have already executed a few crowd-sourcing projects, and helped develop tools for journalists and researchers interested in civic issues.A data source search tool has been in development in the form of Open Data JSON <https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json>. A Bangalore focused data catalog has been in use for awhile as well and provides a base of data to use for people’s search <http://openbangalore.org>.

What would be a Successful Outcome for Your Project?

Success for this project means having a better understanding of what information is needed most by people and what data is required. We will gain detailed evidence regarding what kind of data people want. This entails a collection of questions, who is asking and from where, and what data gaps exist. The number of crowdsourcing projects initiated shows the intensity of the need, and how comfortable citizens are asking for data and proactively starting a data collection project.

Please List your Team Members and their Relevant Experience/Skills

Meera K, Oorvani Foundation, a media group who will provide editorial support to curate data, dissemination of data or queries, and audience reach. Nisha Thompson and Thejesh GN, from DataMeet, open data community, who will provide the technology and community aspects of the tool. Sumandro Chattapadhyay of the Centre for Internet and Society, will help planning the project and linking the effort with other Indian and global initiatives in open data and development.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015

KNC 2015 - Open Bangalore

sumandro — 2015-10-01T06:30:56Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_OpenBangalore.png

KNC 2015 - Citizen Matters

sumandro — 2015-10-01T06:20:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_CitizenMatters.jpg