Centre for Internet and Society

Design!PubliC — Third Conclave in New Delhi

praskrishna — 2012-05-30T07:03:33Z

On the 20th of April 2012, the third Design Public Conclave, organized by the Center for Knowledge Societies in collaboration with IBM, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and the Centre for Internet and Society, was held at the National Museum, New Delhi. The Conclave brought together thought-leaders and decision makers from the government, the media, multinational organizations and academic institutions for a conversation about transforming India into an Innovation Society.

Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Aditya Dev Sood, Arun Maira, Aditya Mishra, Sukumar Ranganathan, Bhairavi Jani, Ashwin Mahesh, Yamini Aiyar, Scott Burnham, Samanth Subramanian, Shanker Annaswamy, Ashok Alexander, Jeby Cherian, Pankaj Jhunja, Chakshu Roy, Ekta Ohri, James Crabtree, Theo JJ Groothuizen, Sam Pitroda, Darshana Gothi Chauhan, and spoke in the session on Participation, Collaboration and Innovation. The varied audience included representatives from the Planning Commission, the Embassies of Netherlands and Sweden, the American Center, the Ford Foundation, Premsela, DFID, PRS, Lirneasia, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, Financial Times, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, NID, Asian Paints, Yes Bank, MTS, and many others.

The conclave began with three panel discussions exploring the relationship between trust, participation and innovation.

Participation, Collaboration, Innovation

The discussions touched upon different means to generate citizen participation in key decision making, including using social media, mobile phones and other technological platforms. These new networking technologies help create spaces for discourse, debate, and an opportunity for collective organization and activity. They also have the capacity to transform the agency and voices of previously remote societies. However, despite their potential to garner massive public participation, they have not really been utilized by most private, public or social institutions.

Mere participation is not enough. It is necessary to moderate the conversation and make respondents accountable for their comments, so that it does not lapse into a meaningless cacophony of anonymous voices. The challenge that remains, then, is to design a platform where both citizens and the government can engage in a meaningful way, without the barriers of language and literacy, and collaboratively arrive at meaningful, actionable solutions.

Imagining India as an Innovation Society

This conversation dove deeper into ways in which the necessary elements of trust and participation could be better incorporated in all the sectors of society in order to enable an innovation culture in India. Existing conceptions of innovation in India, including price-pointing innovation, and the need to move beyond this and create a culture that values systematic, routinizable innovation processes were discussed. When innovating in the public sector and designing systems and processes that affect the larger public, it is especially important to respond to the specific needs of the people. This is where avenues for civil society participation and the design of public spaces become especially crucial, as they function as interfaces between decision-makers and the public. Each panelist spoke about different aspects of this large challenge, touching upon user needs, education systems, intellectual property laws and methods of innovation.

It was clear, as the conversation ended, that a lot more work and planning is needed to even begin to articulate and come to a consensus on what an innovation society looks like.

Click to download the full report (published by Center for Knowledge Societies) [PDF, 2.18 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-delhi-event-report

Google Policy Fellowship Programme: Call for Applications

praskrishna — 2012-05-24T15:38:28Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is inviting applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India Fellow, who will be selected by August 15, 2012.

The Google Policy Fellowship offers successful candidates an opportunity to develop research and debate on the fellowship focus areas, which include Access to Knowledge, Openness in India, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, and Telecom, for a period of about ten weeks starting from August 2012 upto October 2012. CIS will select the India Fellow. Send in your applications for the position by June 27, 2012.

To apply, please send to google.fellowship@cis-india.org the following materials:

Statement of Purpose: A brief write-up outlining about your interest and qualifications for the programme including the relevant academic, professional and extracurricular experiences. As part of the write-up, also explain on what you hope to gain from participation in the programme and what research work concerning free expression online you would like to further through this programme. (About 1200 words max).
Resume
Three references

Fellowship Focus Areas

Access to Knowledge: Studies looking at access to knowledge issues in India in light of copyright law, consumers law, parallel imports and the interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property rights, targeted at policymakers, Members of Parliament, publishers, photographers, filmmakers, etc.
Openness in India: Studies with policy recommendations on open access to scholarly literature, free access to law, open content, open standards, free and open source software, aimed at policymakers, policy researchers, academics and the general public.
Freedom of Expression: Studies on policy, regulatory and legislative issues concerning censorship and freedom of speech and expression online, aimed at bloggers, journalists, authors and the general public.
Privacy: Studies on privacy issues like data protection and the right to information, limits to privacy in light of the provisions of the constitution, media norms and privacy, banking and financial privacy, workplace privacy, privacy and wire-tapping, e-governance and privacy, medical privacy, consumer privacy, etc., aimed at policymakers and the public.
Telecom: Building awareness and capacity on telecommunication policy in India for researchers and academicians, policymakers and regulators, consumer and civil society organisations, education and library institutions and lay persons through the creation of a dedicated web based resource focusing on knowledge dissemination.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Google Policy Fellowship program?
The Google Policy Fellowship program offers students interested in Internet and technology related policy issues with an opportunity to spend their summer working on these issues at the Centre for Internet and Society at Bangalore. Students will work for a period of ten weeks starting from July 2012. The research agenda for the program is based on legal and policy frameworks in the region connected to the ground-level perceptions of the fellowship focus areas mentioned above.

I am an International student can I apply and participate in the program? Are there any age restrictions on participating?
Yes. You must be 18 years of age or older by January 1, 2012 to be eligible to participate in Google Policy Fellowship program in 2012.

Are there citizenship requirements for the Fellowship?
For the time being, we are only accepting students eligible to work in India (e.g. Indian citizens, permanent residents of India, and individuals presently holding an Indian student visa. Google cannot provide guidance or assistance on obtaining the necessary documentation to meet the criteria.

Who is eligible to participate as a student in Google Policy Fellowship program?
In order to participate in the program, you must be a student. Google defines a student as an individual enrolled in or accepted into an accredited institution including (but not necessarily limited to) colleges, universities, masters programs, PhD programs and undergraduate programs. Eligibility is based on enrollment in an accredited university by January 1, 2012.

I am an International student can I apply and participate in the program?
In order to participate in the program, you must be a student (see Google's definition of a student above). You must also be eligible to work in India (see section on citizen requirements for fellowship above). Google cannot provide guidance or assistance on obtaining the necessary documentation to meet this criterion.
I have been accepted into an accredited post-secondary school program, but have not yet begun attending. Can I still take part in the program?
As long as you are enrolled in a college or university program as of January 1, 2012, you are eligible to participate in the program.
I graduate in the middle of the program. Can I still participate?
As long as you are enrolled in a college or university program as of January 1, 2012, you are eligible to participate in the program.

Payments, Forms, and Other Administrative Stuff

How do payments work?*

Google will provide a stipend of USD 7,500 equivalent to each Fellow for the summer.

Accepted students in good standing with their host organization will receive a USD 2,500 stipend payable shortly after they begin the Fellowship in August 2012.
Students who receive passing mid-term evaluations by their host organization will receive a USD 1,500 stipend shortly after the mid-term evaluation in September 2012.
Students who receive passing final evaluations by their host organization and who have submitted their final program evaluations will receive a USD 3,500 stipend shortly after final evaluations in October 2012.

Please note: Payments will be made by electronic bank transfer, and are contingent upon satisfactory evaluations by the host organization, completion of all required enrollment and other forms. Fellows are responsible for payment of any taxes associated with their receipt of the Fellowship stipend.

*While the three step payment structure given here corresponds to the one in the United States, disbursement of the amount may be altered as felt necessary.

What documentation is required from students?

Students should be prepared, upon request, to provide Google or the host organization with transcripts from their accredited institution as proof of enrollment or admission status. Transcripts do not need to be official (photo copy of original will be sufficient).

I would like to use the work I did for my Google Policy Fellowship to obtain course credit from my university. Is this acceptable?

Yes. If you need documentation from Google to provide to your school for course credit, you can contact Google. We will not provide documentation until we have received a final evaluation from your mentoring organization.

Host Organizations

What is Google's relationship with the Centre for Internet and Society?

Google provides the funding and administrative support for individual fellows directly. Google and the Centre for Internet and Society are not partners or affiliates. The Centre for Internet and Society does not represent the views or opinions of Google and cannot bind Google legally.

Important Dates

What is the program timeline?

June 27, 2012	Student Application Deadline. Applications must be received by midnight.
July 18, 2012	Student applicants are notified of the status of their applications.
August 2012	Students begin their fellowship with the host organization (start date to be determined by students and the host organization); Google issues initial student stipends.
September 2012	Mid-term evaluations; Google issues mid-term stipends.
October 2012	Final evaluations; Google issues final stipends.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/google-policy-fellowship

Cancel the Subscription

Subbiah Arunachalam — 2012-05-09T03:44:50Z

It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available, writes Prof. Arunachalam in an article published by the Indian Express on May 8, 2012.

Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher, you may have to read or refer to many journals, not two or three. And you will depend on your institution’s library for those journals.

Till 20-30 years ago, most academic libraries, at least in the West, did not find it difficult to subscribe to most journals needed by the scientists in their institutions. Then things started changing and journal subscription prices started skyrocketing — some costing $20,000-40,000 — leading to what librarians call the serials crisis. Much of the price rise was caused by commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. These three control most of the 24,000 science, technology and medicine journals and publish more than 40 per cent of all journal articles today. Elsevier reported a profit of 37 per cent of its revenue in 2011 (up from 36 per cent in 2010); the profit of the other two is no less than 30 per cent despite the recession.

A few years ago, academic librarians, even in the US, had to cut down their budgets for books and monographs to keep journal subscriptions going. Early this year, Harvard, reputed to have the richest endowment among universities, announced that it was finding it to difficult to hold on to its subscriptions and requested its faculty to publish their work in “open access journals” which would be free to read and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls. The irony of it all was summed up nicely by Professor Robert Darnton, director of libraries at Harvard: “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free, and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices.”

A few months ago, a Fields Medal winner, mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge, made it publicly known that he had stopped publishing in, refereeing for and being on the editorial boards of journals published by Elsevier. Gowers created a website called The Cost of Knowledge and close to 11,000 scientists from around the world have signed it already, pledging to boycott Elsevier journals.

Cost, however, is only part of the issue. A more serious issue is the exclusive control enjoyed by publishers over how research gets distributed and shared. They demand that authors surrender copyright to the papers they publish and use it to throttle scholarly communication and hinder the progress of science. It is common sense that if we make scholarly information freely available it will reach a larger audience and help advance further research and lead to wider economic benefits.

The boycott had a salutary effect. Elsevier withdrew its lobbying for the rather absurd Research Works Act, which, if passed in the US Congress, would kill public access to federally funded research and reverse the mandate of the National Institutes of Health putting in one go all the 21 million freely available records in the PubMed library into a fee-to-see system.

Long before Gowers’s boycott of Elsevier and Harvard’s request to its faculty, there have been many stellar initiatives to usher in an era of open access to science and scholarship. For example, all seven research councils in the UK have mandated open access to research funded by them. So has the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest private-sector funder of life science research. Apart from these funder mandates, there are many institutional mandates, including the ones at ICRISAT, Hyderabad, the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, and the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela. All these developments have been meticulously chronicled by the philosophy professor, Peter Suber, in the US and the technology writer, Richard Poynder, in the UK.

Recently, the British government enlisted the cooperation of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. Says David Willetts, minister for universities and science: “Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research.”

In India, though, there appears to be very little enthusiasm among the leaders of the science establishment. Neither the office of the principal scientific adviser nor the department of science and technology seems to have shown any interest in mandating open access to taxpayer-funded research. The National Knowledge Commission has recommended mandating open access to all publicly funded research, but it is not clear who will implement the recommendation. Right now, it is left to individuals to promote open access in India.

The writer is with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Read the original article in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/cancel-the-subscription

Arduino Introductory Workshop at CIS

Priya Kuber — 2012-05-01T07:50:08Z

The Centre for Internet & Society organised a hands-on-free Arduino workshop in its office on March 3, 2012. Video is now online!

The month of March in 2012 has been an eventful month for hardware enthusiasts in Bangalore. With open source hardware catching up in a big way, a free workshop on "An introduction to Arduino" seemed to be the perfect choice. Its announcement drew a considerable response. The audience was filtered from various backgrounds. Pramode CE[1] of Recursive Labs[2] covered most of the basics, beginning with the basics of arduino to how the code interacts with the sensors. Starting with flashing LEDs to the use of serial port to basic sensors like LDRs he took around the whole basic system with ease. Click for more details.

About 20 people participated in this workshop. These included interaction designers, artists and those enthusiastic to get started with creative projects but with no prior experience with electronics, interfacing and all that hack talk. The workshop provided a general understanding of instructional programming languages, and served as a platform for creative people who didn't have a technical background but wanted to translate their wildest techno-ideas to reality in a snap.

The event also marked the beginning of the CIS hack-lab.

VIDEOS

[1].https://twitter.com/#!/pramode_ce
[2]. http://recursive-labs.com/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/arduino-workshop-report

Bangalore Meet-up for the Open Government Partnership Brasilia

praskrishna — 2012-04-12T13:18:28Z

The international Open Government Partnership (OGP) is holding its first annual meeting on April 17 and 18, 2012. Representatives from over 50 member countries will gather in Brasilia to celebrate the progress that has been made to date, to exchange best practices, and to grow and strengthen the global collaborative network of open government leaders. Bangalore meet-up at CIS on April 17, 2012 from 5.30 p.m to 7.30 p.m.

Those who work on open government initiatives but unable to attend in person, can still participate remotely. OGP has tied-up with a number of external partners to make arrangements for people to participate in the event online. There will be live webcasts, interviews and chats. Viewers will be able to pose questions to those being interviewed and will be polled in real-time to see who is watching, where they are, what their interests are and what are their thoughts on the programme.

The two day meeting offers an opportunity for open government advocates throughout the world to connect with local civic activists and public officials as well as those working on similar problems in other countries.

The Centre for Internet & Society is hosting the Bangalore meet-up on April 17 and 18, 2012. Get together to watch the live video stream, engage in conversations via live chat, or on Twitter and Facebook for discussing plans to move open government forward in your region.

Click for the full list of countries participating in the event.

8:30-9:30 am Registration & Coffee

9:15-9:30 am Official photo of OGP Member Government Heads of Delegation and Steering Committee Members

9:30-10:15 am Opening Remarks and Welcome

The Honorable Dilma Rousseff, President of the Federative Republic of Brazil
The Honorable Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States of America
The Honorable Jakaya Kikwete, President of the United Republic of Tanzania
The Honorable Nika Gilauri, Prime Minister of Georgia

10:15-10:45 am Setting the Stage for the Age of Open: OGP 2012

Minister Jorge Hage, Brazil
Under Secretary of State María Otero, United States
Warren Krafchik, International Budget Partnership

10:45-11:15 am Coffee and Networking

11:15-12:30pm Plenary: Using Transparency to Transform Lives Online and Offline

Secretary of the Interior Kenneth Salazar, United States
Gautam John, Akshara Foundation and TED Fellow, India
Elisabeth Ungar Bleier, Transparency International, Colombia
Juliana Rotich, Co-Founder of Ushahidi, Kenya

Moderated by Samantha Power, The White House, United States

12:30-1:30 pm Innovation Village of Regional Government, Private Sector, and Civil Society organizations advancing Open Government

1:30-2:45 pm Lunch and Networking.

Lunch will be provided onsite at the conference center.

2:45-5:30 pm Open Government on the Move: The OGP Country Action Plans in Two Parts

In Part I and Part II of regional breakout sessions, government ministers and leading civil society activists will discuss country action plans and how to promote a race to the top on open government in each region. Highlights from each panel will be transcribed. Moderators will encourage discussion with the audience following comments from panelists. Governments not presenting in Part I will present in Part II of the regional sessions, from 4:30 to 5:45pm. Participants presenting in Part II are encouraged to attend the session of their choice during Part I and vice versa.

2:45-4:00pm Country Action Plans PART I

South America, I

Government of Chile
Government of Colombia
Government of Uruguay
Government of Brazil
Maria Ferrari Fontecilla, Participa, Chile
Edison Lanza, CAInfo, Uruguay

Moderated by Juan Pardinas, IMCO, Mexico

Central America and Caribbean

Government of Honduras
Government of Guatemala
Government of El Salvador
Government of Dominican Republic
Jose Ricardo Barrientos Quezada, ICEFI, Guatemala
Carlos Hernandez, Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa, Honduras

Moderated by Vonda Brown, Open Society Foundation, United States

Africa, I

Government of Liberia
Government of Ghana
Government of South Africa
Alison Tilley, Open Democracy Advice Center, South Africa
Vitus Azeem, Ghana Integrity Initiative, Ghana

Moderated by Rakesh Rajani, Twaweza, Tanzania

Asia

Government of Mongolia
Government of the Republic of Korea
Government of Indonesia
Government of Philippines
Dorjdari Namkhaijantsan, Open Society Foundation, Mongolia
Vincent Lazatin, Transparency and Accountability Network, Philippines

Moderated by Suneeta Kaimal, Revenue Watch Institute

Central Europe

Government of Romania
Government of Bulgaria
Government of the Slovak Republic
Government of Czech Republic
Gergana Jouleva, Access to Information Program Foundation, Bulgaria
Andra Teodora, Fundatia Soros Romania

Moderated by Martin Tisne, Omidyar Network, United Kingdom

Western Europe, I

Government of Norway
Government of Sweden
Government of Denmark
CSO Representative TBD
CSO Representative TBD

Moderated by Tim Kelsey, Cabinet Office, United Kingdom

Southern Europe, I

Government of Albania
Government of Montenegro
Government of Croatia
Government of Macedonia
Katarina Ott, Institute of Public Finance, Croatia
Vuk Maras, MANS, Montenegro

Moderated by Warren Krafchik, International Budget Partnership

Baltics

Government of Latvia
Government of Lithuania
Government of Estonia
Rura Mrazauskaite, Transparency International, Lithuania
Linda Austere, Center for Public Policy, Latvia

Moderated by Liia Hanni, E-Governance Academy, Estonia

4:00-4:30 pm Coffee and Networking

4:30-5:45 pm Country action plans PART II

South America, II

Government of Peru
Government of Paraguay
Government of Mexico
Miguel Pulido, Fundar, Mexico
Samuel Rotta, Proetica, Peru

Moderator TBD

North America

Government of Canada
Government of the United States
Patrice McDermott, Openthegovernment.org Coalition, United States
Toby Mendel, Center on Law and Democracy, Canada

Moderated by Tara Hidayat, Government of Indonesia

Africa, II

Government of Tanzania
Government of Kenya
John Ulanga, The Foundation for Civil Society, Tanzania
George Kegoro, International Commission of Jurists, Kenya

Moderated by Zohra Dawood, Open Society Foundation South Africa

Middle East

Government of Israel
Government of Jordan
Professor Tamar Hermann, Israeli Democracy Institute, Israel
CSO representative TBD

Moderated by Anthony Richter, Transparency and Accountability Initiative

Northeastern Europe

Government of Ukraine
Government of Moldova
Serghei Ostaf, National NGO Council, Moldova
Khmara Oleksii, Civic Partnership for Supporting OGP in Ukraine

Moderated by Tom Blanton, National Security Archive, United States

Western Europe, II

Government of the United Kingdom
Government of the Netherlands
Government of Spain
Government of Italy
Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation, United Kingdom
Marjan Besuijen, Hivos, Netherlands

Moderated by Alan Hudson, ONE Campaign

Southern Europe, II

Government of Greece
Government of Malta
Government of Turkey
CSO representative TBD
CSO representative TBD

Moderated by Håkon Arald Gulbrandsen, Government of Norway

South Caucasus

Government of Armenia
Government of Georgia
Government of Azerbaijan
Eka Gigauri, Transparency International Georgia
Galib Abbaszade, National Budget Group, Azerbaijan
Liana Doydoyan, FOI Centre, Armenia

Moderated by Jonas Moberg, Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, Norway

5:45-6:30 pm First Day Closing Remarks

7:00-9:30 pm Celebrating Open Government: A Reception hosted by the Government of Brazil and Omidyar Network.

The reception is onsite at the Convention Center.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

9:00-10:00 am OPENING Plenary: Responsibility and Challenges that Come with Openness

Walid al-Saqaf, YemenPortal.net & Alkasir, Yemen
Minister Francis Maude, United Kingdom
Secretary of State Ben Abbes, Tunisia
Fernando Rodrigues, Folha de São Paulo, Brazil

Moderated by Alex Howard, O’Reilly Media, United States

10:00-10:30 am Coffee and Networking

10:30-12:30 pm Thematic Breakout Sessions: Paths to Openness

Participants choose one of five breakout sessions to attend in the morning block of thematic discussions. Follow Sessions 1 or 2 in the morning and afternoon blocks for in-depth discussions on one topic, explored from three perspectives: government, civil society, and the private sector.

Access to Information: Government Perspectives

Vania Vieira, CGU, Government of Brazil
Dr. Ali M. Abbasov, Minister of Communications and Information Technologies, Government of Azerbaijan
Government of Liberia
Pierre Boucher, Deputy Chief Information Officer, Government of Canada

Moderated by Laura Neuman, The Carter Center, United States

Lessons Learned in Service Delivery: Government Perspectives

Minister Mathias Chikawe, Government of Tanzania
Ms. Marie Munk, Deputy Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Economy and the Interior, Government of Denmark
Government of Estonia (invited)
Permanent Secretary Dr. Bitange Ndemo, Government of Kenya

Moderated by Mark Robinson, DFID/Transparency and Accountability Initiative, UK

Networking Mechanism Affinity Group: Open Data Portals

Steve Davenport, AidDATA, United States
Tim Kelsey, Director of Transparency & Open Data, Cabinet Office, United Kingdom
Marko Rakar, Windmill, Croatia
Eric Gunderson, Development Seed, United States

Moderated by Abhinav Bahl, Global Integrity/OGP Networking Mechanism

Networking Mechanism Affinity Group: Public Finance Management and Fiscal Transparency

Iara Pietricovsky, INESC, Brazil
Secretary Butch Abad, Government of Philippines
Dr. Brian Wrampler, Boise State University, United States

Moderated by Nicole Anand, Global Integrity/OGPNetworking Mechanism

Advancing Open Government through Knowledge Exchange

Roberto Perez, IACC, Latin America, invited
Ms. Stela Mocan, Director e- Government Center, Government of Moldova
Miguel Pulido, Fundar, Mexico
Prayoga Wiradisuria, President's Delivery Unit, Government of Indonesia
Eric Braverman, McKinsey, United States

Moderated by Han Fraeters, World Bank Institute

12:30-2:00 pm Lunch and Networking.

Lunch will be provided onsite at the conference center.

2:00-4:00 pm Thematic Breakout Sessions: More Paths to Openness

Participants choose one of five breakout sessions to attend in the afternoon block of thematic discussions.

Access to Information: Civil Society and Private Sector Perspectives

Panel I: Civil Society Perspectives

Karin Lissakers, Revenue Watch Institute
Alison Tilley, Open Democracy Advice Center, South Africa
Ivan Pavlov, Freedom of Information Foundation, Russia
Karina Banfi, Alianza Regional Por La Libre Expresion e Informacion, Latin America

Moderated by Helen Darbishire, AccessInfo Europe, Spain

Panel II: Private Sector Perspectives

Alexandre Gomes, SEA Technologia, Brazil
Chris Taggart, Open Corporates, United Kingdom
Jose Francisco Compagno, Ernst and Young
Ginny Hunt, Google, United States

Moderated by Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation, United Kingdom

Lessons Learned in Service Delivery: Civil Society and Private Sector Perspectives

Part I: Civil Society Perspectives

Jose Ricardo Barrientos Quezada, ICEFI, Guatemala
Felipe Heusser, Ciudadano Inteligente, Chile
Nikhil Dey, MKSS, India
Harvey Lowe, Canadian Council on Social Development, Canada

Moderated by Rakesh Rajani, Twaweza, Tanzania

Part II: Private Sector Perspectives

Philip Ashlock, OpenPlans/Open311, United States
Jorge Soto, Citivox, Mexico
Tom Steinberg, MySociety, United Kingdom, invited
Michael Gurstein, Center for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training, Canada

Moderated by Rakesh Rajani, Twaweza, Tanzania

Open Government and Legislatures

Part I: Legislative Perspectives

Representative Paulo Pimenta, Brazil
Denis Russo,Votenaweb, Brazil
Laura Alonso, Legislature of City of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cristiano Ferri Soares de Faria, e-Democracy Program Director, Brazilian House of Representatives, Brazil

Moderated by Gherardo Casini, Head of Global Center for ICT in Parliaments, United Nations

Part II: Civil Society Perspectives

Andrew Mandelbaum, National Democratic Institute, United States
John Wonderlich, Sunlight Foundation, United States
Danardono Siradjudin, Indonesian Parliamentary Center, Indonesia
Melissa Ortiz Masso, Latin American Network on Legislative Transparency, Latin America

Moderated by Tiago Peixoto, World Bank Open Government Specialist

Measuring for Impact: How to build the case for Open Government

Rolf Alter, OECD, France
Nikos Passas, Northeastern University, United States/Greece
Jorge Garcia-Gonzalez, Director of Technical Secretariat of MESICIC, Organization of American States, Latin America
Harlan Yu, Princeton University, United States

Moderated by Martin Tisne, Omidyar Network, United Kingdom

Learning from Country Consultations to Date: New Strategies for Public Engagement

Samuel Rotta, Proetica, Peru
Chris Vein, The White House, United States
Khmara Oleksii, Civic Partnership for Supporting OGP in Ukraine
Government of Philippines, invited

Moderated by Warren Krafchik, International Budget Partnership, United States

4:00-4:30 pm Coffee and Networking

4:30-5:00 pm Report from Working Group on Meeting Outcomes

5:00-6:00 pm OGP at Home: Closing Remarks with OGP Leadership

Vice-Minister Luiz Navarro, Brazil
Samantha Power, White House, United States
Warren Krafchik, International Budget Partnership
Tim Kelsey, Director of Transparency and Open Data, Cabinet Office United Kingdom

Note: Brazil's local time is approximately eight and half hours behind us. The welcome address on April 17th starts at 9:30 A.M (B.R.T) which is approximately 5:00 P.M (I.S.T).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-government-partnership-brasilia-bangalore-meetup

Design!PubliC — Event in Delhi

praskrishna — 2012-04-11T11:45:04Z

Centre for Knowledge Societies in partnership with IBM, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, HeadStart, India@75, LiveMint, and the Centre for Internet & Society is organizing the third edition of Design!PubliC event in Delhi on April 19 and 20, 2012.

Design Public is a high-level conversation among a select group of thinkers, decision-makers and opinion-leaders who seek to transform India into an innovation society. It brings together influential actors from all sectors of society to deliberate the best ways in which innovation can serve the public interest. The larger goal of the Conclave is to serve as an enabling platform for building the necessary partnerships and consortia that will bring this agenda to practical realization.

This third edition of the Design Public Conclave is focused on issues of trust and participation and how they relate to innovation. We will be addressing key questions like:

How can we overcome deficiencies in trust and participation to better facilitate innovation?
How can we better imagine India as an innovation society?
How can we build smarter cities and ensure sustainable urban development?
What does rural innovation really mean and how do we do it?
What are the necessary consortia and cross-sectoral alignments for driving innovation?

The Panelists

	Aditya Dev Sood Aditya Dev Sood is Founder and CEO of the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS), an innovation consulting firm that provides design services of a kind that Indian industry never thought it would even need — User Research, User Experience Design, Design Strategy and Innovation Management. Through his consulting work, and also through his writings and his public presentations, Aditya offers a compelling vision of the central role of design and innovation for emerging economies such as India. The focus on his firm has remained on lower income and rural groups, and through contractual consulting engagements it has sought always to bring about market successes as well as the greater societal good. Dr. Sood is a Fulbright scholar with two doctorates from the University of Chicago and a wide range of disciplinary competencies, gained through a long and diverse education, including Architecture, Art History, Critical Theory, Comparative Literature, Sanskrit Philology, Philosophy of Language, Cultural Anthropology, Social Theory and Political Economy.
	Arun Maira Arun Maira is a Member of the National Innovation Council, a part of the National Planning Commission of the Government of India. In addition to being a prolific author on leadership and organization transformation, as well as the future of India, he has worked as an experienced consultant for companies all over the world and for a diversity of industries, from automobiles and pharmaceuticals to international agencies for economic development. Prior to joining the National Planning Commission, Arun Maira worked with the TATA Group in India, the Boston Consulting Group, Save the Children in India, the Axis Bank Foundation, and CII’s National Councils, among many others. He received his M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Physics from St Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
	Aditya Mishra In addition to leading a sales team for Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) Ltd., Aditya Mishra began his own not-for-profit company to promote entrepreneurship in India called Headstart. Headstart is run by volunteers dedicated to creating space for and promoting innovation in India by fostering individual entrenpreneurs, research, and the adoption of new technology. Aditya advises early stage start-ups and incubators through Startup Saturdays events to aid in the development of products and service, busines planning, and sales and marketing. Headstart is headquarted in Bangalore, but through the Headstart Network of entrepreneurs, academics, and industry professionals, activities are carried out in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi, Ahmedabad, Chennai, and Kolkata.
	Sukumar Ranganathan Sukumar Ranganthan was a founding member of Mint, a business paper of the Hindustan Times in association with the Wall Street Journal. Launched in 2007, Mint brings “Clarity in Business News” to readers across the country. He has worked in several capacities in business news, from Marketing Editor at The Hindu Business Line to Managing Editor of India’s leading business magazine, Business Today. In addition to a Master’s degree in Business Administration, Sukumar holds a Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering and another Master’s in Mathematics.
	Bhairavi Jani After graduating from Miami University, Ohio, USA, and working with KPMG Consulting in Washington D.C., Bhairavi Jani returned to India in 2001 and began her career in business. After setting up and scaling up a fourth party logistics company, Bhairavi accepted the role of Director for all companies under the SCA Group in 2005, which manages shipping, customs, warehousing, logistics, and IT. As Group Director, she works with different teams from the respective companies withing the Group, providing them strategic advice. In addition to being a successful businesswoman, Bhairavi has worked closely with the late C. K. Prahalad on India@75 of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), a grassroots initiative for realizing an inclusive, sustainable, and developed India by 2022. It works to accelerate India’s transformative into an economically vital, technologically innovative, and socially and ethically vibrant global leader. Having served as a National Chairman of Young Indians, CII, Bhairavi has since 2011 taken a five year hiatus from her own businesses to serve as Executive Director for India@75.
	Ashwin Mahesh Ashwin Mahesh is a professor of Public Policy at IIM Bangalore, but his innovative ideas and dedication to service has brought him outside academia. In 1998, he co-founded India Together, an online magazine of public affairs, policy, and development in India. He has also started Mapunity, an independent R&D company designed around reversing the trend of government lagging behind technology. Ashwin Mahesh has a PhD in atmospheric remote sensing from the University of Washington, and he does research in exploring the expanding role of technology & IT in urban traffic management.
	Yamini Aiyar Yamini Aiyar is the founder and director of the Accountability Initiative, an organization working to strengthen accountability and engagement in Indian governance, which has received praise from Indian government officials and even President Obama. She is also presently a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, focusing on understanding accountability tools in order to institutionalize accountability methods and strengthen public service delivery systems. Prior to the Accountability Initiative, Aiyar worked at the World Bank and the Ford Foundations in New Delhi. She holds a MSc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics, and M.A. in Social and Political Sciences from St. Edmund’s College, Cambridge University, and a B.A. in Philosophy from St. Stephens College, Delhi University.
	Scott Burnham Scott Burnham is a creative director, writer, and designer who has worked on strategies for cities to use design to reprogram relationships. He has created several projects for European cities including Urban Play for Amsterdam with Droog Design and Bairro Criativo for Porto, Portugal. Currently, Burnham directs the Trust Design project for Premsela, the Netherlands Institute for Design, exploring the relationship between trust and design from products and shared urban spaces. He is the editor of a special 4-issue publication series with Volume Magazine, and a guest lecturer at Design Academy Eindhoven. In addition to writing and speaking, Burnham worked as the Creative Director for the UK’s Urbis Center for Urban Culture from 2003-2006.
	Samanth Subramanian Samanth Subramanian is a journalist who has written pieces for The New York Times, Mint, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the Hindu, and many others. Though he prefers long-form narrative articles, he also has written several shorter pieces, as well as a non-fiction book Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast, which won the 2010 Shaki Bhatt First Book Prize. He currently writes for the New York Times’ India Ink blog. Subramanian completed his undergraduate degree from Pennsylvania State University in journalism and received his Master’s degree in International Relations from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
	Sunil Abraham Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of The Centre for Internet and Society, which aims to criticaly engage with the interaction between the internet and the public, including concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability, adn pedagogic practices. While serving on the board of directors for CIS, Sunil has worked on many projects exploring the internet and information. He has been elected an Ashoka fellow, where he explored the democratic potential of the internet, and was granted a Sarai FLOSS fellowship as well. For the United Nations, Sunil managed the International Open Source Network for the Asia-Pacific Development Information Program between 2004 and 2007. The next year, he managed ENRAP, Knowledge Networking for Rural Development in the Asia-Pacific region, which worked to share knowledge amongst the projects and stakeholders of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
	Shanker Annaswamy Shanker Annaswamy is the Managing Director for IBM India Private Limited, and Regional General Manager of IBM in India and South Asia. He is responsible for all sales, marketing, services, and delivery in India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. In addition to holding a senior position in IBM, Annaswamy has been President and Chief Executive Officer for GE Medical Systems in South Asia, Managing Director of Wipro-GE Medical Systems, and Adviser with the Ministry of Health for the Sultanate of Oman. He currently serves as Chair of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) National Committee on Intellectual Property Owners, having previously co-chaired CII’s advisory committee on its National Innovation Mission. In 2009, BusinessWeek listed Annaswamy among India’s 50 Most Powerful People. He received his Bachelor of Engineering degree from Madras University and a Diploma in Business Management Education from the All India Management Association, New Delhi.
	Ashok Alexander Ashok Alexander is Director of Avahan, the Global Health Program’s HIV prevention initiative in India, which was founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2003. As Director, he works with India’s federal and state governments, NGOs, and corporate partners. Before joining Avahan, Alexander worked in Hong Kong, the United States, and India for 24 years. After joining McKinsey & Company in New York, he moved to India to become the head of its New Delhi office. In addition, he has extensive experience working with NGOs, being a leader in the creation of the American India Foundation (AIF) and serving on the Board of Advisors. Alexander holds graduate degrees in economics and management from Delhi University and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
	Jeby Cherian Jeby Cherian is the Strategy Leader of IBM in India and South Asia, and also serves on the India Leadership Team. He provides guidance to IBM’s Corporate Development team in India, leads and positions IBM’s Security solutions portfolio to the Government of India, and provides executive sponsorship for growing the High End Server business in India. Before this, Cherian worked in Bangalore with IBM’s Global Solutions Delivery Center and with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Finance Transformation services. Cherian is a CPA with a Master’s degree in Accounting from the University of Illinois and an MBA from the University of Chicago.
	Pankaj Jhunja Pankaj Jhunja, now General Manager of Design for Tata Motors, has had the opportunity to work in a diversity of businesses each with different responsibilities and complexities of products. Before Tata Motors, Jhunja worked for Dilip Chhabria Design (DC) specializing in Custom Built Cars, Homeflow Inc. in Pune as Product Manager, and with Renault Nissan India in Mumbai as General Manager Design. Jhunja holds a Bachelor’s degree from the National Institute of Technology, Silchar, and a Master’s degree in Design from IIT Mumbai.
	Chakshu Roy Chakshu Roy is a lawyer who heads technology initiatives at PRS Legislative Research (PRS), New Delhi. PRS is a unique initiative that provides non-partisan analysis to all Members of Parliament in India. Chakshu is developing a comprehensive technology strategy to engage large sections of the population in the policy process. He has conceptualised and developed India’s only online database of all state laws. Chakshu has conducted capacity-building workshops for over 1000 journalists on tracking the work of legislators. He specialised in real estate law and commercial agreements before joining PRS. He has earlier worked in corporate law with the Chamber of Law, New Delhi. He holds bachelors degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi University.
	Ekta Ohri Ekta Ohri is the Head of Project Operations at the Center for Knowledge Societies (CKS). She holds experience of applying ethnographic and user experience research methods as well as principles of design thinking for addressing a variety of innovation challenges in emerging economies – ranging from improving rural public health delivery systems, providing financial services to the poor and bridging their information and communication gaps through telecommunications to enhancing urban mobility and luxury experiences. As the head of innovation at CKS, she works with different teams providing them strategic advice around innovation approaches, developing context (urban or rural) specific research methodologies and analyzing research insights in ways that leads to concepts that create maximum value for the users, as well as disseminating some of these ideas in the public domain through publications. Ekta has multi-disciplinary background in Architecture (Sushant School of Art and Architecture), Visual and Critical Studies (California College of the Arts), and Anthropology (Northwestern University) and is particularly interested in exploring linkages between design, culture and lived experiences.
	James Crabtree James Crabtree is the Mumbai Correspondent for the Financial Times since November 2011. He covers Indian corporate news and social and political trends in the country’s financial capital. James joined the FT in 2010 and was previously the Comment Editor based in London.He was previously an editor and essayist at Prospect. Before returning to journalism, James worked as policy advisor in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and also for various think tanks. He has also spent a number of years living in the US, first as a Fulbright Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and then living in Washington, working as a senior policy advisor at the New Democrat Network, another think tank. James is a trustee of the charity mySociety.org, one of the UK’s most innovative technology organisations.
	Theo JJ Groothuizen Theo JJ Groothuizen is currently the Counsellor for Science and Technology at the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in New Delhi India. He is member of the steering committee of the Delhi Sustainable Development Summit 2008. Born in 1949 in the Netherlands, he graduated in industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, and is since 1986 principle of Landmark Design Holding (Netherlands and Switzerland). Groothuizen served as executive board member of International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) and the Association of Dutch Designers (BNO) and as advisor for the Bureau of European Design Associations (BEDA). He was active in several international advisory boards and was tutor in international design workshops, initiated international exhibitions and has been invited as speaker, guest lecturer and jury member all over the world. He is fellow of the Foundation Design for the World, advisor for the European Institute for Design and Disability (EIDD) and honorary member of the BNO. He taught at the Delft University of Technology and served as member of its External Research Advisory Board. He also taught at the Design Academy and functioned as international curator of the Gwangju Design Biennale 2005.
	Sam Pitroda Sam Pitroda is an international figure known for his strong support in India’s communications revolution and redefining the role that technology can play in India by linking it to better delivery of services to the underprivileged. He has long worked in government, business, and innovation in India. He served as Technology Advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is founder and CEO of C-SAM, Inc., with offices worldwide, and chaired the National Knowledge Commission from 2005-2008. Now, in addition to Advisor to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information, Infrastructure & Innovations, chairman of India’s National Innovation Council, charting the roadmap for India’s ‘Decade of Innovation.’ Pitrota completed his Master’s in Physics and Electronics from Maharaja Sayajirao University and subsequently received another Master’s in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In 2010, he also received and Honorary degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
	Darshana Gothi Chauhan Darshana is an architect and urban designer. She has varied experience in designing new towns, regeneration of town centres, transport action plans and urban extension projects. She is passionate about participatory planning and the approach of empowering local people to create better cities. Darshana is currently working at Urban Initiatives in London as a Managing Consultant. Her recent works at UI include Southall Big Conversation, a public consultation process in a culturally diverse area in London . Darshana is also the Chapter Development Manager of INTBAU India, a charitable organisation promoting traditional architecture and urbanism in India . As part of INTBAU India, she has been instrumental in organising public consultation events backed with intensive baseline and capacity building work for the regeneration of the inner city of Pune in India. Darshana has simultaneously worked on projects for other consultancies such as The Max Lock Centre, London . Her works at Max Lock include a Spatial Planning Framework for Kaduna , a city of 3 million people for the Central Government of Nigeria. She has previously worked with the Ministry of Works and Human Settlements in Bhutan to develop the master plan for a new administrative capital in East Bhutan as part of Christopher Charles Benninger Architects.

Agenda

Day 1: Certificate in Innovation Management

Venue: CKS House, New Delhi: 19th April, 2012

09.30 a.m. Icebreaker Dialogue
Participants will introduce themselves briefly and talk about their perceptions of innovation and its application in their work. A CKS member will aggregate the thoughts that emerge from the audience in order to articulate the multiple definitions of innovation that emerge. This will be followed by a quick call out on the value of innovation.

10.30 a.m. Analysis of Innovation Case Studies
CKS Innovation Experts will present various case studies of innovation in order to present the different tools, approaches and stages of innovation.

12.40 p.m. UDE Approach to Innovation
CKS Innovation Experts to present the U-D-E approach to innovation and demonstrate different uses of the Innovation Cycle.

01.15 p.m. Wrap Up and Invitation to Innovation Consultations
CKS Innovation Trainers conclude the morning's session and invite participants to sign up for Innovation Consultations post lunch at the Chaia Innovation Campus.

02.15 p.m. Innovation Consultations
Participants meet mentors on a one to one basis to receive consultation on how they can apply this approach in the specific context of their work or a particular challenge? Where are the opportunities to apply the approach and what value can that have?

Day 2: Design Public Conclave

Venue: National Museum, New Delhi: 20th April, 2012

09.45 a.m. Word of Welcome
Aditya Dev Sood, Center for Knowledge Societies, gives a word of welcome and short introduction to the logic of the conclave.

10.00 a.m. Crises of Trust are Crises of Creativity, Design, and ultimately of Innovation
by Samanth Subramanian, Scott Burnham and Yamini Aiyar
This opening panel will address questions of trust and participation in the wake of the global spring. How can institutions respond creatively to include the networked public? What are the inter-relationships between trust, creativity, design and innovation and why are these important for our future?

11.00 a.m. Participation, Collaboration, Innovation
by James Crabtree Ekta Ohri, Sunil Abraham, Ashwin Mahesh and Aditya Mishra
Crises of trust are often linked to failures of participation and inclusion. How can activists and critics of institutions be more creative in their approaches so as to restore and repair the public trust? What channels for feedback and more substantive modes of participation must be created so as to promote innovation through dialogue and collaboration?

12.00 p.m. Imagining India as an Innovation Society
by Aditya Dev Sood, Ashok Alexander, Shanker Annaswamy, Sukumar Ranganthan and Arun Maira
This panel brings together industry and government experts to imagine the values, behaviors, ways of working, societal institutions and diverse other dimensions of society that would have to change in India to transform it into an innovation society. But first, what is an innovation society? Do we understand this correctly?

02.00 p.m. Breakout One: Smarter Cities
by Darshana Gothi Chauhan, Ekta Ohri and Jeby Cherian
Jeby Cherian of IBM will lead this breakout session on smarter Urban Management and Civic Administration.

02.00 p.m. Breakout Two: How can we do Rural Innovation better?
What should or could we mean by Rural Innovation? Is this the same old thing as jugaad, indovation and tinkering? This panel brings together designers and innovation experts to talk with management thinkers to describe the specific steps and stages involved in innovation processes and how they could apply in rural areas. What do steps individuals and organizations need to take to reeducate or empower decision makers at all levels in different sectors in India to bring about an awareness, understanding and orientation towards innovation?

02.00 p.m. Breakout Three: 50 Steps to an Innovation Society
by Theo JJ Groothuizen Bhairavi Jani
Bhairavi Jani will lead this thematic breakout session on specific steps governments, corporations, social agencies, academics and individual citizens can take to better imagine and then build an Innovation Society.

03.30 p.m. Mutual Presentations
Breakout sessions will cross-report to one another.

04.00 p.m. Concluding Plenary: What Do We Need to Do To Build an Innovation Society?
by Chakshu Roy Aditya Dev Sood Bhairavi Jani
This plenary session will include leading thinkers from government and media along with sectoral experts to discuss specific steps we must now undertake in order to work towards innovation in different domain and activity areas. In some ways this is the most challenging and important session of the day, for it will lay out the next steps and future path of the Design Public process.

06.00 p.m. Wrap-Up and Word of Thanks
Aditya Dev Sood gives a few concluding remarks and concludes the day with a vote of thanks to all advisors, sponsors, partners, speakers and participants at the Design Public Conclave.

07.00 p.m. Dinner
All participants are invited to a dinner and celebration of 10 years of CKS at the Chaia Innovation Campus in Chattarpur Enclave, New Delhi. Transportation will be provided.

For registration, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/design-public-delhi

International Space Apps Challenge

praskrishna — 2012-04-10T05:18:14Z

The International Space Apps Challenge is an international codeathon-style event that will take place over a 48 hour period in cities on all seven continents – and in space – on the weekend of April 21-22, 2012. The event embraces collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing solutions to global challenges. The Centre for Internet & Society is organising the event in Bangalore.

Background

On September 20, 2011, President Obama, together with other heads of state, endorsed the principles of the Open Government Partnership – a new multilateral initiative to promote transparency, participation and collaboration between governments and citizens. Since then, 52 countries have joined the global partnership.

NASA is working with organizations around the world on the International Space Apps Challenge as part of the United States’ domestic commitment to the Open Government Partnership.

How it Works?

Participants such as concerned citizens, discipline experts, engineers, scientists, and software code developers attend events hosted in cities around the world. At these events, individuals collaborate with others by forming teams focused on solving a particular challenge. The teams compete with other teams around the world to utilize publicly available data to design innovative “solutions” to a pre-determined series of global “challenges.” The challenges are collected prior to the event from supporting organizations.

Challenges

Challenges are grouped into four broad categories:

Software Development
Open Hardware
Citizen Science Platforms!
Data Visualization!

It’s not just about smart phone applications! The International Space Apps.

Challenge will provide solutions that:

Address strategic exploration needs!
Address strategic social needs (life on Earth)

To date, 50+ challenges have been submitted. These challenges are being vetted with development communities such as the Yahoo! Developer Network to refine them prior to the event.

Benefits

Some benefits of the International Space Apps Challenge include:

Visible demonstration of a government’s interest in using publicly available data, in partnership with others, to address global needs.
Opportunity for citizens in countries with little or no investment in space exploration to contribute to space exploration through open source, open data, and code development.
Promotion of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education by encouraging students from around the world to utilize publicly available data for solutions to global challenges.
Encouragement of international partnership and mutual understanding.
Demonstration of commitment to the principles of the Open Government Partnership.

Sample Event Agenda

	Saturday, April 21
09:00	Registration
10:00	Schedule and logistics announcements
10:30	Subject Matter Expert briefing
11:00	Begin developing
12:30	Lunch break 13:30 Developing continued
16:30	Optional progress briefing, more developing
18:30	Dinner break
20:00	More developing
	Sunday, April 22
10:00	Logistics briefing & updates
10:15	Begin developing
12:00	Submission Deadline
12:00	Lunch break
13:30	Presentations
15:00	Judges Voting
15:30	Awards
16:00	Post event social

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the International Space Apps Challenge?
The International Space Apps Challenge is a 2 day technology development event during which citizens from around the world will work together to solve current challenges relevant to both space exploration and social need.
When will it take place?
The International Space Apps Challenge will take place on all seven continents – and in space - on 21-22 April 2012.
Who is leading the Challenge?
On September 20, 2011, President Obama, together with other heads of state, endorsed the principles of the Open Government Partnership – a new multilateral initiative to promote transparency, participation and collaboration between governments and citizens. Since then, 52 countries have joined the global partnership. NASA is working with other organizations around the world on the International Space Apps Challenge as part of the United States’ domestic commitments to the Open Government Partnership.
Who can participate in the Challenge?
Anyone can participate in the International Space Apps Challenge. It requires individuals with a broad range of skills. We are looking for engineers, technologists, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students, entrepreneurs – anyone who has a passion for changing the world and is willing to contribute.
Why should I participate in the Challenge?
You should participate in the Challenge because the toughest challenges of the world are not one nation’s alone, and this is a unique opportunity to develop technology to reach the human race and make the world a better place. Additionally, the Challenge is an opportunity to:
1. Demonstrate a commitment to the principles of the Open Government Partnership.
2. Exercise a government’s interest in using open data and technology, in partnership with others, to address global needs.
3. Engage citizens in countries with little or no investments in space exploration to contribute to space exploration through open source, open data, and code development.
4. Promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education by encouraging students from around the world to utilize open technology for solutions to global challenges.
5. Encourage international partnership and mutual understanding.
What challenges will be addressed at the event?
Challenges are in development from a wide variety of sources inside and outside of NASA. An initial set has been posted on the site and the community is invited to help develop them collaboratively there. New challenges will continue to be added on a weekly basis in anticipation of the event. To discuss contributing additional challenges or datasets, contact alicia.llewellyn-1@nasa.gov.
Where will the Challenge take place?
Locations in which events are currently planned to be held include San Francisco, US; Tokyo, Japan; Melbourne and Canberra, Australia; Jakarta, Indonesia; Exeter and Oxford, UK; Nairobi, Kenya; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and McMurdo Station, Antarctica. There will be additional events throughout the world and participation by astronauts on the International Space Station.
What is a codeathon?
A codeathon is a unique event that brings together citizens interested in collaborating on the development solutions that address critical challenges. A codeathon celebrates software development in its most positive context—using minimal resources and maximum brainpower to create outside- the-box solutions in response to interesting problems. Codathons are technology development marathons, drawing on the talents and initiative of the best and the brightest software developers, engineers, designers and technologists from around the world, who volunteer their time to respond to real- world problems with solutions than can have immediate impact. The International Space Apps Challenge is a “codeathon-style” event.
Is the event limited to just software development?
No! Participants in the event will collaborate to build software, open hardware, data visualization, and citizen science platform solutions that contribute to space exploration and solve global challenges that focus on improving life on earth.
What happens at the event?
At the events, individuals collaborate with others by forming teams focused on solving a particular challenge. The teams compete with other teams around the world to utilize publicly available space and data to design innovative “solutions” to a pre- determined series of global “challenges.”
What about licensing and IP rights?
All solutions built at the event must be submitted under a license that permits the free and open dissemination of the work. NASA and the other supporting organizations do not own the rights to nor are committed to utilize any solution developed during the event.
Who organizes the events in each city?
Each event is led as a collaboration between organizations who work together to host an event, mobilize the developer community and contribute to the overall success of the International Space Apps Challenge.
How can organizations get involved?
There is still an opportunity to participate in the International Space Apps Challenge and contribute to an event in your country. We are looking for organizations who are interested in supporting events in cities around the world, as well as for subject matter experts who can share their expertise at the event, either in person or remotely. To express interest in supporting an event in your country, contact elizabeth.sabet@secondmuse.com or kristen.m.painting@nasa.gov

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/international-space-apps-challenge

Open DataCamp — 2012

praskrishna — 2012-03-30T14:49:14Z

A one-day unconference for people working with data from various sectors to come together and share their projects and ideas was organised in Bangalore on March 24, 2012. It was organised by the DataMeet group. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event.

Sessions

9:00am - 10:00am	Registration
10:00am - 10:10am	Introduction to OpenDataCamp Team DataMeet
10:15am - 10.55am	Panel Discussion: State of Open Data in India Data in India in general is in a state for much improvement. What does that mean for open data? How can open data help improve the data situation? What are the drawbacks of opening up data? Anand S (Gramener), Zainab Bawa (HasGeek), Nithya Raman (Transparent Chennai), Moderator Nisha Thompson
11:00am - 11.25am	Pictures through numbers Anand, Chief Data Scientist, Gramener
11.25am - 11.40pm	Tea
11:45pm - 12.10pm	Karnataka Guarantee of Services to Citizens Sridhar Pabbisetty, COO, Centre for Public Policy
12:15pm - 12.40pm	Open Data & Free Maps Shekhar Krishnan
12.45am - 1.10pm	Introduction Aadhaar(UID) Data Pramod Varma & Sanjay Jain
1.10am - 2.15pm	Lunch

	Main Hall	Meeting Room (small)	Food Court
2:15pm - 2:40pm	Drawing By Numbers by Tactical Technology Collective Kaustubh Srikanth	Why Big data and why should you bother? Mohan S,CEO, TrendWise Analytics	Karnataka Learning Partnership Data Practices and a Call for collaboration. Megha Vishwanath
2:45pm - 3:10pm	ISB's visualisation of migration in India. ISB & Gramener	The State of Climate Data in India - Open and Closed. Pavan Srinath	Anatomy of NSSO Data sumandro
3.15pm - 3:40pm	Water Data Nisha Thompson, India Water Portal	Mobile as a Data Collection Device Thejesh GN	Open data API and the challenges Karthik B. R

3.40pm - 4.15pm

Tea

4.15pm - 4.40pm

Modelling car insurance pricing
Gaurav Vohra, Jigsaw Academy

Free slot

What is Data?
Mrinal Wadhwa

4.45pm - 6.00pm

Feedback, etc

The sponsors included Google, India Water Portal, Gramener, Microsoft Research, Akshara Foundation, DataMeet, HasGeek and the Centre for Internet & Society.

Venue:Google, 3rd, 4th and 5th floors,RMZ infinity, Tower ENo.3, Old Madras Road, Bennigana Halli, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560 016

For more info, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/open-data-camp

Open access to government data on the cards

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:31:48Z

The way has been cleared for public access to the data collected by Union government ministries and departments, with official approval being accorded to the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). T Ramachandran's article was published in the Hindu on March 25, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted in it.

Following its recent approval by the Union Cabinet, the policy has been notified and is in the process of being gazetted, said R. Siva Kumar, CEO of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure, and head of the Natural Resources Data Management System, Department of Science and Technology.

The use of open data as a tool for promoting governmental transparency and efficiency has been gaining ground in some parts of the world. An Open Government Partnership was launched last year by the United States and seven other governments. Forty-three other governments have joined the partnership, which has endorsed an Open Government Declaration, expressing a commitment to better “efforts to systematically collect and publish data on government spending and performance for essential public services and activities.” It acknowledges the ‘right' of citizens to seek information on governmental activities.

India has not joined the partnership, but is collaborating with the U.S. in developing an open source version of software for a data portal.

The NDSAP states that at least five ‘high value' data sets should be uploaded to a newly created portal, data.gov.in, in three months of the notification of the policy. Uploading of the remaining data sets should be completed within a year.

The Department of Science and Technology will co-ordinate the effort and create the portal through the National Informatics Centre. The Department of Information Technology will work out the implementation guidelines, including those related to technology and data standards.

Welcoming the approval for the NDSAP, Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based NGO, said the removal of “a few good aspects” in an earlier draft of the policy — such as linkage with Sections 8 and 9 of the Right to Information Act that specify the kinds of information exempt from disclosure by the authorities — had weakened it “even further.” “None of the criticisms the CIS had sent in as part of the feedback requested on the draft have been addressed,” he said.

The NDSAP seeks “to provide an enabling provision and platform for providing proactive and open access to the data generated through public funds available with various departments/organisations of the government of India.”

However, the Ministries and Departments can draw up, within six months of the notification of the policy, a negative list of data-sets that will not be shared, subject to periodic review by an ‘oversight committee.'

The policy envisages three types of access to data: open, registered and restricted. Access to data in the open category will be “easy, timely, user-friendly and web-based without any process of registration/authorisation.” But data in the registered access category will be accessible “only through a prescribed process of registration/authorisation by respective departments/organisations” and available to “recognised institutions/organisations/public users, through defined procedures.” Data categorised as restricted will be made available only “through and under authorisation.”

The policy also provides for pricing, with the Ministries and Departments being asked to formulate their norms for data in the registered and restricted access categories within three months of the notification of the policy.

Read the original published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/open-access-to-govt-data

Francis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World

praskrishna — 2013-08-03T05:36:54Z

The Electronic Publishing Trust recently announced a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developed countries who have made significant contribution for the cause of open access and free exchange of research findings. There were 30 nominations from 17 countries around the world and Dr. Francis Jayakanth from the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore was selected for the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access in the Developing World by a committee that went through all the nominations.

The award function organised by the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore was held at the Sambasivan Auditorium, M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in Chennai on 14 February 2012. Leading luminaries such as Prof. M.S. Swaminathan, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. G Baskaran and Prof. K Mangala Sunder participated in the award felicitation ceremony.

Giving the welcome speech, Prof. Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at CIS said that Dr. Jayakanth works for the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, has trained many students and helped a number of institutes to set up open access repositories. Prof. Arunachalam added that the event is being celebrated in India as the winner is from India and specified that it is being held at the MS Swaminathan Foundation as this was the institution that hosted the first workshop to promote open access. Prof. Swaminathan had a vital role in arranging funds for the workshop. About 50 people had learnt what open access was, how to set up open access repositories, how to use the EPrints software, etc. For this very reason it was decided to hold the event in Chennai and not Bangalore where Dr. Jayakanth is based.

Felicitating Dr. Jayakanth, Prof. Swaminathan who presented the award added that it is important to highlight the contributions of those who really convert the concept of social inclusion to reality. He said that today every politician talks about inclusive growth. What is this inclusive growth, how do you convert exclusion to inclusion? Exclusion creates large problems, social problems, economic problems, etc. On a concluding note, Prof. Swaminathan said that the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh has declared 2012-13 as the year of science and he hopes that there will be a new science policy and technology policy and that he hopes that a very important component of that should be methods of ensuring open access including open access to knowledge and open access to literature.

In his award acceptance speech, Dr. Jayakanth said that the atmosphere was very overwhelming and never in his two-and-a-half decade old career he had the opportunity to speak amidst such luminaries and added that it was a privilege and prestige to have received the award from Prof. Swaminathan, the father of the Green Revolution in India. He also added that no event in India or elsewhere is complete without the active participation and mentioning of the name of Prof. Arunachalam, the greatest advocate of open access that India has seen so far, and that he wouldn’t have been here at the award ceremony but for the timely intervention of Prof. Arunachalam.

Dr. Jayakanth concluded by saying that he would like to thank Prof. NV Joshi, Prof. Derek Law, Prof. Alma Swan, Prof. Balaram, Prof. N Balakrishnan, Prof. Giridhar, and Prof. TB Rajashekar, and particularly the students of the information and knowledge management programme at the National Centre of Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, who were responsible for the growth of a repository granting more visibility to the 32,000 publications that are part of the repository.

Prof. Mangala Sunder of IIT Madras and Prof. G Baskaran of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, also participated in the event. Prof. Sunder said that it is for the kind of information that we talk about, which we want to make public for which champions like Dr. Jayakanth have been working on the sidelines but working so efficiently to get institution after institution to convert what is known as a rigid framework into a flexible more open policy of bringing their scientific content to their intellectual information content. He said that he works in the area of content development from the point of view of education and he understands the difficulty of bringing material to the public.

There are many issues, such as issues about copyright, issues about people owning the information, issues about people feeling very rigid on what they want to say in the public, etc. Dr. Jayakanth has gone through all these exercises for the last 30 years in slowly creating the “little after little” what are called the waterways to finally see that everyone benefits. The linking of science, knowledge and sustainable development to open access to information, open access to research and open access to content completes the whole cycle of knowledge.

Prof. Baskaran said that it is a very well deserved award and Dr. Jayakanth has definitely raised the bar for future awardees. Prof. Baskaran stressed upon the aspects of open access. He said that as a theoretical physicist he understands the need for open access very well. Physicists, when they have new research results place them in arXiv, the open access repository for preprints in physics. Some people wonder what if some physicists deposit all kinds of articles in the arXiv. Experience has shown that 99 per cent of the articles appear in good journals later. He added that once it is put in the arXiv, the whole world gets access and a bad paper will be noticed and commented upon by many. No one likes to be the author of such a paper! He urged that other sciences, especially the life sciences should have a repository similar to arXiv and requested Prof. Swaminathan to take the intiative at MSSRF.

Dr. Francis Jayakanth

Dr. Francis Jayakanth is a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore. He has played a significant role in the establishment of India’s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and open access journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, open access journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, and the benefits of open access to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. Dr. Jayakanth can indeed be considered an open access ‘renaissance man’, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of open access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level.

See Francis's presentation on Who Benefits from Open Access to Scholarly Literature? [Powerpoint, 1523 KB]

See the video of the award function below:

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/francis-wins-ept-award

Comments on Technical Standards for Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (Phase II)

pranesh — 2012-02-29T09:44:07Z

The e-Governance Standards Division has called for public comments on the draft of the Technical Standards IFEG Phase II. We from the Centre for Internet and Society have given our comments.

The present document is — as the draft IFEG Phase I document was — an excellent step in the right direction, following very ably the policy guidelines laid down in the National Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance.

The Expert Committee and other contributors have made excellent choices as to the 29 standards that have been laid down in this phase of the IFEG. It is praiseworthy that the majority of these (20) are designated as mandatory, and only nine are designated as interim standards. Furthermore, the system has been quite transparent with the selection of standards, providing concise descriptions for each.

That said, the document could be improved by providing greater detail for those standards which are said to violate the National Open Standards Policy. In the current document, every interim standard is said to violate “clause 2”, rather than providing the more specific details (sub-clause, one-line explanation) about the violation.

It is unfortunate that yet again accessibility-related standards have been passed over in the presentation and archival domain.

As we have mentioned in earlier feedback, many other governmental interoperability frameworks are going beyond merely listing technical standards. Some governments, such as Germany and the EU, go beyond technical interoperability, and also have documents dealing with organizational, informational, and legal interoperability. These are equally important components of an interoperability framework. Other governments also also lay down best practice guides, and other aids to implementation, sometimes even including application recommendations. Further, there are many which lay out standards for the the semantic layer, business services layer, etc.

We at the Centre for Internet and Society are currently advising the government of Iraq on development of their e-Governance Interoperability Framework, and would be glad to extend any support that the Department of IT may require of us, including comments on all further phases.

Section-specific Comments

Section 5.2.8

It is unclear whether by IEEE 802.11-2007, the base version is being referred to or the amended version, since IEEE 802.11-2007 has been amended by IEEE 802.11n-2009 to include the IEEE 802.11n standard. As IEEE 802.11n has also become an established standard, it is suggested that section 5.2.28 make it clear that the amended standard is being referred to.

Section 5.2.13

It is recommended that IMAP v4rev1 (IETF RFC 3501, updated by RFCs 4466, 4469, 4551, 5032, 5182, 5738, 6186, supplemented by RFCs 2177, 4550) be used instead of POP3 (IETF RFC 1939). It is critical that governmental messages be preserved on government servers, and should not simply be downloaded and then deleted as is the default with POP3 implementations. IMAP allows for downloading and offline access to mails as well. Any deletion on the server from the client would be recorded in the server logs, hence allowing for transparency. Given this, and the more advanced features available in IMAP, it should be preferred to POP3. In other government interoperability frameworks where an e-mail access protocol is specified, including those of Germany, Malaysia, and Hong Kong, IMAP is provided as a standard and never is POP3 provided as the sole standard.

Section 5.2.15

SAML 2.0 is a standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between security domains, and is not a ‘Wireless LAN Authentication’ standard. Indeed, section 5.2.8 (IEEE 802.11-2007) talks about ‘Wireless LAN Security’.

Section 5.2.23

WML v1.3, as noted, is a declining standard that is deprecated due to the recommendation by W3C of XHTML Basic v1.1. If it is at all included, it should be included not as “Mandatory – Watchlist”, but as “Additional Standard”, as it is a direct competitor to XHTML Basic v1.1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/interoperability-framework-for-e-governance

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

praskrishna — 2012-02-23T09:12:10Z

Cost of research journals going up while funds available are coming down, writes Vasudha Venugopal in an article published in the Hindu on February 19, 2012.

Technology has inherently changed the way science education is propagated. Digital libraries, wikis, webinars, videoconferences, open access and repositories — all seem to be excellent tools for sharing scientific knowledge.

Download the PDF

But with the escalating cost of research journals and the economic and logistical challenges that often accompany attending a conference, the open access model is increasingly being recognised as an alternative to expensive commercial publishing models.

Consider the situation at, say, a biological sciences research firm in Chennai. At least 16 per cent of its total budget is spent on the subscription of journals; more than 50 per cent of that going to the two largest publishing companies. Experts say the cost of journals is increasing at an average of eight per cent a year. Further, many academics do not consider work to have been adequately shared if it has been merely published in over-priced journals.

Boycott

Incidentally, last week, more than 5,700 researchers started boycotting Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, amid growing concerns at cost and accessibility. More than 3,000 academics have signed a petition that claims the publisher charges “exorbitantly high” prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles,' forcing libraries to buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all.

"Since 1950, the volume of research results started getting too large for the scientific societies, leading to the entry of commercial publishers into the field. The cost per journal and the number of such journals are proliferating, while the funds available are coming down,” says Francis Jayakanth, who has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository, ePrints@IISc, which has more than 32,000 publications by researchers.

India has nearly 53 registered open access repositories that allow users to download and use documents free.

Open access advocates say Indian papers appear in both Indian and foreign journals, roughly in equal proportions, but most Indian journals have a very poor circulation, many of them below 1,500; and most Indian papers appear in low-impact foreign journals. “Most scientists in India are forced to work in a situation of information poverty. Others are unable to access what Indian researchers are doing, leading to low visibility and low use of their work. Thus, Indian work is hardly cited. Both these handicaps can be overcome to a considerable extent if open access is adopted widely, both within and outside the country,” says Subbiah Arunachalam, an open access advocate.

Experts say many U.S. universities, including Princeton, MIT and Harvard, have their own repositories. Institutions in India, too, need to set up open-access repositories to ensure their work is available to the public even if it ends up being published in an expensive journal. Even if these are made available in different repositories, one can still access them all if all the repositories are interoperable.

Trustworthy

The established method for an academic to circulate his work is to publish in a peer-reviewed journal of repute, and the reader, too, places some degree of trust in the quality of the work being presented. So will open access, with the huge volume of papers, change that? “Not at all, open access is not vanity publishing or self-publishing or about publications that scientists expect to be paid for. Since every paper is peer-reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Dr. Jayakanth.

Read the article in Hindu. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been quoted in it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/will-open-access-replace-costly-commercial-publishing-models

An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth

praskrishna — 2012-11-24T06:09:54Z

India has been losing out its best talents to the West, however, this trend could be reversed if we create adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, and our scientific productivity and quality of research will improve significantly, says Dr. Francis Jayakanth in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

First of all congratulations for winning the inaugural EPT Award for Open Access.
Thank you very much.
When did you first take an interest in Open Access and what are your research interests?
I have always been impressed with the electronic pre-print servers like the arXiv, Cogprints, etc. I wanted to do something similar for IISc research publications.

One of the important activities of the National Centre for Science (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science (IISc) has been the training programme. Till recently, NCSI was conducting an 18-month training course called Information and Knowledge Management. This was targeted primarily at students graduating from Indian library schools, with a view to providing them with classroom and practical training in the application of ICT. Essentially, the aim was to train the students in how to provide state-of-the-art, computer-based information services. I have been closely associated with this training programme by offering courses and overseeing projects.

As part of the training programme the students are expected do a project. Around the year 2001, one of our students, Mr. Madhuresh Singhal carried out a project work in implementing GNU Eprints.org software developed by the University of Southampton. Incidentally, ePrints is the first professional software platform for building high quality OAI-compliant repositories. The student project successfully demonstrated the self-archiving concept through institutional repositories. The project work was later implemented to set up the country’s first institutional repository, eprints@IISc . Ever since, I have been an OA practitioner and an OA advocate.

I’m not a hard-core researcher. My work interests lies in using free and open source software for providing web-based information services.
Why Open Access is important to science and particularly India?
When researchers publish their works in journals and conference proceedings, they would want their works to be read, cited, and built upon by as wide an audience as possible. Much of the scientific publications are being published by commercial publishers. Subscription costs of such publications are very high, constantly increasing, and beyond the means of most of the libraries. The high subscription costs create an access barrier to the scientific literature because of which the publications do not get the kind of visibility that the researchers would like to. The lack of adequate visibility will reduce the potential impact of the publications. This in turn could affect the advancement of knowledge. It is therefore imperative that the access barrier to scientific literature created because of high subscription costs should be overcome and this could be achieved through OA publishing.

The problems with respect to research literature that India and other developing countries have always faced are two-fold:
- Not being able to access high quality scientific literature because of the high subscriptions costs, and
- Research reported in the national journals does not reach the global audience because most of the journals published from the country are not indexed by Web of Science (WoS) and/or Scopus databases, which are leading citation indexing databases.
If all the journals that are being published in the country could migrate to open access platform then the visibility of research works reported in the journals published from the country will automatically improve with time. This has been the experience of several of the OA journals published by MedKnow and others.
In terms of the number of papers published in refereed journals, the number of citations to these papers, citations per paper, and the number of international awards and recognitions won, India’s record is poor. What needs to be done to improve this?
For a long time now, our country has been losing out the best of the talents to mostly western and other countries. If this trend could be countered by the creation of adequate number of world-class institutions and research facilities, our country's scientific productivity and also quality of research done in the country will improve significantly. This may also trigger reverse brain-drain.
Indian scientists lack access and visibility. They find it tough to access what other scientists have done, due to the high costs of access and libraries in India can’t afford to subscribe to key journals needed by users. Also other researchers are not able to access what Indian researchers are doing leading to low visibility. How can we overcome these deficits? Will adoption of Open Access within and outside India overcome the aforesaid handicaps?
Access to scientific literature in the country has improved significantly during the last decade or so. This is largely because of the several library consortia that have emerged in the country during that period. However, the existing consortia and the ones that are likely to emerge in the coming years, is not the solution for the access barrier to scientific literature that exists today. There has to be a world-wide adaptation of OA to overcome the access barrier.
Do you support the movement towards making scientific publications as freely accessible as possible and create an institutional repository? What steps are being taken by the Indian Institute of Science to maintain an open access archive?
Yes. Open Access Journals and Open Access Archives or Institutional Repositories (IRs) are the two ways to facilitate OA to scholarly literature. As per the DOAJ statistics, today, there are close to 7500 peer reviewed OA journals and as per the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR) there are more than 2770 institutional repositories across the world.

In a recent study, Bo-Christer Bjork estimated that the overall percentage of scientific literature currently available OA is about 20 per cent. This includes both papers published in OA journals and those deposited in institutional repositories and directly on the Web. So, still a long way to go in achieving 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature! If all the research institutions set up their IRs and ensure that copies of post-prints are placed in the IRs then 100 per cent OA to scholarly literature could be achieved, at least, from now onwards.

ePrints@IISc, the OA institutional repository of IISc was established by NCSI in 2002. The repository holds more than 32,400 publications of IISc making the century-old institute’s research far more globally visible than before. NCSI has also provided technical help and support to several other institutes and universities in setting up their repositories and OA journals.
What are the key challenges of the scholarly publications in India?
Poor visibility and readership of many of the journals published from the country affects the citations of the articles published in such journals. This in turn affects the impact factors (IF) of the journals. No author would like to publish in very low IF journals.
What message would you give to funding agencies, the government and policy makers particularly for implementing a nation-wide mandate for Open Access?
Most of the research projects in the country are being funded by the government agencies. It is therefore imperative that we should have a nation-wide OA mandate for research publications that emerge from research projects funded from tax payers’ money. Such a mandate will not only help in enhancing the visibility of research done in the country; it may also help in avoiding duplication of research projects carried out in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/interview-with-francis-jayakanth

Research papers will be available in public domain

praskrishna — 2012-02-17T05:38:36Z

IIT-Madras intends to make circle of knowledge complete, writes Vasudha Venugopal in this article published in the Hindu on 15 February 2012. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is quoted in the article.

2012-13 was declared the year of science by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year, and there is a lot of effort being made all over the country to not only intensify the quantity and quality of research but also ensure greater access for all. For instance, IIT-Madras plans to make available its research papers in all disciplines online, in the public domain. The institute already provides e-learning through online web and video courses in engineering, science and humanities streams through NPTEL.

The attempt now is to convince faculty members to upload their research papers into the institution's repository, says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, Web Coordinator (NPTEL). The move will not only benefit students and faculty members but will also help the circle of knowledge to be complete, he says.

What IIT- Madras plans to do is follow an Open Access policy that would make the access of journals and scientific research public and many other educational organisations plan to follow suite. “Most research publications stay locked up in commercial journals and are inaccessible to many. Open Access is the best way to ensure that research produced in the developing world gets wider visibility,” says Francis Jayakanth, a library-trained scientific assistant based at the National Centre for Science Information, the information centre of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Mr. Jayakanth has been instrumental in creating an institutional repository ePrints@IISc that has over 32,000 publications by researchers.

Subbiah Arunachalam, distinguished fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society explains: “A research produced by the Tuberculosis Research Centre in Chennai which would be of great relevance to researchers, say in a university in Maharashtra, may not be even noticed by the scientists there. Both groups receive funds from the same source - Government of India - and yet what one does is not easily accessible to the other. “Open Access would bridge that gap and make information available to everyone,” he says.

Open Access repositories would help authors place their papers in an interoperable institutional open access archive and anyone with an Internet connection can access it. Researchers say that in most reputed journals, it takes almost six months to get a paper published, and most insist that the paper is removed from the internal repository of the author's institution once it is published. “But 70 per cent of the publishers are now fine with the authors taking the pre-print of their paper uploaded in the repository. And since in open access, every thing is peer reviewed, the quality is never compromised,” says Mr. Jayakanth.

While institutions such as IIT- Madras subscribe to over 2,000 journals, many colleges under Anna University and University of Madras have access to just about 1,500 journals. “There is almost Rs.10 -12 lakh that the institution spends on journal subscriptions so unless there is funding, many self-financed colleges prefer not to subscribe to journals and go for a few mandatory ones prescribed by AICTE. Students and researchers have no way to acquaint themselves with recent updates,” says D. Krishnan, professor, Anna University.

Even if you go through consortiums, you have to spend Rs.20 lakh which many smaller R&D organisations cannot afford to, adds P. Ramamoorthy, librarian at Sameer- Centre for Electromagnetics, a government-funded research agency. “The restrictions imposed by many commercial publishers do not allow one to legally share the published output of his result with his colleague. Open access will relive authors of such hassles,” he says.

The original article was published in the Hindu

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-papers-in-public-domain

Free Arduino Workshop (For Beginners)

praskrishna — 2012-04-28T04:07:50Z

The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore invites you to a hands-on-free Arduino workshop in its office on 3 March 2012. The workshop will be held from 11.00 a.m. to 3 p.m.

What is Arduino?

Arduino, an Italian name meaning "strong friend", is a popular "open-source electronics prototyping platform based around a microcontroller. It accepts inputs, such as signals from sensors (light, temperature, moisture, etc.) or data from the Internet or wireless devices, and sends output signals to devices, such as LEDS, motors, speakers, MIDI sequencers, computers, and so on."

In simpler terms: It is a ready-to-use creative platform, designed to provide interactivity between humans, smartphones, PCs, sensors and the physical world. It is especially a boon for creative people who don't have a technical background and want to translate their wildest techno-ideas to reality in a snap.

A comic by Jody Culkin, introducing Arduino

What can Arduino Do?

Applications of Arduino could include anything under the sun, from making your LED lights glow in reaction to the weather to interactive punching bags: your imagination is the limit (besides the sensors).

Check what some folk did with a bunch of cameras for an amazing music video all in one day

For other examples, check out the Boing Boing listing

Who can Attend?

The workshop is especially meant for interaction designers, artists or anyone else enthusiastic to get started with creative projects and don't have prior experience with electronics, interfacing and all that hack talk. It would help to have a general understanding of instructional programming languages, but this shouldn't be a problem for starts as you will pick it up as we go along. Besides, we are super-friendly and patient folk who will assist participants to demystify geek code.

Apply Now

We have only 20 seats for this free workshop. Participants will work in groups of two. The workshop will last 4 hours, over a lunch break. All materials will be provided, and it would be great if you could get your laptop.

To apply please send a brief intro about yourself and why you think you will benefit from this to yelena@cis-india.org. Selected participants will be notified shortly.

A map, showing the location of CIS

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/free-arduino-workshop

Centre for Internet and Society

Design!PubliC — Third Conclave in New Delhi

Participation, Collaboration, Innovation

Imagining India as an Innovation Society

Google Policy Fellowship Programme: Call for Applications

Fellowship Focus Areas

Frequently Asked Questions

Payments, Forms, and Other Administrative Stuff

How do payments work?*

What documentation is required from students?

I would like to use the work I did for my Google Policy Fellowship to obtain course credit from my university. Is this acceptable?

Host Organizations

What is Google's relationship with the Centre for Internet and Society?

Important Dates

What is the program timeline?

Cancel the Subscription

Arduino Introductory Workshop at CIS

Bangalore Meet-up for the Open Government Partnership Brasilia

Design!PubliC — Event in Delhi

The Panelists

Agenda

Day 1: Certificate in Innovation Management

Day 2: Design Public Conclave

International Space Apps Challenge

Background

How it Works?

Challenges

Benefits

Sample Event Agenda

Saturday, April 21

Sunday, April 22

Frequently Asked Questions

Open DataCamp — 2012

Sessions

Open access to government data on the cards

Francis Bags EPT Award for Open Access in Developing World

Dr. Francis Jayakanth

Comments on Technical Standards for Interoperability Framework for E-Governance in India (Phase II)

Section-specific Comments

Section 5.2.8

Section 5.2.13

Section 5.2.15

Section 5.2.23

Will open access replace costly commercial publishing models?

Boycott

Trustworthy

An Interview with Dr. Francis Jayakanth

Research papers will be available in public domain

Free Arduino Workshop (For Beginners)

What is Arduino?

What can Arduino Do?

Who can Attend?

Apply Now