Centre for Internet and Society

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

Call to increase awareness of intellectual property rights

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:47:26Z

We need more knowledge on IPR itself, says IT Secretary

There is an imperative need to focus on intellectual property rights issues, provide more information to the public on what constitutes IPR and how to deal with violations, Information Technology secretary PWC Davidar said.

“We need more knowledge on IPR itself. Very few people are aware of what IPR is and therefore unaware that they are violating someone's IPR, for instance, even when they copy for an essay,” Mr. Davidar said at the inaugural of the seminar on Access to Knowledge. It was organised by the Consumers Association of India and Consumers International, Kuala Lumpur in association with the Madras Library Association.

Assignments

Even when it came to assignments in schools, colleges and universities, sometimes Ph.D. theses as well, one hears of people borrowing from others' work, Mr. Davidar said.

This kind of thing was very tightly controlled in the West, where software was used to pick up plagiarism. However, that was not so strictly enforced in India, he added.

Debate

Mr. Davidar also highlighted the debate on IPR in areas such as environment or health where lives could be at stake.

“When it comes to academics, you know clearly that you should not borrow without acknowledgement. It is not as simple in situations where a solution can save several lives or prevent destruction of property. Such technologies should be shared, without being safeguarded in the corporate domain by IPR,” he added.

R. Desikan, founder, CAI, provided a brief report on the activities of the organisation and stressed the need to increase awareness of consumer rights, and IPR. Pranesh Prakash, from Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, stressing the need to provide access to knowledge in the context of IPR, also hinted at the negative aspects that patents might have on consumers.

Knowledge economy

Former Chief Vigilance Commissioner N. Vittal said consumers were living in a knowledge economy.

Pointing to the example of Japan that worked backwards on creating their own process with an end product (already invented in the U.S.) in mind, he advised that India too should examine whether it could benefit from such reverse engineering.

“Knowledge only grows with distribution,” he added, alluding to the teaching of the Upanishads.

Read the original article in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/increase-awareness-of-ipr

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

Civil Society groups urge State Judicial Academy to restructure agenda for Judges' Roundtable meet

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:47:36Z

Some of the Civil Society groups in the country have urged the Maharashtra State Judicial Academy to restructure the agenda for the 'Judges Roundtable on Intellectual Property Rights Adjudication' being held in Mumbai on July 24 and 25 to promote public interest and a deeper understanding of intellectual property amongst judicial officers. FICCI is the joint organiser of the event.

In a letter to justice Dr D Y Chandrachud, director (Officiating), Maharashtra State Judicial Academy, the Civil Society groups said that the industry associations like FICCI and CII are primarily known for their lobbying activities towards greater IP protection. Therefore it is not proper for Judicial Academies to collaborate with such organisations without ensuring that the agenda that is set does not promote a biased view. While industry input is necessary, such one-sided collaborations will result in marginalisation of public interest in the IP enforcement
adjudication.

The agenda clearly shows that one side view of IPR and ignores the core concerns emerging out of IPR protection and enforcement related to access to knowledge and access to medicines. Except three academics, all other resource persons outside of the judicial fraternity are from corporate IP law firms and industry associations. The agenda failed to provide a balanced view on IP protection and enforcement, they said.

The letter further said that it is very clear from the agenda and the list of speakers of the roundtable that it is highly skewed, and that there is no balancing of viewpoints that the judicial officers are being presented with. Many of the speakers, who are from corporate law firms, have openly, in public, advocated against public interest provisions of the Indian Patent Act, such as s.3(d) which seeks to prevent evergreening of pharmaceutical patents or s.3(k) which seeks to prevent basic building blocks of technology and business like mathematics,
business methods, and software, from being patented.

Moreover, many of the lawyers have made attempts to import the jurisprudence of developed countries in the matters relating to the enforcement of IPRs, too often with success. Anton Piller orders, which are no longer prevalent in the UK, have been imported into India and modified to even allowing for lock-breaking. This very idea of adhering to foreign jurisprudence on the matters of IPR is highly opposed to the development of indigenous jurisprudence. We feel that jurisprudence of a country should be based on the developmental issues and contexts at the domestic level.

Further, at least four resource persons represent the industry associations like Indian music Industry (IMI), Business Software Alliances (BSA) and The Film & Television Producers Guild of India Ltd. These associations have been actively advocating for IP enforcement law and policies at the national and international level, which undermine the public interest. Hence, these resource people are not in a position to provide a holistic perspective on IP protection and its enforcement, the Civil Society groups contended.

“In the interest of equity and justice, we urge you to take appropriate actions, including requiring the sensitization programme to be balanced both from an industry perspective as well as from a developmental perspective. The Maharashtra State Judicial Academy's collaboration with FICCI does not seem to do either, and instead specific narrow interests seem to be promoted in the form of a sensitization programme. We urge you restructure the agenda to avoid this capture of interest and to actually promote public interest and a deeper understanding of
intellectual property amongst judicial officers,” they said.

This article by Ramesh Shankar appeared in Pharmabiz.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/judges-roundtable-meet

More Debate on UID Project Needed

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:13:43Z

A press conference on UID was held at the Press Club in Bangalore on 26 July, 2010. It was co-organised by Citizen's Action Forum, Alternate Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society. Mathew Thomas and Vinay Baindur spoke about the UID. Proceedings from the conference was covered in the Hindu on 27 July, 2010.

More Debate on UID

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/debate-on-uid

More Debate on UID

praskrishna — 2010-07-28T05:18:22Z

UID coverage in the Hindu on 27 July, 2010

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/uid-coverage-hindu

UID coverage in Udayavani

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:13:24Z

A press conference was held at the Press Club in Bangalore on 26 July, 2010. It was co-organised by Citizen's Action Forum, Alternate Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society. Mathew Thomas and Vinay Baindur were the speakers. Leading Kannada newspaper Udayavani covered this event.

UID coverage in Udayavani

For reading the original click here.

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

UID coverage in Udayavani

praskrishna — 2010-07-28T04:52:10Z

Coverage about the UID event in leading Kannada newspaper Udayavani

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/uid-udayavani

Open is the Future

praskrishna — 2011-05-01T02:55:12Z

The third Open World Forum will gather together decision-makers from the open digital world, in Paris. 1,500 participants from 40 countries will come together to analyze the technological, economic and social impact of Open Source, the invisible engine behind the digital revolution. The aim: to interpret future trends and cross-fertilize initiatives.

Paris, 22 July 2010. Technologies – Economic Models – Governance... Year after year the Free/Open Source movement is establishing itself as the invisible engine driving the digital revolution, and the hidden backbone of key digital players like Google, Amazon and Wikipedia, as well as the catalyst for numerous emerging trends including Cloud computing, the Internet of Things, green technologies, new organizational models, new-generation NGOs, open democracy… Following the success of the first two events, the Open World Forum will once again be staged in Paris this year, on 30 September and 1 October, bringing together 1,500 experts and decision-makers from 40 countries. The aim of this ‘Davos’ of open technologies is to debate and cross-fertilize initiatives, to shape the open digital landscape of the future.

Two Days of High-Level Sessions

With 15 keynote addresses, 20 workshops and 8 think-tanks, featuring 140 presenters from 40 countries, the Open World Forum will include eight flagship sessions:

30 September

Opening keynote addresses: The state of the open world: what impact will it have on the digital future? With Walter Bender (MIT Media Labs/OPLC/Sugarlabs), James Governor (RedMonk), Jeffrey Hammond (Forrester), Simon Phipps (ForgeRock), Dirk Riehle…
The revolution in open innovation: collective intelligence actively supporting growth. With Stefan Lindegaard (15Inno), Steve Shapiro (Innocentive), Roberto Di Cosmo (INRIA), Patrick Chanezon (Google), Michel Guillemet (Bull)…
Open Cloud: Open Source at the heart of tomorrow’s ‘computing power plants’? With Matt Asay (Canonical), Larry Augustin (SurgarCRM), Kyle Mac Donald (Cloud.com), Matt Wood (Amazon)...
Open communities: the emblematic organizations of the 21st century? With Eben Moglen (Software Freedom Law Center), Bertrand Delacretaz (Apache), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Cedric Thomas (OW2)...

1 October

Open democracy in 2010: what are the initiatives and prospects? With Philippe Aigrin (Sopinspace), Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation), Dominique Piotet (RebellionLab), Francis Pisani (Transnet)...
Managing ‘the commons’: ‘tragedy’ or opportunity? With David Bollier (Onthecommons.org), Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation), John Wilbanks (Creative Commons)...
Open Generation: from ‘Generation Y’ to ‘Generation O’? With Sandrine Murcia (Silicon Sentier/Mindblush), Sunil Abraham (Centre for Internet and Society), Benjamin Bejbaum (founder of DailyMotion)…
Closing keynote addresses: Open Innovation Awards and FLOSS 2020 RoadMap. With Michael Tiemann (OSI, Red Hat ), Jean-Pierre Laisne (OW2, Bull)...

Numerous workshops and seminars will also enable delegates to evaluate emerging trends in the open world: the development of open media; the advent of new-generation NGOs based on collaborative strategies (Sahana, CrisisCommons…); the revolution in community marketing; new forms of business organization inspired by Open Source; etc. The innovative events being staged this year for the first time include a summit meeting addressing the points of view of leading industry analysts on the Open Source world (Forrester, 451 Group, PAC, RedMonk) and another on diversity and women in the Free/Open Source world. Finally, the Open Source Think-tank, dedicated to analyzing Open Source economic models, will once again be partnering the Open World Forum.

The Global Meeting Point for Open Innovation

Above and beyond the forward-looking analysis and networking, the event aims to foster the development of multiple, cross-cutting initiatives, during or following the Forum. Complementing the Open CIO Summit – the leading Open Source summit meeting organized by CIOs, for CIOs – and the FLOSS International Competence Centers Summit, the Open World Forum 2010 will also be hosting several new initiatives:

The first BRIC Think-tank, bringing together decision-makers from the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese governments to discuss ways of accelerating their digital development using open technologies
The first Open Cloud Summit, bringing together technical directors from the biggest players in Cloud computing to evaluate ways forward in terms of interoperability.
The first Open Forges Summit, bringing together decision-makers from the major open digital software forges.

The Forum will also stage the presentation of the 2010 Open Innovation Awards, as part of a Demo Cup event, and will continue forward-thinking initiatives with further input into the 2020 FLOSS RoadMap. Over a number of months, international experts will compare their visions of the future, to generate scenarios and make recommendations that will be published at the Forum. The Open World Forum is an initiative launched and led by a number of major international and European organizations from the Free/Open Source and digital world, with the support of public institutions (the EU, Paris city council, the Ile-de-France region) and the active involvement of a wide ecosystem of businesses, including almost 70% of the world’s largest IT companies. Major sponsors of the 2010 OWF already include Bull (co-founder), Red Hat, HP, AlterWay, QualComm, Smile, HP, INRIA, Nuxeo, Pilot Systems, Canonical, Cap Gemini, Oracle, Jaspersoft, SugarCRM, Ayeba and Accenture. In 2010, the Forum is being organized by the Systematic competitiveness cluster, in partnership with Cap Digital and the European Qualipso consortium. The program committee includes some 50 international experts from six continents.

About the Open World Forum

The Open World Forum is the leading global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers and communities to cross-fertilize open digital technological, economic and social initiatives. At the very heart of the Free/Open Source revolution, the event was founded in 2008 and now takes place every year in Paris, with over 140 speakers from 40 countries, an international audience of 1,500 delegates and some forty seminars, workshops and think-tanks. Organized by a vast network of partners, including the leading Free/Open Source communities and main global players from the IT world, the Open World Forum is the definitive event for discovering the latest trends in open computing. As a result, it is a unique opportunity to share ideas and best practice with visionary thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders of the top international Free/Open Source communities and to network with technology gurus, CxOs, analysts, CIOs, researchers, politicians and investors from six continents. The Open World Forum
is being run this year by the Systematic competitiveness cluster, in partnership with Cap Digital and the European QualiPSo consortium. Some 70% of the world’s leading information technology companies are involved in the Forum as partners and participants.

For more information, visit: http://www.openworldforum.org

Click here for the original.
See the list of speakers here
See the video on Youtube here

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

The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T10:48:21Z

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.

What is attention economy?

Attention economy was made prominent through the writings of Thomas Davenport1and Micheal Goldhaber2, who examine 'attention' as a scarce commodity in an information rich environment and divulge into examining exchanges and investments of attention and their results. Not particularly a new concept, attention economy focuses on the examination of attention as a scarce commodity in the information-rich societies influenced by the Internet and new digital technologies. The concept was first noted and written about by the political scientist Herbert Simon (1971), who notes “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients… [and thus arises] the need to allocate that attention efficiently among the over-abundance of information sources that might consume it.” In the abundance of information and access to information, the consumption or the ‘prosumption’ of information relies on the investment of attention, which becomes a scarce commodity – expended in the act of consumption. For the expended resource is no longer information or its scarcity in terms of availability – which has been the classical concerns in the industrialized market economy – but the amount of attention that is expended on the consumption of information. Economics is governed by what is scarce and the abundance of information is not a measurable function, rather what is expended in its consumption, namely human attention. From a cognitive science perspective, attention can be read as the investment of focused cognitive faculties in a particular ‘prioritized’ activity. In this way attention becomes an essential factor in capital production activities, in that the investment of attention generates capital through the direction of work (labour) and time in any particular activity. Derek Lomas (2008) and Peter Hughes3 treat media objects as artificial organisms that need attention for sustenance and energy for reproduction, somewhat in the nature of a Darwinian struggle where the most ‘able’ and ‘fit’ organism survives. All media organisms need one crucial element to survival, sustenance and reproduction – ‘attention’. In viral spreads and reproduction of a media organism the possibility of its procreation and viral distribution is realized through the investment of attention – the amount which enables survival and reproduction. By extension, virtual products are essentially media (artificial) organisms, and by extrapolation virtual goods and (possibly) even identities are organisms that thrive on the attention it receives for survival and reproduction.

The Economy and the Currency

Goldhaber (1997) notes that attention economy does not indeed have a market and operates unlike post-industrial markets. Although there is considerable material influence in terms of the investments of labour, time, and real money, often there is no direct means to measure it. Concepts of property, dichotomies of production, work, leisure and play require reformulation in light of this economy thriving on attention and its monetization. Davenport and Beck (2001) reinforces a measure of Goldhaber's arguments by stating that telecommunications bandwidth is not a problem but human bandwidth is. Goldhaber proceeds to say that a transfer of information must always be accompanied by a transfer of attention – measurable by the amount of time that is invested in the process. Even though both Goldhaber and Davenport seem to agree that examining time investment is a poor measure of the attention that is expended.

Attention economics in earlier discourses and theses are connected with examining the failures and shortcomings of ‘the design’ of informational systems that locate, falsely, informational scarcity as the root of the problem leading to a deficit in attention, whereas the problem lies in the flow of attention itself and not information. The theories on ‘attention’ deal with a multitude of perspectives – from examining the psychological aspects, on the one hand, to economics, politics and sociology (including a measure of anthropology) of online networks on the other. A recent research on attention economy has largely been towards attention:

a) as a scarce resource that was incentivized [providing an incentive to invest]4 in some manner and thus the attention currency – which is one reading of the attention currency; and

b) as non-material capital, termed most appropriately as attentional capital and as measurable as wealth is to income, assuming that income can be measured and wealth and holdings are diverse and often immeasurable. Other studies focus on incorporating attention into design such that it captures user’s attention and rewards the time spent on the consumption of that information – so that the prioritization is the gambit of the providers of information and the subsequent hierarchies (such as Google and Yahoo) rather than the users. Prioritization of avatar information is also prominent in the representations in the achievement hierarchy – a system common to how search engines prioritize information – only in gaming this system systematically categorizes information pertaining to the avatar and its achievements and growth. This is both internal to the game world in question as well as external in that external tools outside of the game gather and prioritize avatar information. Such practices have been termed as metagaming.5

Defining metagaming becomes problematic in that it is not a concept peripheral to the absent centre of gaming rather – metagaming or activities and processes associated with metagaming become multiple centres by itself. Applying this to the secondary/goldfarming market may lead to interesting readings but here I digress. Attention and the flows of attention are connected to the ways in which information is structured into hierarchies and channelled, such that ranking systems and the achievement hierarchy moderates attention flows and shifts – players and gamers who grow in short spans of time through strategic and organizational excellence get more visibility in these hierarchies.

Attention economies are largely read and identified in online economies and ecosystems. Davenport and Beck (2001) switch this dichotomy around and attempt a reading of organizational systems and how the offline attention economy affects organization and concepts of productivity and production. However, for the purposes of this study – online gaming economies take a central focus and a generic reading of multiple MMORPG economies is attempted.

Before Castronova (2003), Castronova et al (2007), and much later Consalvo (2009) engaged with questions on Virtual Economies and Gaming Worlds (for the sake of argument – Castronova’s term, Synthetic Worlds is used interchangeably with Virtual Worlds), Goldhaber and his contemporaries engaged with questions of production of informational goods – those that would in a primitive fashion address virtual production, consumption and exchange of digital informational goods and the relevance of attention expended within these economies. A colloquial reading of attention is that it is always translated as the investment of labour and time in different measures. Furthermore, the investment of time and labour on the consumption of any particular information6 is is incentivized and thus prioritized based on its position in the hierarchy. The higher its visibility, lower its incentives and vice versa. The writers on gaming cultures and economies do not directly engage with questions of attention flows and shifts but by using their concepts on the investment of time, activities of production, cultural, avatarial, and gaming capital, as well as virtual currencies – I engage with the concept of attention as a currency necessary to survival in virtual worlds particularly in MMORPGs, where there are elements of progress, exploration, conquest, warfare and constant struggle.

Reciprocal Attention and Survival

An investment in attention always ‘seeks’ a reciprocity in attention, such that an investment ensures a positive net gain either directly or indirectly owing to a growth in the attention repositories or collection of attention capital. This need not be manifest in the service–provider–user relationship but the user–user relationship. This enables reading the production of attention and the systematic means by which attention is channelled through a complex system of hierarchies in society as well as in the Virtual Gaming Worlds7 more accessible.

Attention can also be approached as the necessity for survival in human society in much the same manner as human society is dependent on the flows of attention for the development of the individual or group in a society or community. It can be argued that attention inevitably forms a basic necessity that indirectly influences survival, sustenance, and reproduction. Production of attention, production of virtual goods, and the production of attentional capital8 are dependent on the minimal and pre-requisite investment in attention. The focus of this paper is to pitch attention as a currency, a currency that can be examined as one only when certain thresholds of attention have been achieved and relevant to the survival in MMORPG gaming worlds— worlds that are capable of viable social and economic interaction.

Questions on the attention economy is inevitably connected to questions of production and consumption and more recently prod-usage and pro-sumption (hyphenated for emphasis) in digital technology mediated environments, whether graphically represented complex virtual worlds or text based MUDs.

Although irrelevant to this trajectory, attention economy has also been approached from a systems and organizational perspective, which is what Davenport and Beck (2001) focus on. Similar studies revolve around examining attention flows in Social Network Systems (SNS) – Lomas (2008) and maximizing user value – Huberman and Wu (2008).

Davenport has explored the implication so of the attention economy from an organizational perspective and the impact on human life – so to speak – particularly in Davenport and Beck 2001 – 'The Attention Economy', the primitive precursor of which was Davenport 1997 – 'Information Ecology'.
Micheal Goldhaber has written and spoken in considerable detail on The Attention Economy – most prominent and seminal of which is 'The Attention Economy – The Natural Economy of the Net' 1997 in the Journal First Monday.
I quote directly from Peter Hughes who posits: “Artificial organisms might live on attention--they 'sleep' when no one is looking at them and gain energy (cycles) when someone is. Since energy could be used to reproduce, the most attention-grabbing forms would be selected.” - Italics imposed for Emphasis.
Some discourses focus on the means by which attention can be converted into currency – one of those means would be to provide incentives to invest attention in a particular action, this incentive then moves its priority higher in the informational hierarchy and in a limited focus, reading the achievement hierarchy.
I believe the term to be conceptually unanchored and nearly meaningless in its vast array of usages and applications – but to locate some of these practices using metagaming might provide an interesting insight into the very nature of these practices and the way in which they are encapsulated and epitomized in other terms.
Informational goods and virtual goods are read side by side and are not differentiated in this article, for the purposes of this argument – 'informational goods' as a term is a larger concept of which virtual goods may form a subset.
Termed the Achievement Hierarchy – The Achievement Hierarchy represents the complex internal and metaverse rankings in an online game. This includes the game’s internal achievement ranking system that categorises players’ and gamers on different growth patterns and achievements as well as external tools not part of the game which assists in a detailed ranking system. Often players themselves subscribe to external ranking mechanisms, to keep track of others and their own progress. Wowprogress is one such external achievement hierarchy that ranks players in multiple realms. Travian World Analyzer, Traviandope and many other external resources support gameplay but are not in essence a part of intended gameplay. Metagaming can prove to be a usable and relevant term to define these practices. I have intentionally avoided linking them as some of these sites employ hostile scripts.
I consistently use attentional capital as an extended concept which includes avatarial capital – avatar capital is a term proposed by Castronova (2005) and cited by Consalvo (2007).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/attention-economy