The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
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Social Mashup!
https://cis-india.org/news/save-date
<b>Save the Date
Join us to meet India’s most passionate, innovative, and curious start-up social entrepreneurs for two groundbreaking days of conversations, connections and inspiration. This event will be held on 2-3 December 2010 at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.</b>
<p><strong>Who’s invited?</strong> Start-up social entrepreneurs, senior social entrepreneurs, funders/investors and anyone else interested in early stage social entrepreneurship.</p>
<p><strong>What will you get?</strong> You’ll have direct access to resources that meet your immediate and long-term needs. You might meet your mentor or mentee, your investor or investee, and your CEO or team member. And did we mention that we'll have a selection of artists and musicians in residence, all set to spark your creativity? Believe us, you're in for a dynamic, inspiring, affordable and fun two days that truly captures the spirit of a start-up!</p>
<p><strong>What will you not get?</strong> Panels that seem to be designed for the panelists, talks that fail to inspire and networking that begins and ends with an exchange of business cards.</p>
<h3>Speakers</h3>
<p>The speakers represent a diverse range of perspective, experience and approach. With all of these people in the same place, sparks of social change are sure to fly.</p>
<ul><li>Sachin Malhan, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.inclusiveplanet.com/en/login?destination=node%2F241416">Inclusive Planet</a></li><li>Prema Gopalan, <a class="external-link" href="http://sspindia.org/index.html">SSP</a></li><li>Gijs Spoor, <a class="external-link" href="http://zameen.org/">Zameen Organics</a></li><li>Solomon Jayaprakash, <a class="external-link" href="http://india.ashoka.org/">Ashoka </a></li><li>Sunil Abraham, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mahiti.org/">Mahiti Infotech Pvt Ltd</a></li><li>Ravi Agarwal, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.toxicslink.org/">http://www.toxicslink.org/</a></li><li>Murali Mohan, Mukteshwari Bosco</li><li>Sunitha Krishnan, Muthu Velayutham</li><li>Dr Jayaprakash Narayan, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.loksatta.org/cms/">Lok Satta Party</a></li><li>Vipin Thekkekalathil, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.youthventureindia.net/">Ashoka's Youth Venture India</a></li><li>Pankaj Jain, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.acumenfund.org/">Acumen Fund</a></li><li>Payal Gupta, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flowconsulting.in/">Flow Consulting</a></li><li>Rob Katz, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.acumenfund.org/">Acumen Fund</a></li><li>Aarti Madhusudan, <a class="external-link" href="http://governancecounts.org.in/">Governance Counts</a></li></ul>
<p> Download the <a href="https://cis-india.org/advocacy/social-mashup" class="internal-link" title="Social Mashup">schedule</a></p>
<p> Register <a class="external-link" href="http://www.socialmashup.org/pages/register-10">here</a> for Social Mashup! </p>
<h3>Contact<br /></h3>
<p>E-mail socialmashup@unltdindia.org or call + 91 22 3222 0475 or write to us at 4th floor Candelar Bldg, 26 St John Baptist Rd, Bandra W, Mumbai 400 050.</p>
<p>See the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.socialmashup.org/">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/save-date'>https://cis-india.org/news/save-date</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T08:15:01ZNews ItemOctober 2010 Bulletin
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2010-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! </b>
<h3><b>News Updates</b></h3>
<ul>
<li>Internet, szabadon<br />A polgárjogi aktivisták konfrontálódtak és panaszkodtak, a Google és a Facebook hárított és panaszkodott az Internet at Liberty konferencián, amelyet kedden és szerdán rendezett a Google és a CEU Budapesten.<a href="http://bit.ly/dwNhRw"><br />http://bit.ly/dwNhRw</a></li>
<li>Hogyan szűrik a kormányok az internetes tartalmakat?<br />Az internet szabadságáról tartanak háromnapos konferenciát Budapesten a Google és a Közép-Európai Egyetem (CEU) szervezésében. Kedden az internetes tartalmak szűrése volt a legfontosabb téma a rendezvényen.<a href="http://bit.ly/aFApER"><br />http://bit.ly/aFApER</a></li>
<li>Konferencia az internetes szólásszabadságról Budapesten<br />Az internet és szólásszabadság viszonyát vitatják meg Budapesten, a Közép-Európai Egyetem és a Google szervezte, háromnapos konferencián<a href="http://bit.ly/9evwE4"><br />http://bit.ly/9evwE4</a></li>
<li>How the UID project can be a cause for concern<br />The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), headed by Nandan Nilekani, is the UPA government's most ambitious project, where one billion Indians are branded with a unique identity number.<a href="http://bit.ly/bl7INY"><br />http://bit.ly/bl7INY</a></li>
<li>In new Facebook features, a comeback for community<br />Nearly 750 tweets bombard the web every second. Internet traffic is growing by 40 per cent a year. People post 2.5 billion photos on Facebook every month. Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube. But who owns all that data? Until now, big business was in complete control and used the data to monetise operations. But all that is set to change. With Facebook launching two new features, ‘Groups' and a ‘Download your information,' the community is making a comeback.<a href="http://bit.ly/arEi4V"><br />http://bit.ly/arEi4V</a></li>
<li>Stiff Resistance Dogs India's ID Plan <br />An article about the UID project by Indrajit Basu in Asia Times Online.<a href="http://bit.ly/bMcOSs"><br />http://bit.ly/bMcOSs</a></li>
<li>Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India<br />Glover Wright of the Center for Internet and Society talks about Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India at the Innovate/Activate Unconference in New York Law School on 24 September 2010.<a href="http://bit.ly/alnjsn"><br />http://bit.ly/alnjsn</a></li>
</ul>
<h3><b>Upcoming Events</b></h3>
<ul>
<li>Enabling Access to Education through ICT<br />ICT workshop in Delhi....Registrations open! <a href="http://bit.ly/9flyEK"><br />http://bit.ly/9flyEK</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>Network Culture: Archaeological and Artistic Interventions Public Seminar – Talk by Kristoffer Gansing and Linda Hilfing<br />Kristoffer Gansing and Linda Hilfling will give a talk on Network Culture on 8 November 2010 in the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.<a href="http://bit.ly/cEmOZw"><br />http://bit.ly/cEmOZw</a></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Research</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">City in the Internet 1: Geography Imagined (Part 1) <br />“The estuaries that flirt with the land mass before they finally perish in the vast deep blue ocean beyond were perfect in their shape and grace. And you know what; from top it appears like a surreal landscape that is so restive and peaceful, almost heaven. The countryside is actually very beautiful”, says Pratyush Shankar in his latest blog post. A random conversation between two persons discovering the joys of seeing our existence through Google Earth!<a href="http://bit.ly/9klUn1"><br />http://bit.ly/9klUn1</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>A Digital Native coordinating Digital Natives<br />Samuel Tettner, joined CIS as a Research Coordinator for the Digital Natives project. He has written a blog entry about his experiences in the project.<a href="http://bit.ly/cpJMQq"><br />http://bit.ly/cpJMQq</a></li>
<li>You Are Here<br />Geo-tagging applications are creating new and impromptu communities of true, says Nishant Shah in his column on Digital Natives in the Indian Express.<a href="http://bit.ly/a64kj7"><br />http://bit.ly/a64kj7</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">નિશાંત શાહ: ડિજિટલ પેઢીનો ઉદય<br />‘ડિજિટલ નાગરિક’ તેમને કહેવામાં આવે છે જેણે સામાન્ય જનજીવનમાં ડિજિટલ ટેક્નોલોજીના પ્રવેશ થઈ ગયા બાદ જન્મ લીધો છે. ડિજિટલ નાગરિકો દરેક જગ્યાએ છે. હવે સમય આવી ગયો છે કે આપણે એ જાણવાનો પ્રયાસ કરીએ કે આ લોકો કોણ છે, તેઓ શું કરી રહ્યા છે, તેઓ પોતાના અંગે શું વિચારે છે અને કેવી રીતે તેઓ કશું પણ જાણ્યા વગર આપણા ભવિષ્યને નવો આકાર આપવાનું કામ કરી રહ્યા છે. (A column by Nishant Shah in the Gujarati newspaper Divya Bhaskar)<a href="http://bit.ly/9HnyBa"><br />http://bit.ly/9HnyBa</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause?— Workshop in South Africa—FAQs<br />The second international Digital Natives Workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" will be held in Johannesburg from 7 to 9 November 2010. Some frequently asked questions regarding the upcoming workshop are answered in this blog entry.<a href="http://bit.ly/c1XJHO"><br />http://bit.ly/c1XJHO</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The silent rise of the Digital Native<br />In late August, this year, the world shook for many when they went online (on their computers, PDAs, iPads, laptops) and realised that the comfortable zone of talking, chatting, sharing and doing just about everything else, had suddenly, without a warning, changed overnight (or afternoon, or morning, depending upon the time-zone they lived in). With a single change in its privacy and location settings, Facebook, home to billions of internet hours consisting of relationships, friendships, professional networks, social gaming, entertainment trivia, memories and exchanges, allowed its users to geo-tag themselves when on-the-move.<a href="http://bit.ly/bHY72Y"><br />http://bit.ly/bHY72Y</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>The geek shall inherit the earth<br />Demystifying the mysterious -agents changing the world around you...A column on Digital Natives by Nishant Shah in the Indian Express.<a href="http://bit.ly/aq2BqY"><br />http://bit.ly/aq2BqY</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives Workshop in South Africa - Call for Participation<br />The African Commons Project, Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands for organising the second international workshop "My Bubble, My Space, My Voice" in Johannesburg from 07 to 09 November 2010. Send in your applications now!<a href="http://bit.ly/d0rl7E"><br />http://bit.ly/d0rl7E</a></li>
</ul>
<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Broad-basing Broadband<br />Education and training through the Internet need Commonwealth Games-like crisis management, says Shyam Ponappa in an article on broadband for education and training published in the Business Standard on 7 October 2010.<a href="http://bit.ly/dnMtpU"><br />http://bit.ly/dnMtpU</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2010-bulletin'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2010-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAWOpenness2012-08-07T12:02:11ZBlog EntryDigitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum
https://cis-india.org/news/digitally-open
<b>Promoting Openness in Today's Digital World</b>
<p>The internet has created exciting new ways to share information and collaborate globally and we are only beginning to see its full potential. So what does the future hold, or more importantly, what could the future hold?</p>
<p>Join ictQATAR and Creative Commons for an interactive forum addressing how innovation can thrive in the digital age through sharing and openness. We'll take on issues such as digital content rights, the open cloud, open source software, openness in government, openness in creativity, culture and art and the value proposition of openness.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://digitallyopen.eventbrite.com/">Register for the event on EventBrite!</a></p>
<p>Hear the latest thinking from Google, Mozilla, Georgetown University and other leaders in the digital rights arena. Participate in lively panel discussions on openness in government, openness in business, and openness for culture and creativity.</p>
<h3>Speakers:</h3>
<ul><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#hessa">Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, ictQATAR Secretary General</a></li><li> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#joi">Joi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons</a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker">Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation</a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#chris">Chris DiBona. Open Source Programs Manager, Google</a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mike">Michael Nelson, Professor, Communication, Culture & Technology Program, Georgetown University </a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#sunil">Sunil Abraham, Center for Internet & Society, India </a></li><li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#habib">Habib Haddad, Founder Yalla Startup, Yamli.com</a><br /></li></ul>
<h3>Program:<a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker">http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker</a></h3>
<p><br />8:45 a.m. Registration Opens<br /><br />9:30 a.m. Welcome <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#hessa">Dr. Hessa Al Jaber</a>, Secretary General, ictQATAR<br /><br />9:45 a.m. What it Means to be Open <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker"> Mitchell Baker</a>, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation<br /><br />10:15 a.m. Digital Content Rights <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#joi">Joichi Ito</a>, CEO, Creative Commons<br /><br />10:45 a.m. The Open Source Revolution <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#chris">Chris DiBona</a>, Open Source Programs Manager, Google<br /><br />11:15 a.m. Break<br /><br />11:30 a.m. The Open Cloud <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mike">Michael Nelson</a>, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown<br /> University<br /><br />12:00 p.m. Panel: Openness in Science and Technology <br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#john"> John Wilbanks</a>, Creative Commons, VP for Science - Moderator<br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#shaika"> Shaikha Al-Jabir</a>, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel<br /> International</p>
<p> Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat<br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#habib">Habib Haddad</a>, Founder, Yalla Startup, Yamli.com<br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#lucio">Lucio Rispo</a>, Qatar Science and Technology Park <br /><br />1:15 p.m. Lunch Break<br /><br />2:15 p.m. Panel: Openness in Government (moderated by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#michael">Michael Nelson</a>) <br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#sunil">Sunil Abraham</a>, Executive Director, Center for Internet & Society, India <br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#paul">Paul Keller</a>, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain,<br /> Knowledgeland <br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#marwan">Marwan Marouf Mahmoud</a>, Executive Director of ICT Industry<br /> Development, ictQATAR<br /> <br />3:15 p.m. Panel: Culture, Creativity and Openness <br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#eric">Eric Steur</a>, Creative Commons Creative Director - Moderator<br /><br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#abdr">Abdulrahman Al-Otaiba</a>, Web and Application Developer<br /> <br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#arend">Arend Kuster</a>, Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation<br /> Journals<br /><br /> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#roger">Roger Mandle</a>, Director, Qatar Museum Authority <br /><br />4:15 End </p>
<h3>Speaker Bios:</h3>
<p><br /><strong>Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR<br /></strong><br />Dr. Hessa Al Jaber is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. In her nearly six years of leadership at ictQATAR, Dr. Hessa has led Qatar's ICT strategy across sectors, spearheading major initiatives in government, education and business.<br /><br />She has overseen the liberalization of Qatar's telecommunications market, ushering in an era of choice and competition, and directed the modernization of Qatar's ICT infrastructure. Passionate about ensuring that the benefits of technology reach all sectors, Dr. Hessa has led numerous initiatives to make Qatar a more inclusive society through ICT.<br /><br />She has spearheaded the modernization of Qatar's government through ICT, streamlining processes, making government more transparent and accessible to its people, and also launching an online portal to the government, Hukoomi. She is also leading Qatar's initiative to build the first high-capacity satellite "E'Shail" to be launched in 2012. Dr. Hessa has been instrumental in the creation of Mada, an assistive technology center that serves persons with disabilities in Qatar, as well as initiating a host of national programs that empower women and youth, and protect children online.<br /><br /><strong>Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation<br /></strong><br />As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Baker was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. She has also sat on the board of the Open Source Applications Foundation.<br /><br />Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape's source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, Baker led the creation of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.<br /><br /><strong>Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons</strong><br /> <br />Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is on the board of CCC and Tucows. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices.<br /><br />He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.<br /><br /><strong>Chris DiBona, Open Source and Public Sector Program Manager, Google<br /></strong><br />Chris DiBona is the open source and public sector programs manager at Mountain View, Ca. based Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches. In the public sector space, he looks after Google Moderator, the polling locations API. Additionally, he is on the board of Our Good Works, a non-profit that looks after the volunteer matching website Allforgood.org.<br /><br />Mr. DiBona is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He occasionally appears on the This Week in Tech and Cranky Geeks podcasts. He is a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and has a masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, he serves on the advisory board of imeem, a San Francisco, Ca. based social networking firm.<br /><br /><strong>Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University<br /></strong><br />Michael Nelson is currently Visiting Professor of Internet Studies in Georgetown University's Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. Since January 2008, he has been doing research and teaching courses on "The Future of the Internet" and technology trends as well as consulting and speaking on Internet technology and policy.<br /><br />Nelson is a Trustee of the International Institute of Communication, a member of the Board of FirstMile.us, and until April was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet2 university research consortium. He is also the outgoing chairman of the Information, Computing, and Communications Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).</p>
<h3>Panelists:</h3>
<p><br /><strong>Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society<br /></strong><br />Sunil is the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), in Bangalore. He is the founder of Mahiti, a social enterprise aiming to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the voluntary sector by using free software. Sunil continues to serve on the board of Mahiti. He is an Ashoka fellow and was elected for a Sarai FLOSS fellowship.<br /><br />For three years, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of United Nations Development Programme's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme, serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2007 - 2008, he managed ENRAP an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development projects in the Asia-Pacific, facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada.<br /><br /><strong>Dr. Shaikha Sultan Al-Jabir, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances, Qtel International</strong><br /><br />Dr. Shaikha Al-Jabir a visionary IT executive who understands where business is going and takes corporate IT to a whole new level. She is currently the Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances in Qtel International (QI) where she is building a framework for strategic and sustainable innovation within QI.<br /><br />Prior to joining QI, she was the CIO at Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation- Kahramaa, where she established a sophisticated ICT infrastructure, placing the organization at the forefront of technology. Dr. Al-Jabir has a PhD in Computer Science, MS in Telecommunications and Computers, and a BS in Electrical Engineering.<br /><br /><strong>Abdulrahman Al Otaiba</strong><br /><br />Abdulraham is a Qatari developer who has been passionate about computers since an early age. He started as a software developer, then web developer, and recently mobile application developer. Most of his personal projects are released under the open source license. He also co-founder and editor-in-chief of Almashroo Arabic blog, which talks about all sorts of web development.<br /><br /><strong>Habib Hadad, Founder & CEO, Yamli.com<br /></strong><br />Habib is a serial tech entrepreneur, recently founder and CEO of Yamli.com a startup focused on empowering the Arabic language on the web. His also the founder and CEO of YallaStartup an NGO focused on early stage entrepreneurship in the MENA region.<br /><br />In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and the ArabianBusiness named him one of the most influential Arabs under 30. He currently serves on the Global Agenda Council on innovation.<br /><br /><strong>Paul Keller, Senior Copyright Advisor, Knowledgeland</strong><br /><br />Paul Keller is senior copyright policy advisor at Knowledgeland, an Amsterdam based think-tank focused on innovation in the knowledge economy. He is public project lead for Creative Commons in the Netherlands and serves as Collecting Societies Liaison for Creative Commons International.<br /><br />Paul is an expert on open content licensing with a special focus on the cultural heritage organizations, the music industry and the creative industries. Next to his work for Creative Commons he is currently coordinating the copyright related aspects of Images for the Future one of the biggest digitization projects for audio-visual heritage in Europe and he is one of the architects of the licensing framework for Europeana, the European Union funded online aggregator of Europe's cultural heritage. Paul frequently advises organizations on the implementation of open content licensing strategies.<br /><br /><strong>Arend Küster: Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ)</strong><br /><br />Arend joined BQFJ from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, where he was Business Development Director and led the development of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. He has over 5 years of consulting experience in Sales and Marketing Strategies for scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers including Elsevier Science, Springer, American Physical Society, Taylor and Francis, Wiley Blackwell, University of Chicago Press, British Medical Journal, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan.<br /><br /><strong>Marwan Marouf Mahmoud, Executive Director of ICT Sector Development, ictQATAR<br /></strong><br />An ICT professional with more than 20 years of experience working with various levels of technology, Marwan oversaw the preparation and implementation of some of the most comprehensive ICT strategies in financial institutions and now heads the ICT Industry development at ictQATAR. In this role ictQATAR, he is involved in building an ICT Industry ecosystem and a digital content ecosystem, which includes initiatives in intellectual property, broadband infrastructure, international ICT Industry cooperation and entrepreneurship programs in the digital content space.<br /><br /><strong>Roger Mandle, Executive Director, Qatar Museums Authority (QMA)</strong><br /> <br />Roger Mandle brings to the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) more than four decades of experience as a senior museum executive and arts educator. As Executive Director, he oversees all of the QMA's museum programs and building projects, including the Museum of Islamic Art. His responsibilities range from administration and finance to the curatorial direction of the museums to a comprehensive educational program, which includes the creation of an international network of training opportunities for Qatari citizens who desire careers in the museum field.<br /><br />Mr. Mandle comes to the QMA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island, where he served as President since 1993. From 1988 to 1993, he was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Mr. Mandle was the Director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio from 1977-1988 and served as Associate Director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 1967 to 1974.<br /><br /><strong>Lucio Rispo, Strategy Research Director, Qatar Science & Technology Park</strong><br /><br />Lucio has more than 35 years of experience in multinational and multicultural environments.<br />Lucio is currently Strategic Research Director at Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP). Prior to joining QSTP Lucio was Managing Director at BioGeM, a European leader in the biotech research and services. He developed strategy and services based on a network infrastructure which allows internationally cooperation.<br /><br />In 2006 Lucio founded the telecom division of Pradac Informatica, Srl, which provided value added services for telecom companies, and which was acquired by Amuser. Prior to Amuser, Lucio held several executive positions including Wordwide Telecom Sales VP at Sema Group, President at Nortel Networks for the Southern European Region and CEO for Europe and Latin America at Bull.<br /><br /><strong>Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons</strong><br /><br />Eric Steuer manages Creative Commons' relationships with artists, media companies, and cultural institutions. He produces creative projects and events that emphasize the use of CC licenses, and also directs the organization's media strategy. Before joining Creative Commons, Eric was as an editor for Wired Magazine, which he continues to write for. He is on the board of CASH Music, is the co-founder of Sneakmove Recordings, and is in a hip hop group called Meanest Man Contest.<br /><br /><strong>John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons, Creative Commons<br /></strong><br />As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark.<br /><br />John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He serves on the Board of Directors for DuraSpace and AcaWiki.</p>
<p>See the original <a class="external-link" href="http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/digitally-open'>https://cis-india.org/news/digitally-open</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T09:26:09ZNews ItemData Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India
https://cis-india.org/news/data-activism-grassroots
<b>Glover Wright of the Center for Internet and Society talks about Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India at the Innovate/Activate Unconference in New York Law School on 24 September 2010.</b>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">Video</span></p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/data-activism-grassroots'>https://cis-india.org/news/data-activism-grassroots</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T09:59:30ZNews ItemSeptember 2010 Bulletin
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this bulletin we bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage and announcement of events organised in the month of September 2010.</b>
<h2><b>News Updates</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010: This conference is being held in Budapest from 20 to 22 September 2010. It is co-sponsored by Google and Central European University. Sunil Abraham and Anja Kovacs are attending the conference. <a href="http://bit.ly/afo0WY" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/afo0WY</a> </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "> INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project: Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants. <a href="http://bit.ly/dnJDRu" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/dnJDRu</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Innovate / Activate: The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School. <a href="http://bit.ly/cbICFq" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/cbICFq</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Webinar: Closed for Business: A Global Panel Discusses International Copyright Laws and Their Impact on the Open Internet <a href="http://bit.ly/a3ZFBw" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/a3ZFBw</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The madness of software patents <br />India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth. <a href="http://bit.ly/cpHd7R" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cpHd7R</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Why piracy is tough to rein in <br />“Video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the film industry” <a href="http://bit.ly/aDUpiY" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/aDUpiY</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Transparency and MDGs: the Role of the Media and Technology <br />Key quotes from sixth panel <a href="http://bit.ly/b3a0YC" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/b3a0YC</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Copyright bill restricts Net access <br />Law to curb piracy may fetter creativity <a href="http://bit.ly/cFj3rD" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cFj3rD</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">科技改變社會 數位原生代計畫 <br />The Chinese language press covered the Digital Natives workshop in Taipei. <a href="http://bit.ly/bPhEO4" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/bPhEO4</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">科技改變社會數位原生代掀波 <br />The Chinese press published an article on Digital Natives. <a href="http://bit.ly/bHaQor" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/bHaQor</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Information is Beautiful hacks in India with David Cameron <br />The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them. <a href="http://bit.ly/dr3AJ2" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/dr3AJ2</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Events</b></h2>
<ul>
<li>International Conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT: ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations open!<a href="http://bit.ly/9flyEK" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/9flyEK</a> </li>
<li>A Talk by Philipp Schmidt: Philip Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University will be giving a lecture at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 6 October, 2010. <a href="http://bit.ly/aVyzMq" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/aVyzMq</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Research</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop: What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed. <a href="http://bit.ly/daE4dM" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/daE4dM</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Binary: City and Nature: A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings. <a href="http://bit.ly/b5FP5D" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/b5FP5D</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive: This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state. <a href="http://bit.ly/cNLKcY" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cNLKcY</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series: This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others. <a href="http://bit.ly/agBOiq" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/agBOiq</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Attentional Capital in Online Gaming: The Currency of Survival <br />This blog post by Arun Menon discusses the concepts of production, labour and race in virtual worlds and their influence on the production of attention as a currency. An attempt is made to locate attentional capital, attentional repositories and attention currencies within gaming to examine 'attention currencies and its trade and transactions in virtual worlds. A minimal collection of attention currencies are placed as central and as a pre-requisite for survival in MMOs in much the same way that real currency become a necessity for survival. The approach is to locate attentional capital through different perspectives as well as examine a few concepts around virtual worlds. <a href="http://bit.ly/aaGZj8" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/aaGZj8</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least for Now: In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire? <a href="http://bit.ly/9a3I0G" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/9a3I0G</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context: This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India. <a href="http://bit.ly/byfPye" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/byfPye</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Accessibility</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Enabling Access to Education through ICT - A Conference in Delhi: The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore in cooperation with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT), a flagship advocacy organization of the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (UN-GAID), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), UNESCO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment and the Deafway Foundation is organizing an international conference, Enabling Access to Education through ICT in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The event is sponsored by Hans Foundation. Registration for the conference has begun. <a href="http://bit.ly/bmrkf7" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/bmrkf7</a></p>
<hr />
<h2><b>Access to Knowledge<br /></b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Pre-grant Opposition Filed for a Software Patent Application by Blackberry Manufacturers: A pre-grant opposition was filed against a software patent application filed in the patent office by Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of Blackberry. The opposition was filed on August 31, 2010 by the Software Freedom Law Centre which has recently expanded its operations to India. This exciting development was announced by Mishi Choudhary from SFLC on the lines of the seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” organised on 1 September 2010 in Delhi jointly by SFLC, the Centre for Internet and Society, the Society for Knowledge Commons and Red Hat. Filing more such oppositions to software patents in India was in the pipeline and this is just the beginning of a movement to take on monopolisation of knowledge and ideas through patenting software, the organisers said. <a href="http://bit.ly/9wE1Xs" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/9wE1Xs</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">First Post-Bilski Decision - Software Patent Rejected: In the first decision post-Bilski, the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) rejected a software patent claimed by Hewlett-Packard. The ruling in this case has buttressed the fact that the Bilski decision furthered the cause of narrowing the patentability of software even though the Supreme Court of the United States totally avoided mentioning software patents or the applicability of the machine or transformation test for software patents in its decision. <a href="http://bit.ly/cnPw7E" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cnPw7E</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Bilski Case - Impact on Software Patents: The Supreme Court of the United States gave its decision in Bilski v Kappos on 28 June, 2010. In this case the petitioners’ patent application sought protection for a claimed invention that explains how commodities buyers and sellers in the energy market can protect, or hedge, against the risk of price changes. The Court in affirming the rejection by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also held that the machine- or-transformation test is not necessarily the sole test of patentability. The Court’s ruling of abstract ideas as unpatentable and its admission that patents do not necessarily promote innovation and may sometimes limit competition and stifle innovation have provided a ray of hope. In the light of the developments, the Bilski decision as far as patentability of software is concerned may not be totally insignificant, says Krithika Dutta Narayana.<a href="http://bit.ly/bjrPGh" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/bjrPGh</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Openness</b></h2>
<ul>
<li> Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report: The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined. <a href="http://bit.ly/9VVzkk" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/9VVzkk</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?: The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship. <a href="http://bit.ly/ciohYy" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/ciohYy</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Internet Governance</b></h2>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Moldova Online: An Interview with Victor Diaconu: In this interview for Russian Cyberspace, set up with the help of Sunil Abraham (Executive Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India), computer software professional Victor Diaconu explains the nature of Internet use, state control and the development of blogging and social media platforms in Moldova. Victor works at Computaris in Chisinau. He is Moldova educated, and has travelled to several western countries (including lengthy stays to US, UK) to learn about and understand what there is to be done in Moldova. Sudha Rajagopalan interviewed Victor Diaconu. <a href="http://bit.ly/cgIvXT" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cgIvXT</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Presentation of the UID project by Ashok Dalwai – A Report: On Tuesday, 7 September 2010, Ashok Dalwai, the Deputy Director General of the Unique Identification of India (UIDAI), gave a lecture at the Indian Institute for Science in Bangalore. Representing the UID Authority, his presentation explained the vision of the project and focused on the challenges involved in demographic and biometric identification, the technology adopted, and the enrolment process. Elonnai Hickok gives a report of his presentation in this blog post. <a href="http://bit.ly/aAy5DG" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/aAy5DG</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Beyond Access as Inclusion: On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is co-organised in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting was to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet. <a href="http://bit.ly/cgS9py" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/cgS9py</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Summary of UID Public Meeting, August 25 2010: A summary of the "No UID" public meeting that took place on Aug. 25th at the Constitution Club, New Dehli. <a href="http://bit.ly/9epHTz" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/9epHTz</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">No UID Campaign in New Delhi - A Report: The Unique Identification (UID) Bill is not pro-citizen. The scheme is deeply undemocratic, expensive and fraught with unforseen consequences. A public meeting on UID was held at the Constitution Club, Rafi Marg in New Delhi on 25 August, 2010. The said Bill came under scrutiny at the meeting which was organised by civil society groups from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi campaigning under the banner of "No UID". The speakers brought to light many concerns, unanswered questions and problems of the UID scheme. <a href="http://bit.ly/97HwbS" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/97HwbS</a> </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Wherever you are, whatever you do: Facebook recently launched a location-based service called Places. Privacy advocates are resenting to this new development. Sunil Abraham identifies the three prime reasons for this outcry against Facebook. The article was published in the Indian Express on 23 August, 2010. <a href="http://bit.ly/adXVjB" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/adXVjB</a> </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<ul>
<li>What a highway can do: Despite signs of transformational change, we need more - SOPs and quality <a href="http://bit.ly/deUbmU" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/deUbmU</a></li>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAWOpenness2012-08-10T07:22:30ZPageInnovate / Activate
https://cis-india.org/news/innovate-activate
<b>The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School.
</b>
<p>Registration is now open! Click here to <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/innovate_activate/registration">register</a>.</p>
<p>Innovation is unquestionably important to society. Intellectual property regimes seek to provide incentives for such innovation. Understanding the inter-working of intellectual property regimes and innovation may lead to conclusions that such regimes are not working well, or at all, in encouraging innovation. When such failures are perceived, active communities form to address the shortcomings. Many communities have formed around issues such as free speech vs copyright; the importance of fair use; alternative licensing regimes such as Creative Commons or free and open source software; patent protection of software and business methods; and patents vs downstream innovation of critical pharmaceuticals.</p>
<p>While these approaches have been exceedingly important in bringing about needed change, many successful groups have devised strategies that balance the extent to which activists work within existing innovation systems in order to achieve their goals, as they continue to explore the necessity of circumventing those systems. At the same time, the increased production of and focus on IP in all industries has catalyzed the emergence of IP obstacles in areas where IP has traditionally not been a consideration, thus creating new areas for activism. It’s time to reexamine our approaches to improving global welfare by identifying new and existing IP-related challenges to activism, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur social, political, environmental, scientific, technological and legal change.</p>
<p>The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School is proud to present Innovate / Activate, a two-day unconference, cosponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where IP practitioners and activists will share their ideas and experiences in order to transform the landscape of activism.</p>
<strong>Event organizers</strong>
<p>:</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/iilp_logo.png/image_preview" alt="IILP" class="image-inline image-inline" title="IILP" /> <img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/yale_logo.png/image_preview" alt="Yale" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Yale" /></p>
<p>Read the details on the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.nyls.edu/centers/harlan_scholar_centers/institute_for_information_law_and_policy/events/innovate_activate">New York Law School website</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/innovate-activate'>https://cis-india.org/news/innovate-activate</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T10:18:29ZNews ItemAugust 2010 Bulletin
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2010-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society. We bring you news and media coverage, research and event updates for the month of August 2010</b>
<h3>News Updates</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>RIM Offered Security Fixes<br /> </b>In India Talks, BlackBerry Maker Said It Could Share Metadata, Notes Show<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/ahT7jD" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/ahT7jD</a><br /> <br /> <b>New Project to Assess Potential of Creating Open Government Data</b> <b>Initiatives in Chile, Ghana and Turkey</b><br /> Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation (founded in 2009 by Tim Berners-Lee) has made an announcement on moving forward with a project to assess the potential of creating open government data<br /> initiatives in Chile, Ghana, and Turkey - the first step of what we hope to be a global initiative focusing on low- and middle-income countries.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/d337Ex" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/d337Ex</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Govt and BlackBerry firm wait for the other to hang up</b><br />Sunil Abraham speaks to Archna Shukla on the stand-off between the Government of India and RIM. The news was published in expressindia.com.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cGeipL" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/cGeipL</a><br /> <br /><b>Call, text, email complaint against rogue auto driver</b><br /> Harassed by an auto driver? Helplines give you no relief? Here's the people's way to help you out. Just report your issue online, call or even SMS sitting in a noisy restaurant, and be heard.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/atiiGW" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/atiiGW</a><br /> <br /> <b>Call to increase awareness of intellectual property rights<br /> </b>We need more knowledge on IPR itself, says IT Secretary<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/avxY16" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/avxY16</a><br /> <br /> <b>Civil Society groups urge State Judicial Academy to restructure agenda for Judges' Roundtable meet</b><br /> Some of the Civil Society groups in the country have urged the Maharashtra State Judicial Academy to restructure the agenda for the 'Judges Roundtable on Intellectual Property Rights Adjudication' being held in Mumbai on July 24 and 25 to promote public interest and a deeper understanding of intellectual property amongst judicial officers. FICCI is the joint organiser of the event.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/dCDZl0" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/dCDZl0</a><br /> <br /> <b>More Debate on UID Project Needed<br /> </b>A press conference on UID was held at the Press Club in Bangalore on 26 July, 2010. It was co-organised by Citizen's Action Forum, Alternate Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society. Mathew Thomas and Vinay Baindur spoke about the UID. Proceedings from the conference was covered in the Hindu on 27 July, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cSEsaP" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/cSEsaP</a><br /> <br /> <b>UID coverage in Udayavani</b><br /> A press conference was held at the Press Club in Bangalore on 26 July, 2010. It was co-organised by Citizen's Action Forum, Alternate Law Forum and the Centre for Internet and Society. Mathew Thomas and Vinay Baindur were the speakers. Leading Kannada newspaper Udayavani covered this event.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/c3AU5s" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/c3AU5s</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open is the Future<br /> </b>The third Open World Forum will gather together decision-makers from the open digital world, in Paris. 1,500 participants from 40 countries will come together to analyze the technological, economic and social impact of Open Source, the invisible engine behind the digital revolution. The aim: to interpret future trends and cross-fertilize initiatives.<a href="http://bit.ly/amY9Qc" target="_blank"><br />http://bit.ly/amY9Qc</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://bit.ly/amY9Qc" target="_blank">
<hr />
</a>Upcoming Events</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>No UID till Complete Transparency, Accountability and People's Participation: A Public Campaign <br /></b>An interactive meeting on UID's lack of a feasibility study, cost involved and dangers of abuse is being held in New Delhi at the Constitution Club Auditorium, Rafi Marg on 25 August, 2010. The meeting is jointly organised by INSAF, PEACE, Citizens' Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties - Karnataka, Slum Janandolana - Karnataka, Alternate Law Forum, The Centre for Internet and Society and concerned individuals.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/8YsBIJ" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/8YsBIJ</a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment</b><br />Leading up to the 2010 IGF, The Association for Progressive Communications (APC), Global Partners, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and the Dynamic Coalition on Internet Rights and Principles are hosting, on 13 September 2010 in Vilnius, an event on 'Internet Governance and Human Rights: Strategies and Collaborations for Empowerment'.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/aoOkPR" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/aoOkPR</a><br /> <br /> <b>Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps Towards an Open and Inclusive Internet?</b><br /> The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Freedom of Expression or Access to Knowledge: Are We Taking the Necessary Steps towards an Open and Inclusive Internet? at the Internet<br /> Governance Forum on 14 September, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/dl1WRL" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/dl1WRL</a></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems</b><br />The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems at the Internet Governance Forum on 14 September, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/dl1WRL" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/dl1WRL</a><br /> <br /> <b>Data in the Cloud: Where Do Open Standards Fit In?<br /> </b>The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Data in the Cloud: Where do Open Standards Fit In? on 16 September, 2010 at the Internet Governance Forum.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/94AF4h" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/94AF4h</a><br /> <br /> <b>International Conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT<br /> </b>The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore in cooperation with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT), a flagship advocacy organization of the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (UN-GAID), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), UNESCO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment and the Deafway Foundation is organizing an international conference, Enabling Access to Education through ICT in New Delhi from<br /> 27th to 29th October, 2010....Registrations to begin soon!<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9flyEK" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/9flyEK</a></p>
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<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Research</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Political is as Political does<br /> </b>The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9hY9sR" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/9hY9sR</a><br /> <br /> <b>Digital Natives: Talking Back<br /> </b>One of the most significant transitions in the landscape of social and political movements, is how younger users of technology, in their interaction with new and innovative technologised platforms have taken up responsibility to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments, relying upon their digital networks, virtual communities and platforms. In the last decade or so, the digital natives, in universities as well as in work spaces, as they experimented with the potentials of internet technologies, have launched successful socio-political campaigns which have worked unexpectedly and often without precedent, in the way they mobilised local contexts and global outreach to address issues of deep political and social concern. But what do we really know about this Digital Natives revolution?<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bZNoSX" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/bZNoSX</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Beyond the Digital: Understanding Digital Natives with a Cause</b><br />Digital Natives with a cause: the future of activism or slacktivism? Maesy Angelina argues that the debate is premature given the obscured understanding on youth digital activism and contends that an effort to<br /> understand this from the contextualized perspectives of the digital natives themselves is a crucial first step to make. This is the first out of a series of posts on her journey to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism through a research with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/b1GS7F" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/b1GS7F</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Accessibility</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Access to Knowledge: Barriers and Solutions for Persons with Disabilities in India</b><br /> Consumers International, Kuala Lumpur and Consumers Association of India in association with Madras Library Association organised a seminar on Access to Knowledge on 31st July, 2010 at the Tamil Nadu Pollution Control Auditorium in Guindy, Chennai. The Principal Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu Department of Information Technology was the chief guest. Former Central Vigilance Commissioner N. Vittal gave the keynote address. Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Nirmita Narasimhan and Pranesh Prakash participated in the seminar. Nirmita and Pranesh made presentations on access to knowledge.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cJXSX8" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/cJXSX8</a></p>
<hr />
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Intellectual Property</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Privacy and the Indian Copyright Act, 1857 as Amended in 2010 <br /></b>In this post the author examines the issue of privacy in light of the Indian Copyright Act, 1857 as amended by the Copyright Amendment Bill in 2010. Four key questions are examined in detail and the author gives<br /> suitable recommendations for each of the questions that arise.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cJXSX8" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/cJXSX8</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Internet Governance</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Does the Government want to enter our homes?</b><br />When rogue politicians and bureaucrats are granted unrestricted access to information then the very future of democracy and free media will be in jeopardy. In an article published in the Pune Mirror on 10 August,<br /> 2010, Sunil Abraham examines this in light of the BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry messenger service that the Government of India plans to block if its makers do not allow the monitoring of messages. He says that civil society should rather resist and insist on suitable checks and balances like governmental transparency and a fair judicial oversight instead of allowing the government to intrude into the privacy<br /> and civil liberties of its citizens.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/dkVHoS" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/dkVHoS</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>UID Project in India - Some Possible Ramifications</b><br />Having a standard for decentralized ID verification rather than a centralized database that would more often than not be misused by various authorities will solve ID problems, writes Liliyan in this blog entry. These blog posts to be published in a series will voice the expert opinions of researchers and critics on the UID project and present its unique shortcomings to the reader.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bOyBS8" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/bOyBS8</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Civil Liberties and the amended Information Technology Act, 2000</b><br />This post examines certain limitations of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended in 2008). Malavika Jayaram points out the fact that when most countries of the world are adopting plain English instead of the conventional legal terminology for better understanding, India seems to be stuck in the old-fashioned method thereby, struggling to maintain a balance between clarity and flexibility in drafting its laws. The present Act, she says, is although an improvement over the old Act and seeks to address and improve on certain areas in the right direction but still comes up short in making necessary changes when it comes to fundamental rights and personal liberties. The new Act retains elements from the previous one making it an abnormal document and this could have been averted if there had been some attention to detail.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/croc9T" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/croc9T</a><br /> <br /> <b>Feedback to the NIA Bill<br /></b>Malavika Jayaram and Elonnai Hickok introduce the formal submission of CIS to the proposed National Identification Authority of India (NIA) Bill, 2010, which would give every resident a unique identity. The submissions contain the detailed comments on the draft bill and the high level summary of concerns with the NIA Bill submitted to the UIDAI on 13 July, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bhinUB" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/bhinUB</a></p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Openness</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do? The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/ciohYy" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/ciohYy</a><br /> <br /> <b>Civic Hacking Workshop<br /> </b>CIS, with the UK Government's Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement, and Google India, is organizing a workshop on open data (or the lack thereof) and 'civic hacking'.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/c3TF2t" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/c3TF2t</a></p>
<hr />
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Telecom</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>'Containing Inflation' - A myth</b><br /> We need problem-solving, not confused rhetoric or misguided action, says Shyam Ponappa. The article was published in Business Standard on 7 August, 2008.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9frC8q" target="_blank">http://bit.ly/9frC8q</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2010-bulletin'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2010-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAWOpenness2012-08-10T10:40:34ZPageJuly 2010 Bulletin
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2010-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet & Society. We bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage, information on our events and other updates for the month of July 2010.</b>
<h2><b>News Updates</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Call for Case Studies on ICT</b><br /> CIS invites organisations to participate in a study focusing on best practices in the use of ICTs in education for persons with disabilities.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/d03jS0">http://bit.ly/d03jS0</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Networking? Not working</b><br /> Concerns about privacy, wastage of time and trivialized communication are some reasons ‘refuseniks’ are going off sites such as Facebook and MySpace, writes Shreya Ray in Livemint.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/dpdKhX">http://bit.ly/dpdKhX</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Digital them about yourself?</b><br /> If you’re on Facebook or have a blog, you could be a digital native, says Akhila Seetharaman.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/ahA6Ts">http://bit.ly/ahA6Ts</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig</b><br /> Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cLN8XE">http://bit.ly/cLN8XE</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS featured in the <span class="visualHighlight">Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India</span><br /> Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9GJsJ7">http://bit.ly/9GJsJ7</a></p>
<p><b>UID Act may be released for debate, may be introduced in monsoon session</b><br /> An article by Karen Leigh & Surabhi Agarwal in livemint on June 30, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9Hq5dg">http://bit.ly/9Hq5dg</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>A New Age in News</b><br /> Citizen journalism and online piracy were key topics during the opening day of the Mekong Information and Communication Technology conference. The 2010 Mekong ICT conference in Chang Mai, Thailand, has brought together an experienced crowd of experts from all over the globe. They have gathered to discuss the status, trends and the current situation of the ICT world.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bdGzbQ">http://bit.ly/bdGzbQ</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Activists welcome privacy Bill, but point out concerns</b><br /> Experts have welcomed the government's move to bring in a law for protecting individual privacy, amid concerns about the potential misuse of personal data it is collecting to execute social welfare and security schemes.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bnddaJ">http://bit.ly/bnddaJ</a></p>
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<h2><b>Upcoming Events</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex: A Lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin</b><br /> The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), IT for Change and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are hosting a lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies, Miami University, Ohio, USA at CIS, Bangalore on 23 July, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9zy2Fa">http://bit.ly/9zy2Fa</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Promoting Education through ICT</b><br /> ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations to begin soon!<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/9flyEK">http://bit.ly/9flyEK</a></p>
<h2><b>Research</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction</b><br /> This post examines attention economy as a brief prelude to a paper and monograph to be published on it. It examines the current theses on attention economy and a few approaches to reading attention economy in gaming besides foregrounding the attention economy and its functions and influence in MMORPGs.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/OP7QFl">http://bit.ly/OP7QFl</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The Making of an Asian City</b><br /> Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/MXxyXP">http://bit.ly/MXxyXP</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Internet, Society and Space in Indian City: First Report</b><br /> This is the first report on the progress of the research on Internet, Society and Space in Indian City. The post is a collection of some of the initial focus of these studies. I have started simultaneously exploring and testing various arguments and have listed some key observations from the ones that are nearing completion.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/Ndmday">http://bit.ly/Ndmday</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!</b><br /> The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/P4mCKv">http://bit.ly/P4mCKv</a></p>
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<h2><b>Accessibility</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>NMEICT Funds Book Conversion Project for the Print Disabled</b><br /> IIT, Kharagpur, Daisy Forum of India, Inclusive Planet and the Centre for Internet and Society have joined hands to undertake a project for the print disabled. The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) is funding this project.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/bWHi00">http://bit.ly/bWHi00</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Right to Read: Campaign Updates</b><br /> A nationwide campaign on Right to Read was co-organised by CIS along with the Daisy Forum of India and Inclusive planet to highlight the lack of content in accessible formats and accelerate change in the provisions of the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, which presently does not permit the conversion of books in accessible formats for the benefits the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons. The campaign is affiliated with the global R2R campaign started by the World Blind Union in April 2008.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/akoaSj">http://bit.ly/akoaSj</a></p>
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<h2><b>Intellectual Property</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010</b><br /> CIS analyses the Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2010, from a public interest perspective to sift the good from the bad, and importantly to point out what crucial amendments should be considered but have not been so far.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/KLBQDx">http://bit.ly/KLBQDx</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>A Guide to Key IPR Provisions of the Proposed India-European Union Free Trade Agreement</b><br /> The Centre for Internet and Society presents a guide for policymakers and other stakeholders to the latest draft of the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement, which likely will be concluded by the end of the year and may hold serious ramifications for Indian businesses and consumers.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/Rw7whN">http://bit.ly/Rw7whN</a></p>
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<h2><b>Openness</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Open Access to International Agricultural Research</b><br /> Open access advocates have urged the top management of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research to give open access to its research publications. A report by Subbiah Arunachalam on 3 June, 2010 was also circulated to all the signatories of the letter.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/cspMYY">http://bit.ly/cspMYY</a></p>
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<h2><b>Telecom</b></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Catching up on broadband</b><br /> The govt can invest some of the Rs 1,00,000 crore from the spectrum auctions to help India catch up on broadband, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest article published in the Business Standard on July 1, 2010.<br /> <a href="http://bit.ly/ag67TU">http://bit.ly/ag67TU</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2010-bulletin'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2010-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAWOpenness2012-08-10T09:41:01ZPageSexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems
https://cis-india.org/events/sexual-rights-openness-regulatory-systems
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Sexual Rights, Openness and Regulatory Systems at the Internet Governance Forum on 14 September, 2010.</b>
<p>Content regulation remains remains a critical area where competing rights and interests are played out. Within this, sexuality and sexual rights lie at the centre of the debate. Protection from the "harm" of pornography and other sexually related content are often the principal reason forwarded for regulating content. At the same time, the internet is a critical space for the exercise and realisation of sexual rights, especially by people who have less access to power and resources, such as migrants, sex workers, differently abled communities, young women etc. In recent years, internet content regulation has increasingly become more of a norm than an exception. Despite the slippery definitions of 'obscene', 'illegal' and 'harmful' content, governments, the private sector and civil society are shaping and implementing regulatory mechanisms, sometimes in partnership with each other.</p>
<p>To what extent has it worked to protect the rights of all users, particularly those that such regulations assert their protection over, such as internet users, young people and women? What can be some of the indicators to monitor and measure to what extent the internet is 'open', especially in relation to sexual rights? What happens when regulation works to instead compromise or infringe on users' sexual rights, including the right to access information, communicate, share knowledge, build communities, exercise control over their personal data, embodiment and spaces? What are some of the mechanisms of redress - both formal and informal - within existing regulatory systems, and how far are they able to respond to these issues? What is needed to ensure that transparency, accountability and a rights-based framework - principles that last year's IGF workshop participants agreed were key - are built into them?</p>
<p>Drawing from current research initiatives in this area, this workshop aims to facilitate an open dialogue and exchange of ideas, knowledge and best practices to respond to some of the questions above. Research papers will also be commissioned to investigate some of the key questions raised above to initiate debate and discussion prior to IGF, which will be shared at the workshop.</p>
<p>Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?<br />Security, Openness and Privacy</p>
<p><strong>Have you organized an IGF workshop before?</strong> Yes<br /><strong>If so, please provide the link to the report</strong>:<br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/hydera/IGFBook_the_first_two_years.pdf">http://www.intgovforum.org/Athens_workshops/Content_Regulation.pdf (2006); <br />http://intgovforum.org/Rio_event_report.php?mem=19 (2007); <br />http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?<br />chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=93 (2</a></p>
<p>Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:</p>
<ul><li>Nadine Moawad, Founder, Take Back The Tech Arabia; Project Leader, EROTICS - Lebanon</li><li>Dorothy Atwood, Vice President - Public Policy, and the Chief Privacy Officer of the telecommunications company AT&T, USA</li><li>Joy Liddicoat, human rights lawyer and Commissioner with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission.</li><li>Clarissa Smith, Member of the Onscenity Research Network; Programme Leader, MA Media and Cultural Studies and MA Film & Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK.</li></ul>
<p><em>Biographies</em>:<br />There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.</p>
<p><strong>Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups</strong>:<br />Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme<br />Co-organisers: <br />Centre for Internet and Society<br />Alternative Law Forum</p>
<p><strong>Organization</strong>:Association for Progressive Communications, Women's Networking Support Programme</p>
<p><strong>Contact Person</strong>: Jac sm Kee</p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/sexual-rights-openness-regulatory-systems'>https://cis-india.org/events/sexual-rights-openness-regulatory-systems</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-05T03:59:22ZEventData in the Cloud: Where Do Open Standards Fit In?
https://cis-india.org/events/data-in-cloud
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Data in the Cloud: Where do Open Standards Fit In? on 16 September, 2010 at the Internet Governance Forum.</b>
<p>Two of the major concerns of recent times have been opening up of government data online and ensuring control over personal data. Interoperability play an important role in both.</p>
<p>When it comes to government data it is necessary to ensure that the data are in formats that citizens can make use of that data. Similarly, when it comes to personal data online, it is important to ensure that such data can be migrated from one service provider to another. While the former will aid in governance, the latter is necessary to ensure fair competition.</p>
<p>These two issues are proposed to be looked at in this best practices forum.</p>
<p>Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?<br />Emerging Issues / Cloud Computing<br /><br /><strong>Have you organized an IGF workshop before?</strong> Yes<br />If so, please provide the link to the report:</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94">http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94</a></p>
<p><strong>Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite</strong>:<br />1. Daniel Dardellier (World Wide Web Consortium)<br />2. Jeremy Malcolm (Consumers International)<br />3. Karsten Gerloff (Free Software Foundation of Europe)<br />4. Vinton Cerf (Father of the Internet)<br />5. Viviana Munoz (South Centre)</p>
<p><em>Biographies</em>:</p>
<ul><li>Rodríguez Katitza (Ms.)</li></ul>
<p>Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:</p>
<p>Centre for Internet and Society (Civil Society Organization)<br /><strong>Organization</strong>:Centre for Internet and Society<br /><strong>Contact Person</strong>: Pranesh Prakash</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/data-in-cloud'>https://cis-india.org/events/data-in-cloud</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-05T03:59:02ZEventOpen Standards: Ensuring Accessibility and Inclusiveness
https://cis-india.org/events/open-standards
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society is co-organising a workshop on Open Standards at the Internet Governance Forum on 16 September, 2010.</b>
<p>The Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards and the Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disabilities have a shared interest on ensuring accessibility of information for all.</p>
<p>Persons with disabilities often find that the audio captioning system for a particular video format does not work with others video formats (requiring re-captioning). Or that the proprietary font standard used by their government cannot be read by their screen-reader.</p>
<p>The principle of inclusion also requires us to ensure that persons who choose non-dominant operating systems and software are not artificially kept out of enjoying the benefits of the World Wide Web.</p>
<p>While it is recognized that open standards are not a sufficient guarantor of accessibility, both DCOS and DCAD believe open standards are a prerequisite. A World Wide Web based on proprietary formats would not be able to deliver an accessible experience to those with disabilities.</p>
<p>This workshop seeks to look at the interface between open standards and accessibility for persons with disabilities and how such standards are important for safeguarding their rights. It would also seek to find ways to promote open standards from this perspective.</p>
<p><strong>Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?</strong><br />Security, Openness and Privacy<br /><br /><strong>Have you organized an IGF workshop before?</strong> Yes<br />If so, please provide the link to the report:</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94">http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=94</a></p>
<p>Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:<br />People who are planned to be invited are:</p>
<ol><li>Catherine Trautmann (MEP)</li><li>Eddan Katz (Electronic Frotier Foundation)</li><li>Nasser Kettani (Microsoft)</li><li>Shadi Abou-Zara (World Wide Web Consortium)</li><li>Vint Cerf (Father of the Internet)</li><li>Wilfried Grommen (Microsoft)<br /></li></ol>
<p><br /><em>Biographies</em>:<br />There are no panelists biographies associated to this workshop at the moment.</p>
<p><strong>Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups</strong>:<br />Centre for Internet and Society (Civil Society) / World Wide Web Consortium (Technical Body)</p>
<p><strong>Organization</strong>:Centre for Internet and Society<br /><strong>Contact Person</strong>: Pranesh Prakash</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/open-standards'>https://cis-india.org/events/open-standards</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-05T03:58:25ZEventNew Project to Assess Potential of Creating Open Government Data Initiatives in Chile, Ghana and Turkey
https://cis-india.org/news/creating-open-government-data
<b>Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation (founded in 2009 by Tim Berners-Lee) has made an announcement on moving forward with a project to assess the potential of creating open government data initiatives in Chile, Ghana, and Turkey - the first step of what we hope to be a global initiative focusing on low- and middle-income countries.
</b>
<p>Within less than a year, the <a class="external-link" href="http://data.gov.uk/">United Kingdom</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.data.gov/">United States</a> have put hundreds of thousands of rich datasets on the Web in machine readable formats. Thousands of applications have been built — the vast majority without taxpayers’ money — by civic hackers to analyze, mash-up, and map these data. Potential benefits of an Open Government Data (OGD) practice include new services, new insights, increased citizen participation, new businesses and better governance. Though other countries, provinces and cities are exploring OGD, there has been little activity in low and middle income countries (see map at left). Given the potential benefits and reasonable costs, it is importance to assess how relevant an OGD initiative might be in these countries as well.</p>
<p>The <a class="external-link" href="http://www.webfoundation.org/">World Wide Web Foundation</a>, with the our partner <a class="external-link" href="http://www.fundacionctic.org/">Fundacion</a> (CTIC), is taking the first steps in this direction. We are starting <a class="external-link" href="http://www.webfoundation.org/projects/ogd/">a new project to conduct an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program in three diverse countries</a> — Chile, Ghana and Turkey. The bottom line questions are: Is the country ready to engage in an OGD initiative? If so, what support might they need? If not, why not, and what lesson can we take away from this assessment?</p>
<p>The project originated in response to a call for proposals from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative: a donor collaborative that includes the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.fordfoundation.org/">Ford Foundation</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hivos.nl/">Hivos</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.internationalbudget.org/">International Budget Partnership</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.omidyar.com/">Omidyar Network</a> , the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.soros.org/">Open Society Institute</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.revenuewatch.org/">Revenue Watch Institute</a>, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The funding for this project originates from the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Institute. The project runs in parallel to a similar feasibility study focusing on India, also support by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and run by the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/">Centre for Internet and Society</a>.</p>
<p>Our work is starting with the development a new methodology for assessing OGD readiness, based on our experience and an <a class="external-link" href="http://www.soros.org/initiatives/information/focus/communication/articles_publications/publications/open-data-study-20100519">excellent paper commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge</a> from earlier this year. We will then conduct research through visits to each country, Web studies, and phone and email interviews to complete the assessment by the end of October. As Tim Berners-Lee said in his interview with Becky, “It has to start at the top, it has to start in the middle and it has to start at the bottom.” In other words, we must talk with people from the highest levels of government, the public administration officials who collect and care for data, and the people who will leverage the data to create new applications. And we will do so during this study. The results should be available before the end of this year.</p>
<p>The Web Foundation is committed to supporting efforts around OGD in individual countries, and as a emerging movement around the world. This is evidenced by the work of Web Foundation Directors Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in the UK and US, the W3C Brazil Office in their country, and W3C’s eGovernment Interest Group, as well as <a class="external-link" href="http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/07/open-data-in-the-caribbean/">work to built capacity in the Caribbean</a>. If you want to learn more, please contact me or Stephane Boyera.</p>
<p>Read the original news at <a class="external-link" href="http://www.webfoundation.org/2010/08/potential-of-open-government-data-in-chile-ghana-and-turkey/">World Wide Web Foundation</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/creating-open-government-data'>https://cis-india.org/news/creating-open-government-data</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T10:44:59ZNews ItemOpen Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship
<b>The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship. </b>
<p><em>Professor Arunachalam started off with some questions to begin with</em>:</p>
<p>Have you published papers in refereed journals? In open access journals? Have you received reprint requests? Have you been a referee for research papers? Have you placed your papers in open access repositories? Do you know the journal budget of your library? Do you use Wikimedia, Blogs, RSS feeds, and other web 2.0 facilities? Do you know the NPTEL courses can be stored in your cell phone, shared with others and can be viewed on a PC/laptop? Have you accessed Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and Khan Academy? </p>
<p><em>He also referred to a quote from Revolution in the Revolution:</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"We are never completely contemporaneous with our present." Our vision is encumbered with memory and images learned in the past. “We see the past superimposed on the present, even when the present is a revolution."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Regis Debray in Revolution in the Revolution </p>
<p>It takes considerable motivation and effort to get away from the burden of the past and really move on to the present. Scholarly communication is no different from other human endeavours. The main purpose—science is the production of knowledge. Some may say understanding the universe, but the two are virtually the same. There are two kinds of knowledge: knowledge one wants to give away free and knowledge one wants to encash. In the past two days we have heard several speakers speak about intellectual property, patents, royalty, court cases on infringement of rights, etc. All that is, of the second kind. Today I am not concerned with that kind of knowledge. I am concerned with knowledge that everyone wants to share, give away free to maximize one’s advantage. The means by which scientists give away the knowledge they generate is through scholarly communication. </p>
<p>There are very good reasons for developing countries to pursue science. As there is a growing tendency to privatize science, issues of great social importance (such as health research related to malaria, diarrhoeal diseases, etc.) remain neglected. And if developing countries do not improve their stakes in knowledge production, they will eternally remain vulnerable to exploitation by the rich countries.</p>
<p>Without free and unhindered flow of information, it will be difficult to perform science let alone maximize the efficiency (and the benefits) of scientific research and build capacity for doing science.</p>
<p>The power of access to information was amply in evidence during the tsunami tragedy, when wherever people were exposed to a culture of information they were able to cope with the tsunami better.</p>
<p>Researchers in most developing countries are working under very difficult conditions, especially in regard to information access. To do research, they need access to essential global research findings, but they do not have such access. For example, a survey revealed a few years ago in the 75 countries with a GNP per capita per year of less than $1,000, 56 per cent medical institutions had no subscriptions to journals; in countries with a GNP between $ 1–3 thousand, 34 per cent had no subscriptions and a further 34 per cent had an average 2 subscriptions per year. What kind of research is possible in these institutions?</p>
<p>Eight countries, led by the USA, produce almost 85 per cent of the world’s most cited publications, while 163 other countries account for less than 2.5 per cent. In the ten years, 1998-2007, there were less than 800 papers from India that were cited at least 100 times. There is tremendous asymmetry both in access to information and in the production of quality research between the rich and the poor countries. As long as this asymmetry in research output and access to relevant information persists, scientists in developing countries will remain isolated and their research will continue to have little impact.</p>
<p>Here he borrowed an extract from Cornell University Library:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Scholarly communication — the process used by scholars and scientists to share the results of their research — is fast approaching crossroads. Individual disciplines and the scholarly community as a whole will soon need to make far-ranging decisions about how scholarly information is formally and informally exchanged, because current methods of scholarly communication are increasingly restrictive and are economically unsustainable.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The history of scholarly communication since 1665 revolves largely around dissemination of knowledge through print-on-paper journals and libraries subscribing to a large number of them and making them available to scholars and scientists. Despite the advent of the faster and far more convenient means of communication - in the form of Internet and the World Wide Web - print continues to hold sway in many parts of the world.</p>
<p>From 1665 to today, the scholarly journal has changed considerably both in the way the content is presented and in the way technology is used. Gone are the leisurely descriptive prose used by people like Michael Faraday. Today the text is terse and most experimental details are omitted and just a superscript (reference) is given. We no longer use the movable types invented by Gutenberg but use personal computers and laptops to compose the text. We no longer use the four-line composing system for mathematical texts; we have TeX in different flavours. We now use sophisticated visualization techniques and multimedia tools. Here are two examples from two different centuries.</p>
<blockquote>"I purpose, in return for the honour you do us by coming to see what our proceedings here are, to bring before you, in the course of these lectures the chemical history of a candle. I have taken this subject on a former occasion, and, were it left to my own will, I should prefer to repeat it almost every year, so abundant is the interest that attaches itself to the subject, so wonderful are the varieties of outlet which it offers into the various departments of philosophy. There is not a law under which any part of this universe is governed which does not come into play and is touched upon in these phenomena. There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle. I trust, therefore, I shall not disappoint you in choosing this for my subject rather than any newer topic, which could not be better, were it even so good."<br /></blockquote>
<p>Michael Faraday in “The Chemical History of a Candle” (1861)</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ARPES measurements in the vortex liquid1 part of the pseudo gap region of underdoped BISSCO cuprates show that the spectrum retains an energy gap of d symmetry, but that around the nodal points that gap appears to have collapsed, leaving a finite arc of apparently true Fermi surface, which simply terminates. In the anti-nodal region the gap remains nearly as large as in the superconductor.2,3 In the experiments there is no indication that this arc represents a part of a true Fermi surface pocket, but this has not prevented the publication of various theoretical interpretations in such terms.4,5 Whatever other properties this region of the pseudogap … … …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Simple Explanation of Fermi Arcs in Cuprate Pseudogaps: by Philip W Anderson, 2008</p>
<p>For a history of scholarly communication, I will refer you to the works of Alan Jack Meadows and Christine Borgman.</p>
<p>The inability to cope with the constantly rising subscription prices of journals provided the motivation for librarians in the West to look for alternatives. And men like Paul Ginsparg and Tim Berners-Lee who saw the potential of technology to facilitate easy and rapid dissemination of nascent knowledge helped others - especially in the physics and computing communities - to make the transition from the past to the present and become contemporaneous with the present. Both of them facilitated open access.</p>
<p>The online revolution went far beyond speeding up knowledge dissemination and democratizing knowledge. It helped the very process of knowledge production in myriad ways. It facilitated visualization, synthesizing, data mining, international collaboration, grid computing, and ushered in the era of eScience.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most developing countries have not made the transition from the past to becoming contemporaneous with the present. Neither have they seen the same levels of transformative impact of science and technology as the advanced countries nor have they taken full advantage of the new technologies and adopted open access to science and scholarship.</p>
<p>Even China and South Korea, both of which have made rapid progress in science and technology in the past decade or two, have not taken full advantage of the open access movement.</p>
<p>In this talk I will present the situation in India. There are three sides to knowledge: education, research and innovation. We will begin with some indicators and set the context.</p>
<p>Together with China, India is widely seen to be a rising global power. China has gone way ahead of India in many respects.</p>
<p>It is the same in science as well, with China performing far better. Some other Asian countries are also stepping up investment in science and soon Asia may rival USA and European Union in science. In terms of R&D investments (in current ppp US dollars), India is in the top ten countries in the world. Some of our labs are better equipped than labs in the West.</p>
<p>Rough estimate of R&D investment, as % GDP</p>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Country<br /></th>
<th>Percentage</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Japan</td>
<td>3.67%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sweden</td>
<td>3.60%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Finland</td>
<td>3.48%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>USA</td>
<td>2.70%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>EU average<br /></td>
<td>2.16%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>China</td>
<td>1.40%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India</td>
<td>1.00%</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>In India, about 70 per cent of R&D investment comes from the government, but industry’s share is increasing. Despite the economic slowdown India's government allocated 284 billion rupees (US $5.8 billion) for R&D last year, 17 per cent more than the previous year. [The US spends $370 bn on science, $270 bn coming from the industry.] In January 2010, the Prime Minister promised to keep hiking the budget for science for some more years. The allocation for the higher education sector is also on the rise and new IITs and IISERs have been set up. Clearly, India is keen to make a mark in world science. Concurrently, a National Knowledge Network is coming up that would link all of India’s higher educational and research institutions and provide high bandwidth connectivity. </p>
<p>India’s scientists have not betrayed the confidence reposed in them. In the past few years, their productivity measured by the number of papers indexed in Science Citation Index – Expanded rose from 18,138 papers in 2000 to 22,846 in 2003 to 30,992 in 2006 to 42,446 in 2009. But these papers have appeared in well over 2,500 journals published from more than 100 countries of the world and in widely differing fields from agriculture and astronomy to space science and new biology. As many of these journals are not subscribed to by most Indian libraries, papers published by researchers in one Indian laboratory may not be known to researchers working in the same field in other laboratories. That is not a good thing. In science, we need to know what others are doing. As Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."</p>
<p>Let us see the number of papers published by India and China in different fields.</p>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><br /></th>
<th>India</th>
<th>China</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>MathSciNet, 2006<br /></td>
<td>1,949</td>
<td>11,762</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Engineering Village, 2006<br /></td>
<td>25,954</td>
<td>199,881</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>SciFinder, 2007<br /></td>
<td>41,697</td>
<td>235,309</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Web of Science, 2007<br /></td>
<td>35,450</td>
<td>98,241</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Data from Scopus show that India moved up from 13th rank in 1996 to 10th in 2006 among nations publishing the largest number of papers. In the same period China moved up from ninth to second. Data from SciBytes – ScienceWatch show that in no field does India receives citations on par with world average.</p>
<p>But after a few years of stagnation, science in India is looking up. Both investments and research output are increasing. New institutions – IITs, IISERs, IIITs and central universities – are coming up. Internet penetration is growing and the costs are coming down. Work done by development organizations has shown that access to scientific knowledge and data benefit not only researchers but also common people.</p>
<p>Scientists and scholars who give away their contribution to knowledge are hampered by copyright law which protects the interests of the intermediaries rather than those of the creators of knowledge. The OA movement is trying to restore the Knowledge commons to the creators. Knowledge commons differ from natural resources commons in one respect. They are not in the zero-sum domain; indeed knowledge grows when shared. Both require strong collective action, self-governing mechanisms and a high degree of social capital to thrive. But the OA movement is spreading unevenly. </p>
<p>Information is the key to science development. It forms the ‘shoulders of giants’ as Newton said. Science in India suffers from two problems: They relate to access and visibility. Both these problems can be solved by widespread adoption of open access. We need to persuade the world to adopt open access. Many advocates are already doing and things are improving.</p>
<p>India needs to adopt OA in a big way. We should take advantage of the potential of the Net and the Web and make the field level playing. But most of us still live in the print-on-paper era.</p>
<p>The access problem is solved to some extent by consortia subscriptions to journals at huge costs. There are at least ten consortia, big and small. A recent study, however, has shown that these journals are not used well.</p>
<p>There are two Indias at vastly different levels of development. With a huge population and a history going back to several millennia, India is keen to develop rapidly and become an advanced country and a global power. This India is reflected in growth rates upwards of 8 per cent over several years, Indian companies acquiring overseas companies, growing foreign investments, increasing investment in science, etc. India is also home to the largest number of the poor in the world and is beset with a multitude of problems most of which could be solved only with research in the sciences and social sciences. The benefits of the high growth rate have not percolated to the poor and there is tension between the two Indias. </p>
<p>India needs to perform research that will make it competitive in global science and to perform science that can address local problems. In the first case India has no escape from the evaluation criteria and practices used in the advanced countries such as citation counts and impact factor. In the second case, India needs to adopt evaluation criteria more suitable for the purpose. In both kinds of research, India will benefit greatly by adopting open access. Unfortunately, progress in the adoption of open access is slow. The story of OA in India is one of missed opportunities and half-hearted attempts.</p>
<p>India has an efficient space programme, a controversial nuclear energy programme and a network of national laboratories under different research councils. Science is managed by multiple agencies. There are two advisory bodies – Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister – and several departments under the Ministry of Science and Technology. There is a separate Ministry of Earth Science.</p>
<p>But most of these agencies have not done much to adopt open access. Despite a request by the DG of CSIR, most CSIR laboratories have not set up OA IRs. The CSIR Director General is promoting <a class="external-link" href="http://www.osdd.net/">open source drug discovery</a> and has secured substantial funding for the project. CSIR is also planning a national level repository for all researchers to deposit their papers irrespective of their affiliation. CSIR-NISCAIR has made all its 19 journals open access.</p>
<p>Agriculture is the key to India’s survival and India has many agricultural research laboratories and universities. Very few of them have an OA repository. ICRISAT, a CGIAR outfit, has set up its own IR and mandated OA. CMFRI has set up an IR and it is filling up fast.</p>
<p>India ranks first in the incidence of blindness, tuberculosis and diabetes. But health research is not paid as much attention as it deserves. No medical research lab or college has an IR.</p>
<p>Many Indian medical journals are OA though, largely thanks to the efforts of MedKnow Publications and the National Informatics Centre of the Government of India. NIC has set up a central OA repository for papers in biomedical research. Indian Journal of Medical Research went OA a few years ago and since then its impact factor is increasing every year. The same is true of many journals made OA by MedKnow. </p>
<p>The Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, signed the Berlin Declaration six years ago, and it took a while to make its journals OA. The Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore, made all its 11 journals OA a few years ago.</p>
<p>The Academies can do a lot more. They do talk about OA in their meetings, but nothing much happens. Early last year INSA convened a meeting on open access and copyright. Dr Sahu, Mr Sunil Abraham and I were invited to speak and INSA is still considering the recommendations.</p>
<p>Their top priority is for requesting the government to pay publication fees to journals that charge such fees and not mandating open access for publicly funded research. </p>
<p>A suggestion to the Academies to set up an Indian equivalent of the Dutch Cream of Science project – an online archive of all papers by all Fellows of the Academies – is taken up by IASc after more than three years.</p>
<p>The Academies could be proactive and advise both the government and the scientists to adopt a mandate for OA, but they are reluctant. Prof. P Balaram, a member of the Knowledge Commission and the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, is an advocate of open access. In an editorial in Current Science, he said, “The idea of open, institutional archives is one that must be vigorously promoted in India.”</p>
<p>Is anyone listening?</p>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Universities</th>
<th>Scopus</th>
<th>Scholar</th>
<th>% Sco vs Sch<br /></th>
</tr>
</tbody>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Univ College London<br /></td>
<td>134,950</td>
<td>8,660</td>
<td>6.4</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Cambridge<br /></td>
<td>114,339</td>
<td>8,320</td>
<td>7.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Oxford<br /></td>
<td>99,723</td>
<td>7,800</td>
<td>7.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Imperial College<br /></td>
<td>91,537</td>
<td>4,720</td>
<td>5.2</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Manchester<br /></td>
<td>83,024</td>
<td>3,840</td>
<td>4.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>King's College London<br /></td>
<td>60,407</td>
<td>1,100</td>
<td>1.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Edinburgh<br /></td>
<td>57,473</td>
<td>9,920</td>
<td>17.3</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Southampton<br /></td>
<td>44,013</td>
<td>14,000</td>
<td>31.8</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of Warwick<br /></td>
<td>23,018</td>
<td>6,010</td>
<td>26.1</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Univ of York<br /></td>
<td>21,554</td>
<td>2,920</td>
<td>13.6</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Loughborough Univ<br /></td>
<td>18,902</td>
<td>4,030</td>
<td>21.3</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>This table is an example of the current situation regarding open distribution of scientific results by world universities. In the case of United Kingdom, the production of quality papers is far higher than the number of them available in repositories and thus being indexed by Google Scholar.</p>
<p>UK universities are not achieving higher ranks in Webometrics as compared to other research-based rankings and this is the most likely explanation for this behaviour. Southampton ranks above Columbia and Yale largely because Southampton has a mandate requiring that all of its research output be made open access on the web through an institutional repository.</p>
<p>The Department of Biotechnology supports over 60 Bioinformatics Centres and the coordinators of these centres meet annually. Eight years ago the plan for setting up IRs in these centres was discussed and till now the plan has not materialized although IRs have been discussed in many of the coordinators meetings.</p>
<p>Early last year the Wellcome Trust and DBT set up a joint Programme of Fellowships to Indian researchers at three levels to prevent brain drain and ensure career advancement for those who stay and work in India. The Minister for S&T proudly announced that papers published by these Fellows will be available freely on the Internet. </p>
<p>If the Wellcome Trust funded research can be made OA why not all Government funded research be mandated to be OA? Examples from the West, such as the OA mandates adopted by research councils in the UK, NIH, Harvard University Faculties of Arts and Science and Law, the Stanford University School of Education and MIT have not influenced Indian funding agencies and researchers. Largely because the majority of Fellows of Academies and Indian scientists in general are unaware of OA and its advantages, limits of copyright, relative rights of authors and publishers, etc. Indian authors rarely use the author’s addendum when signing copyright agreements with journal publishers. </p>
<p>The situation in the social sciences is even worse. With the kinds of economic and socio-political transformations taking place and caste, religious, regional, sectarian and linguistic divisions often threatening the multicultural fabric of the nation, one would think India should invest as much on social science research as on science and technology. But social science research is neglected. Only a few institutions and some think tanks in the non-governmental sector really count and even they have not adopted OA. </p>
<p>The National Knowledge Commission has made clear recommendations on the need for mandating open access for publicly funded research. But it is not clear when the recommendations would be implemented.</p>
<p>In the area of open educational resources, some of India’s best institutions – IITs and IISc - have formed a consortium and have made available some excellent material for undergraduate courses in engineering. IGNOU has recently opened up its course ware. Most NCERT textbooks are available for free on the Internet. The Ministry of HRD is planning to make virtually all educational content freely available to all educational institutions connected to a grid.</p>
<p>The open access revolution can go far beyond helping scientists and social scientists in universities and research institutions. It can help the other India, the India of the poor and the marginalized, as well.</p>
<p>In many developing countries, development organizations working with the poor have shown how improving access to information – relating to weather, market prices, location of large shoals of fish in the sea, government entitlements, availability of credit, training facilities, etc. – through a variety of technologies can make a difference. <br /><br />If intermediaries such as rural doctors and local health workers can access medical information relevant to the current needs of their communities they will be far more effective. The power of sharing medical information was amply demonstrated when SARS broke out in 2003. The unprecedented openness and willingness to share critical scientific information led to the quick identification of the coronovirus responsible for the attack and its genome mapped within weeks. </p>
<p>The same way farmers around the world can benefit from the world’s agricultural research findings if they are freely accessible. That was the reason why the CGIAR laboratories were set up. That is the reason why we should resist privatization of knowledge, especially knowledge generated with public funds. About two months ago, I and 15 other OA advocates appealed to the top brass of the CGIAR to mandate OA for all research publications of CGIAR centres. Three weeks ago CGIAR held a workshop at Rome for the knowledge managers and they are planning one more in November for the senior management. We hope CGIAR will adopt a NIH-like mandate soon.</p>
<p>Open access is making slow progress in India. The main reason is lack of awareness of its advantages among policy makers and scientists. This is a problem common to most developing and possibly some advanced countries. Focused advocacy, especially among research students and young faculty, and training programmes (in setting up OA IRs) can bring in better results. As the Wellcome-DBT project has shown, foreign collaborators can help. Projects like DRIVER can partner with developing country institutions and as Leslie Chan suggests, one may think of a global repository for developing country researchers.</p>
<h3>What is there already?</h3>
<ul><li>World-class Open Course Ware.</li><li>About 200 OA journals. </li><li>Academies led the way. D K Sahu has shown that going OA is win-win all the way. </li><li>A small group is promoting OJS.</li><li>There are about 50 repositories. IISc was the first to set up. Its EPrints archive has crossed the 22,000 mark and IISc is now depositing all legacy papers.</li><li>National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, is the first Indian institution to have an OA mandate in place.</li><li>There are three subject repositories: Biomedical research,</li><li>Library and information science, Catalysis.</li><li>Many physicists use arXiv and India hosts a mirror site.</li><li>Five Indian repositories are in the top 300 of the CINDOC list: IISc 36; ISI-DRTC 96; NIC 111; IIA 228; NIO 231.</li><li>The Catalysis repository is not listed. </li><li>There are some efforts to digitize theses. </li><li>Informatics India Ltd provides an alerting service called Open J-Gate.</li><li>An Indian, LIS software NewGenLib incorporates OA software into a library management software. It is open source. <br /></li></ul>
<p>But we are a country of 1.15 billion people. We should do much more. The major concerns are fear of publisher action, copyright and researcher apathy. But awareness of OA – green or gold – and author addenda is rather low among both researchers and policy makers. What we need is advocacy and more advocacies. We should adopt both bottom-up and top-down approaches. </p>
<p>On the policy front Science Academies, INSA and IASc, are engaged in a discussion on OA. I was invited to address the Council of INSA and again to put together a half-day seminar for the Fellows of INSA and other researchers. I am also talking to IASc frequently.</p>
<p>Science managers have been alerted to the advantages of OA and the need for mandating OA to publicly funded research. But not many seem to care. There is much talk and little action. The Bioinformatics community provides a classic example. As India is hierarchical and to some extent feudal, one wonders if top-down approaches will work better than bottom-up approaches. But OA champions follow both. </p>
<p>Many workshops and conferences on OA are held. Most of them are suboptimal and cannot achieve OA implementation. There are two online lists for OA, but most members are librarians and many of them believe they cannot implement OA on their own.</p>
<h3>International collaboration and ways forward <br /></h3>
<p>A new society, Centre for Internet and Society, has come up to promote all things open, including open source software and open access. </p>
<p>The Principal Scientific Adviser is a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He often meets his counterparts from other countries. Decisions on OA made in the UK and Europe may have an influence on him.</p>
<p>India is a key member of the InterAcademy Panel and Inter Academy Council. Leaders of Indian science can learn from their counterparts, especially from Latin America. It may help if international champions of OA could be brought to India for discussion with science administrators and public lectures.</p>
<p>eIFL does not work in India. We must persuade them to include India in their programmes. One never knows when things will happen in India. They happen when they happen. So we should be pushing all the time!</p>
<p>We need to create more knowledge and make the best use of it, says Janez Potocnic, the European Commissioner for Science and Research.</p>
<p>OA can help in both creating more knowledge and in making the best use of it. We all know that. But there is a big gap between knowledge and action. It is up to you now. Set up repositories in your institutions. Persuade your director/ Secretary to mandate open access. Set up an Alliance of Taxpayers for Open Access. Citizen groups can achieve what individuals cannot. Write to the Minister, MPs and other policy makers.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/science-and-scholarship</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessOpen Access2011-08-23T03:13:24ZBlog EntryCivic Hacking Workshop
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/civic-hacking-workshop
<b>CIS, with the UK Government's Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement, and Google India, is organizing a workshop on open data (or the lack thereof) and 'civic hacking'.</b>
<p>The UK Government's Foreign Office and the Cabinet Office Team for Digital Engagement, Google India and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore are organizing a 'Civic Hacking Workshop' on Wednesday, July 28, 2010, bringing together civic-minded technologists who've been working with governmental data in India and Britain.</p>
<p>The workshop will discuss the problems of obtaining data, especially in India, the technological solutions that these various groups have encountered, the difficulties of technology as a mass-based civic solution, and the visions that these groups have for a more engaged civil society and the contributions they seek to make to the public.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The people attending are, from India (Bangalore):</p>
<ol><li>Alok Singh (Akshara Foundation)</li><li>Shivangi Desai (Akshara Foundation)</li><li>Arun Ganesh (Geohackers / National Institute of Design)</li><li>A. Pandian (Mapunity)</li><li>Sridhar Raman (Mapunity)</li><li>S. Raghavan Kandala (Mapunity)</li><li>Thejesh GN (Janaagraha / Infosys)</li><li>Sushant Sinha (IndianKanoon.com / Yahoo)</li><li>Vijay Rasquinha (Mahiti)</li><li>P.G. Bhat (SmartVote.in)<br /></li><li>Pranesh Prakash (CIS)</li><li>Raman Jit Singh Chima (Google)</li></ol>
<p><br />And from Britain:</p>
<ol><li>David McCandless (Information Is Beautiful)</li><li>Harry Metcalfe (TellThemWhatYouThink.org / Open Rights Group)</li><li>Tim Green (Democracy Club)</li><li>Edmund von der Burg (YourNextMP)</li><li>Rohan Silva (Special Adviser to the PM)</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/civic-hacking-workshop'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/civic-hacking-workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpen DataWorkshopDigital GovernanceOpenness2011-08-23T03:14:03ZBlog EntryOpen is the Future
https://cis-india.org/news/open-future
<b>The third Open World Forum will gather together decision-makers from the open digital world, in Paris. 1,500 participants from 40 countries will come together to analyze the technological, economic and social impact of Open Source, the invisible engine behind the digital revolution. The aim: to interpret future trends and cross-fertilize initiatives.</b>
<p>Paris, 22 July 2010. Technologies – Economic Models – Governance... Year after year the Free/Open Source movement is establishing itself as the invisible engine driving the digital revolution, and the hidden backbone of key digital players like Google, Amazon and Wikipedia, as well as the catalyst for numerous emerging trends including Cloud computing, the Internet of Things, green technologies, new organizational models, new-generation NGOs, open democracy… Following the success of the first two events, the Open World Forum will once again be staged in Paris this year, on 30 September and 1 October, bringing together 1,500 experts and decision-makers from 40 countries. The aim of this ‘Davos’ of open technologies is to debate and cross-fertilize initiatives, to shape the open digital landscape of the future.</p>
<h3>Two Days of High-Level Sessions</h3>
<p>With 15 keynote addresses, 20 workshops and 8 think-tanks, featuring 140 presenters from 40 countries, the Open World Forum will include eight flagship sessions:<br /><br />30 September</p>
<ul><li>Opening keynote addresses: The state of the open world: what impact will it have on the digital future? With Walter Bender (MIT Media Labs/OPLC/Sugarlabs), James Governor (RedMonk), Jeffrey Hammond (Forrester), Simon Phipps (ForgeRock), Dirk Riehle…</li><li> The revolution in open innovation: collective intelligence actively supporting growth. With Stefan Lindegaard (15Inno), Steve Shapiro (Innocentive), Roberto Di Cosmo (INRIA), Patrick Chanezon (Google), Michel Guillemet (Bull)…</li><li> Open Cloud: Open Source at the heart of tomorrow’s ‘computing power plants’? With Matt Asay (Canonical), Larry Augustin (SurgarCRM), Kyle Mac Donald (Cloud.com), Matt Wood (Amazon)... <br /></li><li>Open communities: the emblematic organizations of the 21st century? With Eben Moglen (Software Freedom Law Center), Bertrand Delacretaz (Apache), Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse), Cedric Thomas (OW2)...<br /></li></ul>
<p>1 October</p>
<ul><li>Open democracy in 2010: what are the initiatives and prospects? With Philippe Aigrin (Sopinspace), Ellen Miller (Sunlight Foundation), Dominique Piotet (RebellionLab), Francis Pisani (Transnet)...</li><li>Managing ‘the commons’: ‘tragedy’ or opportunity? With David Bollier (Onthecommons.org), Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation), John Wilbanks (Creative Commons)...</li><li>Open Generation: from ‘Generation Y’ to ‘Generation O’? With Sandrine Murcia (Silicon Sentier/Mindblush), Sunil Abraham (Centre for Internet and Society), Benjamin Bejbaum (founder of DailyMotion)…</li><li> Closing keynote addresses: Open Innovation Awards and FLOSS 2020 RoadMap. With Michael Tiemann (OSI, Red Hat ), Jean-Pierre Laisne (OW2, Bull)...</li></ul>
<p>Numerous workshops and seminars will also enable delegates to evaluate emerging trends in the open world: the development of open media; the advent of new-generation NGOs based on collaborative strategies (Sahana, CrisisCommons…); the revolution in community marketing; new forms of business organization inspired by Open Source; etc. The innovative events being staged this year for the first time include a summit meeting addressing the points of view of leading industry analysts on the Open Source world (Forrester, 451 Group, PAC, RedMonk) and another on diversity and women in the Free/Open Source world. Finally, the Open Source Think-tank, dedicated to analyzing Open Source economic models, will once again be partnering the Open World Forum.</p>
<h3>The Global Meeting Point for Open Innovation</h3>
<p>Above and beyond the forward-looking analysis and networking, the event aims to foster the development of multiple, cross-cutting initiatives, during or following the Forum. Complementing the Open CIO Summit – the leading Open Source summit meeting organized by CIOs, for CIOs – and the FLOSS International Competence Centers Summit, the Open World Forum 2010 will also be hosting several new initiatives:</p>
<ul><li>The first BRIC Think-tank, bringing together decision-makers from the Brazilian, Russian, Indian and Chinese governments to discuss ways of accelerating their digital development using open technologies</li><li>The first Open Cloud Summit, bringing together technical directors from the biggest players in Cloud computing to evaluate ways forward in terms of interoperability. <br /></li><li>The first Open Forges Summit, bringing together decision-makers from the major open digital software forges.</li></ul>
<p>The Forum will also stage the presentation of the 2010 Open Innovation Awards, as part of a Demo Cup event, and will continue forward-thinking initiatives with further input into the 2020 FLOSS RoadMap. Over a number of months, international experts will compare their visions of the future, to generate scenarios and make recommendations that will be published at the Forum. The Open World Forum is an initiative launched and led by a number of major international and European organizations from the Free/Open Source and digital world, with the support of public institutions (the EU, Paris city council, the Ile-de-France region) and the active involvement of a wide ecosystem of businesses, including almost 70% of the world’s largest IT companies. Major sponsors of the 2010 OWF already include Bull (co-founder), Red Hat, HP, AlterWay, QualComm, Smile, HP, INRIA, Nuxeo, Pilot Systems, Canonical, Cap Gemini, Oracle, Jaspersoft, SugarCRM, Ayeba and Accenture. In 2010, the Forum is being organized by the Systematic competitiveness cluster, in partnership with Cap Digital and the European Qualipso consortium. The program committee includes some 50 international experts from six continents.</p>
<h3>About the Open World Forum</h3>
<p>The Open World Forum is the leading global summit meeting bringing together decision-makers and communities to cross-fertilize open digital technological, economic and social initiatives. At the very heart of the Free/Open Source revolution, the event was founded in 2008 and now takes place every year in Paris, with over 140 speakers from 40 countries, an international audience of 1,500 delegates and some forty seminars, workshops and think-tanks. Organized by a vast network of partners, including the leading Free/Open Source communities and main global players from the IT world, the Open World Forum is the definitive event for discovering the latest trends in open computing. As a result, it is a unique opportunity to share ideas and best practice with visionary thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders of the top international Free/Open Source communities and to network with technology gurus, CxOs, analysts, CIOs, researchers, politicians and investors from six continents. The Open World Forum<br />is being run this year by the Systematic competitiveness cluster, in partnership with Cap Digital and the European QualiPSo consortium. Some 70% of the world’s leading information technology companies are involved in the Forum as partners and participants.</p>
<p>For more information, visit: http://www.openworldforum.org</p>
<ul><li>Click here for the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.openworldforum.org/share/newsdesk/Open%20World%20Forum%202010%20-%20Open%20Is%20The%20Future.pdf">original</a>.</li><li>See the list of speakers <a class="external-link" href="http://2010.openworldforum.org/attend/speakers.html">here</a></li><li>See the video on Youtube <a class="external-link" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-6viPUx8FE">here</a></li></ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/open-future'>https://cis-india.org/news/open-future</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-05-01T02:55:12ZNews Item