Centre for Internet and Society

Information is Beautiful hacks in India with David Cameron

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:22:51Z

The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them.

This week, I was lucky enough to accompany UK Prime Minister's delegation to India.

I was part of a small contingent of politically active programmers and civic-minded dataheads out to explore links between tech, transparency and community-based democracy in India. The raw stuff of David Cameron's 'Big Society' initiative.

(To the businessmen, journos and politicos in the delegation, we were known simply as "The Hackers" - an image we played up by sometimes rebelliously removing our ties)

The key event of the trip was a hackday hosted by Google India in the southern central city of Bangalore.

I have to confess a slight colonial attitude going into the meet. Thinking of the UK as a great hacking nation and leading data port, I was expecting to be helping the collected Indian IT professionals and activists improve their skills and give them fresh ideas on how to bootstrap their democracy.

However, our Indian counterparts very quickly astonished us with brilliant and powerful data projects and grass roots hacks using simple tools and technologies to solve everyday civic issues. Some of which I wanted to exhibit here.

Bus Map Hack

Information designer Arun Ganesh was frustrated by the bus maps in his native Chennai.

Chennai's bus map goes from this…

The official map was incomplete and incomprehensible - and had been 'under construction' for six years.

Passionate about maps and geo-mapping, Arun took it upon himself to design a new map to help the enormous number of people (Chennai has a population of over 4 million) who used the buses every day. Unfortunately, he faced a major challenge: over 5,000 separate buses & bus routes.

… to this

So he turned to crowd-sourcing on the web to gather data on all the routes. Local travellers poured timetables and bus details into his app. And in just 3 days he had compiled enough data to create a fresh map with a clean comprehensible design. And an accompanying interactive app BusRoutes.in for painless route planning.

Then he went further. Using the data - and a fair walking distance of 500 metres - he visualised the areas covered by all the bus routes. The resulting heatmap instantly and cleverly reveals which areas of the city are poorly served by the bus network.

Karnataka Learning Partnership

Education is a big issue in India, where close to 35% of the population are illiterate. The Karnataka Learning Partnership works to improve government schools in Karnataka region by running literacy, maths and library-use programs across the southern Indian state.

Karnataka schools monitored

Mashing Googlemaps and their detailed data through a web interface, the Akshara Foundation provides a dynamic monitoring and look up service for the quality of schools in each area. It's not unlike the recently launched SchooloScope here in the UK.

(Please note: the site is in beta and not live yet. You can see their work at blog.klp.org.in.)

National Election Watch

Using information liberated by the 2006 Right to Information Act in India, Nationalelectionwatch.org tracks the backgrounds of every single politician in India. An incredible feat given the enormity and intricacies of Indian democracy.

Over 1200 NGOs work to collect data from affidavits filed by the candidates on their financial, criminal and educational background. The myneta.info website acts as an instant power check on a system unfortunately tainted by widespread corruption and bribery.

The crime-o-meter

Pages on particularly criminal MPs feature a 'crime dial' visualisation to get the message across.

Missed Calls

Despite a thriving tech-sector, India still has relatively low internet uptake. Just 0.05% of the 1.2 billion population are active internet users. Compared to around 40% in the UK and 29% in China.

But nearly half the population own mobile phones. So SMS and missed calls have become a dominant form of free information exchange, especially when ingeniously hacked together.

In a typical hacked service, information providers set up phone numbers. Information seekers phone the number and then immediately hang up, registering a 'missed call'. The information provider then sends them an SMS with the info they might be seeking. Carpenter jobs or internet cafes in the locality, for example.

Ironically, lax privacy protection - by our standards - in the country actually improves this service. While banned here, triangulation of mobile signals to determine the location of a call is freely permitted in India. So services are able to text back localised information. All for free.

Hacktastic!

Thanks to Harry Metcalfe at TellThemWhatYouThink.Org, Tim Green from DemocracyClub.org.uk, Edmund von der Burg at YourNextMp.com, and Pranesh Prakash at the Centre for Internet and Society for their help and input.

Read the original in the Guardian

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

July 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T09:41:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on our events and other updates for the month of July 2010.

News Updates

Call for Case Studies on ICT
CIS invites organisations to participate in a study focusing on best practices in the use of ICTs in education for persons with disabilities.
http://bit.ly/d03jS0

Networking? Not working
Concerns about privacy, wastage of time and trivialized communication are some reasons ‘refuseniks’ are going off sites such as Facebook and MySpace, writes Shreya Ray in Livemint.
http://bit.ly/dpdKhX

Digital them about yourself?
If you’re on Facebook or have a blog, you could be a digital native, says Akhila Seetharaman.
http://bit.ly/ahA6Ts

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig
Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.
http://bit.ly/cLN8XE

CIS featured in the Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India
Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.
http://bit.ly/9GJsJ7

UID Act may be released for debate, may be introduced in monsoon session
An article by Karen Leigh & Surabhi Agarwal in livemint on June 30, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9Hq5dg

A New Age in News
Citizen journalism and online piracy were key topics during the opening day of the Mekong Information and Communication Technology conference. The 2010 Mekong ICT conference in Chang Mai, Thailand, has brought together an experienced crowd of experts from all over the globe. They have gathered to discuss the status, trends and the current situation of the ICT world.
http://bit.ly/bdGzbQ

Activists welcome privacy Bill, but point out concerns
Experts have welcomed the government's move to bring in a law for protecting individual privacy, amid concerns about the potential misuse of personal data it is collecting to execute social welfare and security schemes.
http://bit.ly/bnddaJ

Upcoming Events

Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex: A Lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin
The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), IT for Change and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are hosting a lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies, Miami University, Ohio, USA at CIS, Bangalore on 23 July, 2010.
http://bit.ly/9zy2Fa

Promoting Education through ICT
ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations to begin soon!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK

Research

The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction
This post examines attention economy as a brief prelude to a paper and monograph to be published on it. It examines the current theses on attention economy and a few approaches to reading attention economy in gaming besides foregrounding the attention economy and its functions and influence in MMORPGs.
http://bit.ly/OP7QFl

The Making of an Asian City
Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.
http://bit.ly/MXxyXP

Internet, Society and Space in Indian City: First Report
This is the first report on the progress of the research on Internet, Society and Space in Indian City. The post is a collection of some of the initial focus of these studies. I have started simultaneously exploring and testing various arguments and have listed some key observations from the ones that are nearing completion.
http://bit.ly/Ndmday

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!
The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.
http://bit.ly/P4mCKv

Accessibility

NMEICT Funds Book Conversion Project for the Print Disabled
IIT, Kharagpur, Daisy Forum of India, Inclusive Planet and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands to undertake a project for the print disabled. The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) is funding this project.
http://bit.ly/bWHi00

Right to Read: Campaign Updates
A nationwide campaign on Right to Read was co-organised by CIS along with the Daisy Forum of India and Inclusive planet to highlight the lack of content in accessible formats and accelerate change in the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, which presently does not permit the conversion of books in accessible formats for the benefits the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The campaign is affiliated with the global R2R campaign started by the World Blind Union in April 2008.
http://bit.ly/akoaSj

Intellectual Property

Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010
CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.
http://bit.ly/KLBQDx

A Guide to Key IPR Provisions of the Proposed India-European Union Free Trade Agreement
The Centre for Internet and Society presents a guide for policymakers and other stakeholders to the latest draft of the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which likely will be concluded by the end of the year and may hold serious ramifications for Indian businesses and consumers.
http://bit.ly/Rw7whN

Openness

Open Access to International Agricultural Research
Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.
http://bit.ly/cspMYY

Telecom

Catching up on broadband
The govt can invest some of the Rs 1,00,000 crore from the spectrum auctions to help India catch up on broadband, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest article published in the Business Standard on July 1, 2010.
http://bit.ly/ag67TU

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2010-bulletin

Privacy and the Indian Copyright Act, 1857 as Amended in 2010

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T03:25:02Z

In this post the author examines the issue of privacy in light of the Indian Copyright Act, 1857 as amended by the Copyright Amendment Bill in 2010. Four key questions are examined in detail and the author gives suitable recommendations for each of the questions that arise.

India's Copyright Act was established in 1857 and was most recently amended in 2010. Although India at present is not a member of WIPO, the provisions in the proposed Bill will work to make the Act WIPO compliant. When looking at privacy in the context of copyright, four key questions arise:

How do DRM technologies undermine privacy and what safeguards are present in the Indian Law to protect citizens’ right to privacy?

Technologies such as digital rights management technologies were developed to be used by hardware manufacturers, publishers, copyright holders and individuals to impose limitations on the usage of digital content and devices. DRM technologies pose as a privacy threat, because in their ability to monitor what is happening to a copyrighted work, they are also able to collect personal information and send it back to a host without knowledge of the user. The host is then able to use that data for marketing or commercial purposes. In the Copyright Act, 1957 there are no current provisions against DRM circumvention. In the proposed Copyright Bill 2010 there are two proposed provisions to prevent anti circumvention of DMR technologies, and one provision that clarifies what is a DMR technology.

Proposed Legislation

Section 2 (xa): Defines Rights Management information.
Section 65A : Protection of Technological Measures - Any person who knowingly makes or has in his possession any plate for the purpose of making infringing copies of any work in which copyright subsists shall be punishable with imprisonment which may extend to two years. The section includes that any person facilitating circumvention by another person of a technological measure, shall maintain a complete record of such other persons including his name, address and all relevant particulars necessary to identify him.
Section 65B: Protection of Rights Management Information – Any person who removes or distributes, copies or broadcasts any rights management information without authority shall be by punishable with imprisonment.

Recommendation

We find that in this provision the privacy of an individual is brought into question, because there are no safeguards against the commercialization of information, and no formal process of redress if an individual discovers that his information is being used without his consent/prior knowledge. We would recommend that it be clearly articulated in the provision that the collection and commercialization of information and personal data is prohibited by DRM technologies and host companies, and a method of redress be put in place.

Under the present copyright does a person have the ability to expose privacy infringement?

Because DRM technologies often employ the use of spy-ware, it is important that an individual has the ability to know if spy-ware is being used on their computer systems. Currently reverse engineering is permitted under provision 52 (ac). The amended version of provision 52 is less clear on if reverse engineering would be allowed.

Current Legislation

Provision 52 (ac): Certain acts not to be in infringement of copyright include the observation, study or test of functioning of the computer programs in order to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any elements of the program while performing such acts necessary for the functions for which the computer program was supplied. The following acts shall not constitute in infringement of copyright, namely:

Proposed

The proposed amendment reads:

52 (1) The following acts shall not constitute an infringement of copyrights, namely:

(i) (a) a fair dealing with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work not being a computer program for the purposes of:

(ii) private use, including research

(iii) Criticism or review, whether of that work or of any other work.

The exclusion of computer program in the proposed bill makes it unclear under what circumstances reverse engineering would be allowed.

Recommendation

We would recommend that for clarity purposes a specific clause be added to the act that details under what circumstances a person is allowed to reverse engineer a product for protection of their own privacy.

How does the proposed exception for the disabled undermine privacy?

In India under the current Copyright Act, 1957 there are no provisions for the benefit of disabled persons, thus currently permission from copyright holders needs to be exclusively sought every time the visually challenged person requires access. Under the Constitution of India and the Berne Convention, India has committed to enshrining the rights of the disabled.

Proposed Legislation

The proposed amendment of the Act will grant compulsory license in respect of publication of any copyrighted works not covered by the exception under section 52 (1) (zb).

The Bill also proposes a board that would establish the credentials of the applicant and satisfy itself that the application has been made in good faith. This compromises the anonymity that most individuals enjoy when a disabled person tries to access a digital library.

Recommendation

We recommend that the proposed Bill limits the authentication process a disabled person must go through when accessing digital libraries, etc, and the extent to which records are to be kept of transaction This will serve to protect the anonymity and privacy of disabled persons.

What is On the horizon?

As copyright and IP is a constantly evolving issue, countries are consistently amending and changing their laws. With the flow of peoples across borders increasing, Indians will be affected by different international policies that could pose to infringe upon their privacy, for example, cross border checks or three strike regimes.

Examples of Proposed Legislation: The Anti- Counterfeiting Trade Agreement

ACTA is a proposed legislation with the objective to combat counterfeiting and piracy. Partners in the negotiations include the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Switzerland. The treaty will oblige each Contracting Party to adopt, in accordance with its legal system, the measures necessary to ensure the application of the treaty. Though ACTA has not been enacted, many worry that ACTA would facilitate privacy violations by trademark and copyright holders against private citizens suspected of infringement activities without any sort of legal due process. The Act would allow for random searches of laptops, MP3 players, and cellular phones for illegally downloaded or ripped music and movies.

Recommendation

We find that copyright infringement does not appear to justify a three strike regime or cross border searches. ACTA and other international treaties raise the question that if India became compliant with certain international standards, the standards would be too stringent without safeguards, and pose as a risk to a person’s privacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/copyright-privacy

Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:50Z

Leading up to the 2010 IGF, The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Global Partners, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), IT for Change, and the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles are hosting, on 13 September 2010 in Vilnius, an event on 'Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment'.

Internet governance has significant impact on human rights. This is reflected by the inclusion of human rights considerations in the Geneva Declaration of Principles and the Tunis Agenda, which gave the IGF its mandate. However, human rights discussions have not featured prominently at the IGF. What discussions there have been tended to focus on civil and political rights without also sufficiently considering how the internet relates to cultural, social and economic rights. The indivisibility of rights has not received the attention it requires.

The Internet governance and human rights communities work in different spaces and rarely have the opportunity to interact. The presence of the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression, Frank la Rue at the 2009 IGF and again at the 2010 IGF shows that this is beginning to change. The 2010 IGF presents a valuable opportunity to place human rights more firmly on the Internet governance map and to identify opportunities for collaboration with mainstream human rights communities.

With an increasing emphasis on the development agenda in the IGF it is also a good opportunity to look at the links between human rights, development and the Internet.

Join the conversation with human rights, Internet governance and development activists as we review pressing IG issues such as access, diversity, equality, freedom, openness and development with a view to strengthening the human rights agenda at the IGF.

More concretely, we hope to:

continue building effective collaborations promoting human rights in Internet governance, and,
identify appropriate spaces for intervention in the 2010 IGF.

Agenda:

Moderator: Chad Lubelsky. Global Networking, Policy & Advocacy Coordinator,

Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

14:00 Introduction: Background and rationale of the session, aims and objectives. Anriette Esterhuysen (APC)

Keynote speaker : Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression.

Keynote speaker: Arvind Ganesan, Director or Business and Human Rights Program, Human Rights Watch.

14:45 Questions

15:00 Open discussion session on 'Human rights and internet policy: the interconnectedness of economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights'. Moderated by Lisa Horner (Global Partners) and Anja Kovacs (the Centre for Internet and Society).

15:40 Coffee/tea break

16:00 Breakout group discussions

16:40 Report Backs

17:00 Plenary discussion on the way forward (Anriette Esterhuysen, APC and Parminder Jeet Singh, IT for Change)

17:20 Closing remarks

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/internet-governance-human-rights

Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps Towards an Open and Inclusive Internet?

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:34Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps Towards an Open and Inclusive Internet? at the Internet Governance Forum on

Although cyber-utopian visions have long been discredited, the promise that the Internet contains as a tool to work towards democratisation and greater social justice has not yet lost its attraction. This workshop will consider what kind of Internet architecture is needed, what kind of 'openness' and Internet 'freedom' is required to ensure that such visions can actually translate into reality. While the importance of freedom of expression has been fairly widely acknowledged, a concerted approach to many more Internet governance issue is urgently required if those who are at the forefront of struggles for social justice online are to continue to do their important work. The interplay between access to knowledge (including access to information and access to culture) on the one hand and human rights on the other, too, for example, requires our urgent attention.

The aim of this workshop will be, then, to come to a more in-depth and more rounded understanding of what issues impact the democratising potential of the Internet and how exactly they do so, so that we can also start communicating about these with greater clarity. To reach this aim, the workshop will bring together activists, researchers and other stakeholders with expertise on different regions of the world and, consequently, at times diverging opinions on what the problems and solutions with regard to Internet governance are, and will bring them in debate with each other.

The workshop will be organized in a roundtable format in order to increase the involvement of the participants. Initial remarks of the speakers will be followed by debate, and active moderation will ensure that the discussions are dynamic. The issues raised by the speakers will be grouped under several axes, including: (i) Civic empowerment online: towards a new public sphere?; (ii) governmental and private control over information and personal data; (iii) Cases of tension between copyright protection and access to knowledge online. Cases such as the adoption of laws following the three strikes model and the adoption of open data regulations will be taken into consideration.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:
Civil Society:
Robert Guerra – Freedom House, US
Anja Kovacs – Centre for Internet and Society, India
Kevin Bankston – EFF, US

Academics:
Marília Maciel - Center for Technology and Society - Brazil
Jeremy Malcolm - Consumers International, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Government:
Johan Hallenborg – Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden
José Murilo Junior – Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Brazil

Business sector:
Alan Davidson – Director of Public Policy and Government Affairs for the Americas
Cornelia Kutterer, Microsoft, Belgium

Multistakeholder initiative:
Susan Morgan, Global Network Initiative

Remote moderator:
Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

(A moderator is still to be determined but will be chosen from among the civil society and academic speakers. All speakers have confirmed their participation)

Biographies:
There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Carlos Affonso Pereira de Souza - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation – civil society
Johan Hallenborg, Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs - government
Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society - civil society
Jeremy Malcolm. Consumers International - civil society
Marília Maciel - Center for Technology and Society, Getulio Vargas Foundation – civil society

Organization:Centre for Internet and Society, India, and Center for Technology and Society of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

Contact Persons: Anja Kovacs and Marília Maciel

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/freedom-of-expression

Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:22Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems at the Internet Governance Forum on 14 September, 2010.

Content regulation remains remains a critical area where competing rights and interests are played out. Within this, sexuality and sexual rights lie at the centre of the debate. Protection from the "harm" of pornography and other sexually related content are often the principal reason forwarded for regulating content. At the same time, the internet is a critical space for the exercise and realisation of sexual rights, especially by people who have less access to power and resources, such as migrants, sex workers, differently abled communities, young women etc. In recent years, internet content regulation has increasingly become more of a norm than an exception. Despite the slippery definitions of 'obscene', 'illegal' and 'harmful' content, governments, the private sector and civil society are shaping and implementing regulatory mechanisms, sometimes in partnership with each other.

To what extent has it worked to protect the rights of all users, particularly those that such regulations assert their protection over, such as internet users, young people and women? What can be some of the indicators to monitor and measure to what extent the internet is 'open', especially in relation to sexual rights? What happens when regulation works to instead compromise or infringe on users' sexual rights, including the right to access information, communicate, share knowledge, build communities, exercise control over their personal data, embodiment and spaces? What are some of the mechanisms of redress - both formal and informal - within existing regulatory systems, and how far are they able to respond to these issues? What is needed to ensure that transparency, accountability and a rights-based framework - principles that last year's IGF workshop participants agreed were key - are built into them?

Drawing from current research initiatives in this area, this workshop aims to facilitate an open dialogue and exchange of ideas, knowledge and best practices to respond to some of the questions above. Research papers will also be commissioned to investigate some of the key questions raised above to initiate debate and discussion prior to IGF, which will be shared at the workshop.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:
http://www.intgovforum.org/Athens_workshops/Content_Regulation.pdf (2006);
http://intgovforum.org/Rio_event_report.php?mem=19 (2007);
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?
chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=93 (2

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:

Nadine Moawad, Founder, Take Back The Tech Arabia; Project Leader, EROTICS - Lebanon
Dorothy Atwood, Vice President - Public Policy, and the Chief Privacy Officer of the telecommunications company AT&T, USA
Joy Liddicoat, human rights lawyer and Commissioner with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.
Clarissa Smith, Member of the Onscenity Research Network; Programme Leader, MA Media and Cultural Studies and MA Film & Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK.

Biographies:
There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme
Co-organisers:
Centre for Internet and Society
Alternative Law Forum

Organization:Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme

Contact Person: Jac sm Kee

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/sexual-rights-openness-regulatory-systems

Data in the Cloud: Where Do Open Standards Fit In?

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:59:02Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Data in the Cloud: Where do Open Standards Fit In? on 16 September, 2010 at the Internet Governance Forum.

Two of the major concerns of recent times have been opening up of government data online and ensuring control over personal data. Interoperability play an important role in both.

When it comes to government data it is necessary to ensure that the data are in formats that citizens can make use of that data. Similarly, when it comes to personal data online, it is important to ensure that such data can be migrated from one service provider to another. While the former will aid in governance, the latter is necessary to ensure fair competition.

These two issues are proposed to be looked at in this best practices forum.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Emerging Issues / Cloud Computing

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:

http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:
1. Daniel Dardellier (World Wide Web Consortium)
2. Jeremy Malcolm (Consumers International)
3. Karsten Gerloff (Free Software Foundation of Europe)
4. Vinton Cerf (Father of the Internet)
5. Viviana Munoz (South Centre)

Biographies:

Rodríguez Katitza (Ms.)

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:

Centre for Internet and Society (Civil Society Organization)
Organization:Centre for Internet and Society
Contact Person: Pranesh Prakash

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/data-in-cloud

Open Standards: Ensuring Accessibility and Inclusiveness

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:58:25Z

The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Open Standards at the Internet Governance Forum on 16 September, 2010.

The Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards and the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disabilities have a shared interest on ensuring accessibility of information for all.

Persons with disabilities often find that the audio captioning system for a particular video format does not work with others video formats (requiring re-captioning). Or that the proprietary font standard used by their government cannot be read by their screen-reader.

The principle of inclusion also requires us to ensure that persons who choose non-dominant operating systems and software are not artificially kept out of enjoying the benefits of the World Wide Web.

While it is recognized that open standards are not a sufficient guarantor of accessibility, both DCOS and DCAD believe open standards are a prerequisite. A World Wide Web based on proprietary formats would not be able to deliver an accessible experience to those with disabilities.

This workshop seeks to look at the interface between open standards and accessibility for persons with disabilities and how such standards are important for safeguarding their rights. It would also seek to find ways to promote open standards from this perspective.

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?
Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? Yes
If so, please provide the link to the report:

http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:
People who are planned to be invited are:

Catherine Trautmann (MEP)
Eddan Katz (Electronic Frotier Foundation)
Nasser Kettani (Microsoft)
Shadi Abou-Zara (World Wide Web Consortium)
Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet)
Wilfried Grommen (Microsoft)

Biographies:
There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Centre for Internet and Society (Civil Society) / World Wide Web Consortium (Technical Body)

Organization:Centre for Internet and Society
Contact Person: Pranesh Prakash

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

RIM Offered Security Fixes

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:24:12Z

In India Talks, BlackBerry Maker Said It Could Share Metadata, Notes Show

Research In Motion Ltd. has offered information and tools to help India conduct surveillance of wireless email and messaging services on RIM's popular BlackBerry, say people familiar with the negotiations, illuminating RIM's dealings as it seeks to balance sovereign security concerns with its customers' privacy.

In a series of discussions that intensified this summer, RIM offered to provide crucial information that would help the Indian government track down messages sent via the company's popular and encrypted corporate email service, according to those familiar with the confidential talks and to minutes of meetings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

In a July 26 meeting, RIM representatives told Indian officials "they have a setup to help the security agencies in tracking the messages in which security agencies are interested," according to an Indian government summary of the meeting.

The Waterloo, Ontario, company has become an industry leader in part on the strength of a secure technology that offers information privacy to customers. But as RIM seeks to expand, it is grappling with how its promise of user confidentiality is encountering resistance from governments around the globe.

RIM's challenge, along with Google Inc.'s face-off with China over censorship issues, illustrates the growing tensions between Western technology giants, who seek to woo millions of emerging-market consumers with increasingly sophisticated technology, and governments that are trying to maintain security in the face of it.

The stakes are high in India, the world's No. 2 wireless market, behind China, with 635 million subscribers. Emerging economies are vital to RIM as its smartphones face competition in North America from Apple Inc.'s iPhone and devices that run on Google's Android software. RIM's new international subscribers for the first time outnumbered new North American subscribers in the quarter that ended Feb. 27, according to brokerage GMP Securities.

Discussions between RIM and India took a public turn Thursday when India's government threatened to block some BlackBerry services from the country's telecommunications networks unless the services could be opened to surveillance by Aug. 31. On Friday, an Indian government official said RIM had assured India it would meet the deadline.

A spokesman for RIM in India declined to comment on negotiations with India. Sachin Pilot, India's Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology said Friday there are promising signs that the company is willing to cooperate, but there's no deal "until I have something in writing."

RIM has come under scrutiny in recent months amid contentious negotiations with countries including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which have also sought to monitor BlackBerry services for threats to national security.

A person familiar with the negotiations in the U.A.E. said officials in the region believed RIM had been holding back from them technological solutions that had been offered to Western governments, specifically in regards to BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM declines to discuss its negotiations with governments and didn't comment on negotiations in India and other countries.

In a statement issued Thursday, RIM outlined its guidelines for how far it is willing to go in helping carriers meet surveillance needs. RIM said it will only help carriers meet strict national-security rules, won't provide more access than its competitors already do and won't alter the security architecture of its corporate email servers in response to government needs.

"RIM maintains a consistent global standard for lawful access requirements that does not include special deals for specific countries," the statement said.

Governments are pressuring RIM to comply with their demands for information in part because unlike other smartphone vendors, it operates its own network of servers, the biggest of which is in Canada, outside their monitoring reach and jurisdiction.

That contrasts with devices such as the iPhone, which don't operate their own email services. Governments generally have laws that allow them to monitor traffic on mobile and computer networks operating within their own countries.

Talks between RIM and various countries have centered mostly on data routed through the company's system for corporate emails, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and its instant-messaging service, BlackBerry Messenger, whose high levels of encryption can prevent government monitors from deciphering content or determining sender or recipient. RIM has said that even it can't decrypt BlackBerry corporate emails.

India's security services argue they need access to selected emails to ward off criminal and terrorist threats. "In terms of our issues of national security, any responsible government would not want to compromise," said Mr. Pilot, the communications minister. "I don't think what we are asking is out of the ordinary vis-à-vis other countries."

Security and technology experts say each country has different surveillance needs, technology infrastructures and laws governing how security forces and police can access data. It is generally Internet service providers and telecommunications carriers that must implement the country's monitoring regime, and the kinds of help RIM gives carriers in doing that varies with each nation, says a person familiar with RIM's operations.

According to minutes taken by the Indian side, the parties discussed whether RIM could provide "metadata" from encrypted corporate emails—information such as the email's sender and recipient and the time sent. "After some persuasion, the [RIM] representative agreed that they can provide the metadata of the message," according to an Indian summary of one discussion.

Cyber-security experts say such metadata would give government intelligence services important leads to locate BlackBerry traffic on corporate email servers, where messages are in decrypted form. It wasn't clear under what circumstances RIM would agree to divulge such information.

In the meetings, RIM also promised to develop tools to help Indian authorities tap into third-party Internet chat services, such as Google's Gmail, that run on its handsets, according to the meeting minutes. It isn't clear whether or how RIM has proposed to help security officials decode BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM also appears to have put itself in a role of educating Indian officials over the operation of its network and on network security in general, suggesting to officials that emails that aren't subject to heavy corporate encryption can be viewed with assistance from local carriers.

Governments that have been reviewing their data-access arrangements with RIM have been sharing information with each other, said an official in the region with knowledge of the Indian negotiations.

The U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East's largest economies, upped their ante with RIM weeks before India did. Both countries have been negotiating with RIM for the same kinds of access to data that India wants, but people familiar with talks in the Gulf countries say they have been acrimonious.

Government officials say RIM has taken a condescending attitude to developing countries' security demands, and say they believe the company was holding out on solutions to access information, such as on BlackBerry Messenger, that had been offered to other countries.

"They refuse to listen to us," said a person familiar with the negotiations. "It's like we aren't speaking the same language."

Anger boiled over last month with the U.A.E. announcing a ban on BlackBerry email, Internet and instant-messaging services from Oct. 11, citing a lack of progress in more than three years of negotiations. Saudi Arabia followed with a threatened ban on BlackBerry Messenger.

Tensions were fueled when RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis said in an interview earlier this month with The Wall Street Journal that many of the nations the company deals with aren't tech-savvy and don't understand the Internet. "We work with these countries to educate them," he said.

Negotiations between the U.A.E. and RIM are ongoing. The government says it remains optimistic of a solution. In Saudi Arabia, telecommunications regulators announced earlier this week that RIM had offered them a technical fix that would let them access data from BlackBerry Messenger.

In RIM's home country of Canada, the U.S. and other countries, police and security agents typically must get a court order to gain access to things like the content of emails.

India's regulations in this area are murky. An 1885 law that has been updated over the years allows the government to intercept Internet traffic "on the occurrence of any public emergency." A 2008 law gives bureaucrats in various agencies the authority to order monitoring of any entity's Web traffic, though the matter can be challenged in court.

It remains unclear whether RIM's promise to provide metadata to corporate messages will be enough to satisfy India's concerns. A more drastic solution, says Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society, would be for the government to require RIM to build a BlackBerry data center within India—something that could cost tens of millions of dollars, people familiar with the matter say—and then classify the company as an Indian Internet service provider.

Such a move would put India on stronger legal footing, analysts say, to demand data from RIM as well as companies whose employees use BlackBerrys. Under such a scenario, "the government would be allowed to get a room inside RIM and install whatever machines they want to monitor that traffic," Mr. Abraham said.

It wasn't clear from the government documents summarizing the meetings between RIM and the government whether such an option is being considered. The company would vehemently oppose such a classification, people familiar with the situation say. In the U.A.E, RIM has balked at the government's request that it set up a local data center, people familiar with those negotiations said.

Read the original in Wall Street Journal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/rim-offered-security-fixes

New Project to Assess Potential of Creating Open Government Data Initiatives in Chile, Ghana and Turkey

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:44:59Z

Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation (founded in 2009 by Tim Berners-Lee) has made an announcement on moving forward with a project to assess the potential of creating open government data initiatives in Chile, Ghana, and Turkey - the first step of what we hope to be a global initiative focusing on low- and middle-income countries.

Within less than a year, the United Kingdom and United States have put hundreds of thousands of rich datasets on the Web in machine readable formats. Thousands of applications have been built — the vast majority without taxpayers’ money — by civic hackers to analyze, mash-up, and map these data. Potential benefits of an Open Government Data (OGD) practice include new services, new insights, increased citizen participation, new businesses and better governance. Though other countries, provinces and cities are exploring OGD, there has been little activity in low and middle income countries (see map at left). Given the potential benefits and reasonable costs, it is importance to assess how relevant an OGD initiative might be in these countries as well.

The World Wide Web Foundation, with the our partner Fundacion (CTIC), is taking the first steps in this direction. We are starting a new project to conduct an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program in three diverse countries — Chile, Ghana and Turkey. The bottom line questions are: Is the country ready to engage in an OGD initiative? If so, what support might they need? If not, why not, and what lesson can we take away from this assessment?

The project originated in response to a call for proposals from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative: a donor collaborative that includes the Ford Foundation, Hivos, the International Budget Partnership, the Omidyar Network , the Open Society Institute, the Revenue Watch Institute, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The funding for this project originates from the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Institute. The project runs in parallel to a similar feasibility study focusing on India, also support by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and run by the Centre for Internet and Society.

Our work is starting with the development a new methodology for assessing OGD readiness, based on our experience and an excellent paper commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge from earlier this year. We will then conduct research through visits to each country, Web studies, and phone and email interviews to complete the assessment by the end of October. As Tim Berners-Lee said in his interview with Becky, “It has to start at the top, it has to start in the middle and it has to start at the bottom.” In other words, we must talk with people from the highest levels of government, the public administration officials who collect and care for data, and the people who will leverage the data to create new applications. And we will do so during this study. The results should be available before the end of this year.

The Web Foundation is committed to supporting efforts around OGD in individual countries, and as a emerging movement around the world. This is evidenced by the work of Web Foundation Directors Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in the UK and US, the W3C Brazil Office in their country, and W3C’s eGovernment Interest Group, as well as work to built capacity in the Caribbean. If you want to learn more, please contact me or Stephane Boyera.

Read the original news at World Wide Web Foundation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/creating-open-government-data

Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?

praskrishna — 2011-08-23T03:13:24Z

The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.

Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with:

Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy?

He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:

"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."

Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution

It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication.

There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.

Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.

The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.

Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?

Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.

Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:

“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”

The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.

From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.

"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."

Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)

ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …

Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008

For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.

The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.

The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.

Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.

Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.

In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.

Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.

It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.

Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP

Country	Percentage
Japan	3.67%
Sweden	3.60%
Finland	3.48%
USA	2.70%
EU average	2.16%
China	1.40%
India	1.00%

In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity.

India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.

	India	China
MathSciNet, 2006	1,949	11,762
Engineering Village, 2006	25,954	199,881
SciFinder, 2007	41,697	235,309
Web of Science, 2007	35,450	98,241

Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.

But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.

Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly.

Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.

India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.

The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.

There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias.

India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.

India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.

But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting open source drug discovery and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.

Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.

India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.

Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow.

The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.

The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.

Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research.

A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.

The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”

Is anyone listening?

Universities	Scopus	Scholar	% Sco vs Sch
Univ College London	134,950	8,660	6.4
Univ of Cambridge	114,339	8,320	7.3
Univ of Oxford	99,723	7,800	7.8
Imperial College	91,537	4,720	5.2
Univ of Manchester	83,024	3,840	4.6
King's College London	60,407	1,100	1.8
Univ of Edinburgh	57,473	9,920	17.3
Univ of Southampton	44,013	14,000	31.8
Univ of Warwick	23,018	6,010	26.1
Univ of York	21,554	2,920	13.6
Loughborough Univ	18,902	4,030	21.3

This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.

UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.

The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.

Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet.

If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers.

The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA.

The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.

In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.

The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.

In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference.

If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks.

The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.

Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.

What is there already?

World-class Open Course Ware.
About 200 OA journals.
Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way.
A small group is promoting OJS.
There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.
National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.
There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,
Library and information science, Catalysis.
Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.
Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.
The Catalysis repository is not listed.
There are some efforts to digitize theses.
Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.
An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source.

But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches.

On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.

Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both.

Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.

International collaboration and ways forward

A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access.

The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.

India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.

eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!

We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.

OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship

Govt and BlackBerry firm wait for the other to hang up

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:46:54Z

Sunil Abraham speaks to Archna Shukla on the stand-off between the Government of India and RIM. The news was published in expressindia.com.

What is the current stand-off between the government and RIM all about?

The current logjam is with regards to BlackBerry messenger, email and web traffic. Around two years ago, the government had asked BlackBerry to allow it to monitor the text messages (SMSes) and phone calls exchanged through its platform. The government has since then been monitoring these services with the help of telecom service providers. It, however, still doesn’t have any means to monitor, intercept or decrypt BlackBerry’s messenger, email and web exchanges. The government wants to put in place a surveillance infrastructure to monitor these services and is asking BlackBerry to cooperate.

What is unique about BlackBerry services? Why doesn’t the government have a similar problem with Nokia or Apple?

Companies such as Apple do not provide email and messenger services in India. They only sell their handsets in the country. Nokia recently started providing such services under the Nokia Messaging Services Platform. The service, which includes enterprise solutions, consumer services and Nokia’s own messaging solution Ovi mail, is still in beta format. Nokia’s India spokesperson said the company will set up servers for its various services inside India whenever it kickstarts the functions in a full fledged manner.

Canadian firm Research in Motion (RIM), makers of BlackBerry, on the other hand, provides all these services alongside selling its handsets. It also manages all its data and traffic on its own without giving the access to anybody. The servers for these services are installed outside India. The government is concerned that keeping servers outside the country will give access to foreign authorities to monitor its local traffic and information. In the US, for instance, this kind of monitoring will be possible under the provisions of the Patriot Act.

Is BlackBerry the only one to use strong encryptions?

The use of strong encryption in information technology is prevalent in both the wireless industry and Internet platforms. BlackBerry, however, uses a superior encryption that is highly reliable and secure and it owes its popularity in the world markets to this feature mainly. According to Sunil Abraham, the Executive Director of Bangalore-based advocacy group Centre for Internet and Society, BlackBerry uses strong encryption with 256 bit keys. In comparison, gmail.com and Citibank.co.in use only 128 bit keys.

“If you have encryption on while visiting citibank.com or when using an offline mail client like MS Outlook Express, the government can identify the encrypted service that you are using and the recipient of your encrypted messages. Then they can launch a targeted brute-force attack to intercept and decrypt specific communications,” he says, adding that with the BlackBerry, the government can only see that you are having an encrypted transaction with the BlackBerry servers. They cannot identify the recipients and web services. This makes the brute-force attack difficult as a lot of time is spent decrypting unimportant messages.

What is the problem that RIM is facing in UAE and Saudi Arabia?

In UAE, it is facing the same problem as in India. In Saudi Arabia, BlackBerry will instal computer servers, which would allow the government some access to user’s data.

Can the Indian government and RIM meet half-way?

Unlikely. Though, as per PTI reports,

BlackBerry has made an attempt to break the logjam by offering metadata and relevant information to security agencies which will enable them in lawful interception, it has has failed to enthuse them. At a meeting between government officials and RIM, company’s representatives said that “they can provide the metadata of the message like the Internet Protocol address of BES and PIN and International Mobile Equipment Identity of the BlackBerry mobile”, sources said. Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. It provides information about a certain item’s content like how large the picture is, the colour depth, the image resolution when the image was created, and other data. A text document’s metadata may contain information about how long the document is, who the author is, when the document was written, and a short summary of the document. However, sources said the RIM, which has nearly one million subscribers across India, failed to enthuse the security agencies who want an uninterrupted access to the messaging services on BlackBerry platform. The security agencies apprehend that BlackBerry services in the present format pose a serious security threat.

The government may argue that if surveillance is allowed in some countries, it should have the same access, too.

So far, RIM’s public stand has been that its security architecture was specifically designed to provide corporate customers with the ability to transmit information wirelessly while providing them with the necessary confidence that no one, including RIM, could access their data.

Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society says there is a possibility of a compromise behind the doors and the citizens may never get to know that a surveillance regime and infrastructure have been put in place to monitor their communications.

Click to read the original.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/govt-and-blackberry

Access to Knowledge: Barriers and Solutions for Persons with Disabilities in India

praskrishna — 2012-03-13T10:43:17Z

Consumers International, Kuala Lumpur and Consumers Association of India in association with Madras Library Association organised a seminar on Access to Knowledge on 31st July, 2010 at the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Auditorium in Guindy, Chennai. The Principal Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu Department of Information Technology was the chief guest. Former Central Vigilance Commissioner N. Vittal gave the keynote address. Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Nirmita Narasimhan and Pranesh Prakash participated in the seminar. Nirmita and Pranesh made presentations on access to knowledge.

Access to Knowledge

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/barriers-and-solutions

Call, text, email complaint against rogue auto driver

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:45:39Z

Harassed by an auto driver? Helplines give you no relief? Here's the people's way to help you out. Just report your issue online, call or even SMS sitting in a noisy restaurant, and be heard.

Right from drivers with no proper identity cards, to those refusing to ply or those who attempt sexual assault enroute, you can report them all to a team of volunteers who manage a complaint book 24x7. There is also a map online, where you can pinpoint the exact place, time and even upload videos or photographs taken on the spot.

This complaint management system, recently launched by Kiirti (part of the Centre for Internet and Society) is an attempt to help tackle the cases of auto menace in the city. "It's quite like the Fix My Street initiative of the West. This is for the people and maintained by the people. What makes it different from the existing helpline mechanism in Bangalore is that there is better transparency and more options given to people on how they can file their complaint 24x7,'' explains Sudha Nair, project community manager for Kiirti in India.

All the complaints received will be scrutinised and verified by a backend support team of volunteers and then sent across to the department concerned for action. Besides, the complainant will be able to check the status of the complaint.

"Recently, in The Times of India, we read about the sad state of the official helplines provided by the transport department. There is no transparency in it nor is it available all the time, so we decided to launch this system. We are only working as a catalyst. The portal can also be effectively used by various RWAs to help check the problem in their area,'' Sudha added. Various NGOs like Janaagraha, Environment Support Group, Public Affairs Centre and Children's Movement for Civic Action have also come forward to support this initiative.

Read the original in the Times of India

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/complaint-against-rogue-auto-driver

Digital Activism and Online Advocacy: Experiences from the Tibetan Freedom Movement – A Talk by Shibayan Raha

praskrishna — 2011-09-23T05:46:27Z

A talk on the role of digital activism, online advocacy and use of social media in the Tibetan freedom struggle by Shibayan Raha at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 9 August, 2010.

The Tibetan freedom movement began in the 1950’s when it started its campaign to highlight the sufferings of the Tibetan community under the Chinese regime through conventional means. Today the movement has come a long way in that it engages the Chinese Government on every possible world stage including the online world. Online advocacy and digital activism forms an integral part of this movement as is reflected from the use of advanced e-mailing servers and social media as an activism tool to mobilise people online and press international bodies to extend support for the movement.

Shibayan Raha, a young activist, will talk on the role of digital activism, online advocacy and the use of social media to further the cause of the Tibetan freedom movement.

About Shibayan Raha

Shibayan Raha is the grassroots co-coordinator for ‘Students for a Free Tibet, India’. A native of Kolkata, he did various odd jobs in his hometown before devoting himself to social work, particularly the Tibetan freedom struggle, five years ago. As a grassroots co-coordinator, he takes the Tibetan issue to the youngsters and gathers more people to join the movement. He has been imprisoned thrice, twice in Tihar jail and once in the Colaba police station. Further, he has also been involved in other areas like the Bhopal gas leak tragedy, the Burmese issue and AFSPA.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/talk-by-shibayan-raha