The Centre for Internet and Society
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March 2010 Bulletin
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2010-bulletin
<b>Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! We bring you updates of our research, news, and events for the month of March 2010 in this bulletin.</b>
<h3><b>News Updates</b></h3>
<p class="ecxmsonormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>An Open Answer to Office</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /> </span>OpenOffice with its new features is giving Microsoft Word tough competition, says Deepa Kurup in this article published in The Hindu.<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/news/open-office" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/news/open-office</a></p>
<h3><b>Upcoming Events</b></h3>
<p class="ecxmsonormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>CPOV: Wikipedia Research Initiative</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /> </span>The second WikiWars conference will be held in Amsterdam from 26 to 27 March 2010<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/cpov</a></p>
<p class="ecxmsonormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>CI Global Meeting on A2K</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /> </span>CIS is a co-sponsor of the Consumers International Meeting on A2K to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on April 21 and 22, 2010.<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/events/ci-global-meeting-a2k" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/events/ci-global-meeting-a2k</a></p>
<h3><b>Research</b></h3>
<p class="ecxmsonormal" style="text-align: justify; "><b>India Game Developer Summit Bangalore 2010</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><br /> </span>The India Game Developer Conference held at Nimhans Convention Centre on the 27th of February, 2010 was attended by Arun Menon who is working on The Gaming and Gold Project at The Centre for Internet and Society. The Developer forum brought together game developers from different sectors of the Game Production Cycle, with hardware manufacturers like Nvidia demonstrating their latest 3d technology and Software developers like Crytek and Adobe demonstrating the latest in developer tools for creating and editing games on multiple platforms.<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/gaming/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/gaming/india-game-developer-summit-in-bangalore-2010</a><br /> <br /> <b>10 Legendary Obscene Beasts</b><br /> Nishant Shah analyses a peculiar event of vandalism which has now become the core of free speech and anti-censorship debates in mainland China. Looking at the structure of user generated knowledge websites and the specific event on the Chinese language encyclopaedia, 'Baidu Baike', he shows how, in cities where spaces of political spectacle and public protest are quickly diminishing, the Internet has become a tool for producing new public spaces of demonstration and protest.<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/grants/ISShanghai/itcity4" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/research/grants/ISShanghai/itcity4</a></p>
<p class="ecxmsonormal"><b>WikiWars - A report</b><br /> In this blog, Nishant Shah analyses about the WikiWars, the first of the three events held in Bangalore on January 12 and 13.<br /> <a href="https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wwrep</a></p>
<h3><b>Telecom</b></h3>
<p class="ecxmsonormal"><b>Understanding Spectrum</b><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><b><br /> </b></span>What is spectrum and how do government and commercial decisions on this scientific phenomenon affect public facilities and costs? Shyam Ponappa examines this in his latest blog published in the Business Standard on March 4, 2010.<b><br /> </b><a href="https://cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/understanding-spectrum%0c" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/advocacy/telecom/blog/understanding-spectrum</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2010-bulletin'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2010-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomIntellectual Property RightsAccessibilityInternet GovernanceCISRAWOpenness2012-08-13T05:02:42ZPageAn open answer to Office
https://cis-india.org/news/open-office
<b>OpenOffice with its new features is giving Microsoft Word tough competition, says Deepa Kurup in this article published by The Hindu on March 14, 2010.</b>
<p>The decade-old OpenOffice was the Free and Open Source riposte to Microsoft's Office that has entrenched itself in the office productivity suite segment.</p>
<p>Originally a proprietary software application that was open-sourced by Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice has come a long way, with the release of its new-improved version 3.2. Today, having crossed 300 million downloads — a third of this over the last year — this community project is among the most successful stand-alone Open Source products.</p>
<p>Data legacy and incompatibility issues, as a majority of office software was already using proprietary applications, and widespread piracy, retarded early growth. Constantly competing with MS Office, it got better with successive iterations, though it has not quite caught up. The latest version, Office 2010, is due for release and offers browser versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, across the PC, mobile phone and browser.</p>
<h3>Open Office 3.2</h3>
<p>The most in-your-face improvements of Open Office 3.2 Writer are the reduced start-up time (down by 46 per cent, it claims) and more features on Calc, its spreadsheet programme. It offers improved compatibility with proprietary file formats, including password-protected files, and increased compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) standards that have now been adopted by several countries.</p>
<h3>Why Open Office?</h3>
<p>For starters. OpenOffice is free — as in free beer and freedom/liberty, to roughly borrow the famous Richard Stallman analogy for Free Software. So when MS Office 2007 for home users costs Rs 3,000, and between Rs.14,000 and Rs.17,000 for professionals, OpenOffice is free.</p>
<p>Though the frills and fancies are missing in the user interface, including simple features like a thesaurus, for a regular user what OpenOffice offers is basic and adequate.</p>
<p>As for the “freedom” it offers, OpenOffice has driven localisation in a big way. Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, points out that its support for language computing is key. OpenOffice is available in 26 Indian languages (led by the CDAC's BharateeyaOO team and independent FOSS communities), years before proprietary options were available. Even today, Microsoft's Office Suite offers 12 languages, while OpenOffice offers dictionaries, thesaurus, spelling and grammar check.</p>
<p>Though it has not been widely adopted in the way it is in Europe, there are some success stories, Mr. Abraham says. For instance, the Delhi Government and the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu are migrating to OpenOffice.</p>
<h3>New acquisition</h3>
<p>With proprietary giant Oracle recently acquiring Sun Microsystems, the FOSS community that has contributed reams of code to Sun's Open Source project — like OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, and more importantly MySQL — is apprehensive. But with no competing Office products, there is little reason for Oracle to kill OpenOffice. Michael Bemmer, general manager of Global Business Unit, asserts OpenOffice will remain Open Source and free. “The Oracle Office product family will be the first desktop-to-web-to-mobile solution centred on the ODF document standard — running on any platform, any device.”</p>
<p>Link to the original article in the <a class="external-link" href="http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/article244502.ece">Hindu</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/open-office'>https://cis-india.org/news/open-office</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2011-04-02T13:38:15ZNews ItemMozilla DevDay 2010, Bangalore
https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-devday-2010-bangalore
<b>Mozilla, Mahiti & The Centre for Internet and Society are joining hands to organize an informal developer-oriented conference in Bangalore on Saturday February 27, 2010.
</b>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">The
Mozilla DevDay will be an opportunity for developers, open source enthusiasts,
and web aficionados who live in and around Bangalore, to meet
Mozilla staff and learn about the Mozilla Project and its technologies. The
DevDay is a free conference open to the general public.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">For
more information please visit: <a href="http://j.mp/BLRMozDevDay">http://j.mp/BLRMozDevDay</a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">All
interested participants are requested to register by following this link: <a href="http://j.mp/MozDevDayBLR">http://j.mp/MozDevDayBLR</a></p>
For the event poster, <a href="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Moz%20Day.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Moz Day, Bangalore">click here</a>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-devday-2010-bangalore'>https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-devday-2010-bangalore</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaOpenness2011-04-05T04:12:42ZEventImpaired Social Mobility
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/impaired-social-mobility
<b>Leading e-mail providers like Gmail and Yahoo Mail have introduced open protocols for copying e-mails offline through Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird but popular social networking websites like Facebook, Myspace, etc generally do not allow the user to backup their own data. Sunil Abraham through this article points out that if competition and technological development does not rectify the situation then the government needs to intervene for the sake of its citizens.</b>
<p>A good number of netizens spend hours on social networking websites – lovingly building a circle of friends, or alternatively a social or commercial marketing campaign. God forbid –if something goes wrong then we start again from square one. There are several serious threats right there on the horizon, of which I will name only two. One, the owner of the social networking services could go bust – if it could happen to the Lehman Brothers it can happen to Web entrepreneurs still dreaming about their business model. Two, a security slip from either side could result in a bot or hacker gaining control of your account and also corrupting your data. Last year, Myspace was breached and 17 GB of private photographs was leaked onto The Pirate Bay. Earlier this year, Microsoft almost lost data for nearly 800,000 sidekick smart phone users in the US. Today, compromised twitter accounts can be noticed by the increased frequency spam messages. As these systems become increasingly complex and ownership shifts, these mishaps are only going to get more frequent. And in most cases you just can't backup your own data.</p>
<p>In the days of offline software – vendor lock-in was achieved using proprietary formats thus preventing users from migrating to the competition. As a result, very few of us have files from the Word Star and Word Perfect days. Proprietary formats force the user to keep renewing the license for the associated software or worse, pirating it. Fortunately, the copyright law in many countries including India allows for reverse engineering and free software developers were able to provide us alternatives such as OpenOffice.org. This combined with anti-trust investigation in Europe and US has resulted in Microsoft embracing an open format as native storage for the latest version of the Office suite. </p>
<p align="left">Today it is déjà vu in the world of social networking in particular and cloud computing more generally. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut and their ilk all provide file storage, contact management, messaging and calendaring functionality. However, very few of them actually allow the user to backup their data – for example on Facebook and Myspace it is not possible for a user to backup their contact database. Some exceptions like Orkut allows for export of contact database, etc., but that is more because it is not the primary monopoly that Google wants to protect. Fortunately, email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail have all finally embraced open protocols and are using POP3 or IMAP protocol and we can copy our mail offline using Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. In the future, social networking sites may congregate around a couple of open standards and offer their users true digital social mobility. There are already some initial signs of hope here – for example, the Data Portability Project is supported by individuals from Plaxo, Facebook and Google.</p>
<p align="left">However, if competition and technological development does not rectify the situation then there might be a case for government intervention. Especially, because citizens wishing to engage in e-governance have no choice but to embrace the choice of the politicians and bureaucrats whether it is Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. In Canada, the Privacy Commissioner forced Facebook to change its policies on retaining user data after they had deleted their accounts. In US, the Attorney Generals of 49 states gave a laundry list of modifications to Myspace in order to keep children safe from paedophiles. In India too, the government and civil society should collaborate on policy reform to ensure that citizens’ rights are protected on social networking websites. Think of it as a phone number portability equivalent for Web 2.0.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/impaired-social-mobility'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/impaired-social-mobility</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessDigital Activism2011-08-18T05:07:22ZBlog EntryWiki's worth, on a different turf
https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-worth-different-turf
<b>An Indian duo–a programmer and a mathematician–have developed a tool to expose anonymous writers and cleanse Wikipedia of rogue editors</b>
<p>Bangalore-based Kiran Jonnalagadda, a Web programming guru, and Hans Varghese Mathews, a mathematician, are the new entrants to the emerging field of Wikipedia research. The duo is credited with building Wiki Analysis, a tool that helps researchers understand the growing phenomenon of astroturfing, the practice of faking grass-roots support on Wikipedia and other websites. Wikipedia is the first Google result for most searches and this has made it a popular destination for those trying to manipulate public opinion on the Internet. Corporations, governments and even pop artists have been caught astroturfing in the past.</p>
<p>Jonnalagadda and Mathews are among 34 researchers from 17 countries attending a two-day conference in Bangalore, WikiWars, which is concluding today. WikiWars is taking a fresh look at many different aspects of the world’s biggest encyclopaedia, the sixth most popular website on the Internet.</p>
<p>The first generation of astroturfing on Wikipedia has been, thus far, largely unsophisticated, with little attention paid to covering up digital evidence. Remember the campaign Avril Lavigne’s fans launched last year that turned her music video Girlfriend into the most viewed clip on YouTube? Wal-Mart Stores Inc. contracted its public relations firm Edelman to maintain a fake website called “Working Families for Wal-Mart”. They pretended to be ordinary citizens who opposed the views of the firm’s labour union.</p>
<p>It is well known that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, with opaque management procedures, are susceptible to astroturf campaigns. Supporters of open licensing and peer production have always held that Wikipedia and other community-managed platforms are protected thanks to their transparency in policies and practices. But as far as Wikipedia researchers are concerned, the jury is still out.</p>
<p>Microsoft tried to pay technology blogger Rick Jelliffe to work on Wikipedia connected to OOXML (Office Open XML) during the ISO (International Organization for Standardization) approval process in an attempt to influence the global vote. OOXML was the new file format for MS Office documents that urgently needed approval to check the growing popularity of Open Office. A user called “Ril_editor”, active between September 2007 and May 2008, who claimed to be working out of Reliance Industries Ltd’s chief Mukesh Ambani’s offices, tried to expunge pages connected to negative publicity about Reliance. Scientologists were blocked by Wikipedia’s arbitration committee when they were found trying to systematically undermine Wikipedia’s NPOV (neutral point of view) policy. NPOV is Wikipedia’s particular spin on non-partisanship, providing equal space to all opinions. However, some Wikipedia researchers such as Geert Lovink, head of the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, and co-organizer of the WikiWars conference, believes that the dominance of English and textual citation requirements has meant that NPOV is never translated into practice.</p>
<p>An American team based out of the Santa Fe Institute, US, has developed WikiScanner, a public database of IP addresses that helps reveal the organizations behind anonymous edits on Wikipedia. WikiScanner has been used to expose the US Central Intelligence Agency’s manipulation of pages. WikiScanner doesn’t yet work for edits by authenticated users. The WikiScanner team has also developed another tool called Potential Sock Puppetry, which exposes those who use multiple user accounts from the same IP address. However, both tools could be circumvented by purchasing multiple data cards or getting people to work from public access points such as coffee shops and cyber cafés.</p>
<p>It is this gap the Indian duo’s tool tries to plug. The first version of their Wiki Analysis tool clusters users into potential lobbies based on the pages they edit within a date range. The tool’s next version will cluster users into lobbies based on the words they consistently add and delete across pages. Says Jonnalagadda, “Wikipedia is now close to a decade old and has many articles that have existed since its earliest days and have been edited by thousands of individuals.” It is now the primary encyclopaedic destination for Internet users, and that makes it a ripe target for astroturfing. At no point in the history of human civilization have so many collaborated over so long to produce one canonical document on any article of human knowledge.</p>
<p>“Wikipedia users rarely bother to check how a page was edited, but that information is all there, available to anyone who cares to look. We’re building the tools to help make sense of it,” Jonnalagadda says. Once Wiki Analysis is ready, you will be able to check if, for example, the editors of the climate change page on Wikipedia are more interested in ecology or energy.</p>
<p>Original article on <a class="external-link" href="http://www.livemint.com/2010/01/12210114/Wiki8217s-worth-on-a-diffe.html">Livemint</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-worth-different-turf'>https://cis-india.org/news/wiki-worth-different-turf</a>
</p>
No publishersunilOpenness2012-10-23T08:33:56ZNews ItemTime Out Bengaluru - Software Patenting
https://cis-india.org/news/time-out-software-patenting
<b>An article by Akhila Seetharaman published as a precursor to the national public meeting on software patents held on 4th in Bangalore. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.timeoutbengaluru.com/aroundtown/aroundtown_feature_details.asp?code=14">Original article on Time Out Bengaluru website</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In August this year, the US Patents and Trademarks Office granted Microsoft ownership of “page up” and “page down”. So in theory, no other company can scroll without permission and acknowledgement to Microsoft in monetary terms.<br /> <br />A number of seemingly ubiquitous software ideas have been patented: the use of tabs to shift from one hyperlink to another on a web page, the “Add to Shopping Cart” function that appears on every online store, automated online loan requests, and even reducing image size to make a webpage load faster.<br /> <br />“Most companies register defensive patents to protect themselves, not offensive ones,” said Sunil Abraham of Centre for Internet and Society. “Not many actively pursue patent infringement, but it is still very scary for a small-time entrepreneur.”<br /> <br />At a time when the Indian Patent Office is in the process of putting together a new Manual of Patent Practice and Procedure, the Centre for Internet and Society is holding a one-day consultation on the issue of software patenting in the city. Participants include the Delhi Science Forum, RedHat, IT for Change, Open Space, as well as the Alternative Law Forum.<br /> <br />From mobile phone technology to pacemakers in healthcare, everybody is dependent on software. “Each software patent is a 17-year monopoly on an idea,” said Anivar Aravind of the Free Software User Group Bangalore.<br /> <br />“If formulaic Hindi films were protected by patent laws, we would be able to make only one film,” joked Abraham. The system of software patenting wipes out smaller businesses and innovation, he said. “Software, like poetry and literary works, is already protected by copyright. After all, Bill Gates made his fortunes from copyright and not patents. But many software companies are trying to get additional protection.”<br /> <br />Copyright and patents are both part of intellectual property rights, but copyright restricts the expression of an idea while patents restrict the idea itself, according to Abraham. Under a patenting regime, even before a kid writes one line of code he has to read many patents.”<br /> <br />Kiran Patil of Turtle Linux Lab agreed. “If every little thing is patented, there’s nothing a developer can do.” He cited Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU (a recursive acronym for GNU’s Not Unix) Project, who likened patents to explosive devices: “Software patents are the software project’s equivalent of land mines: each design-decision carries a risk of stepping on a patent, which can destroy your project.”<br /> <br />Worst of all, the world sees those with patents as the innovators, said Patil, which, according to him, is a big misconception.<br /><br />While corporate giants like Microsoft and IBM fix exchange deals through cross-licensing, smaller companies get left out of the loop entirely. Despite not having many patents of their own, several Indian software companies support software patenting because they have huge contracts with the large software companies in the United States and Europe who do.<br /> <br />The Indian Patent Act of 1970 did not allow for software patents until 2002 when an amendment, which ironically excluded “computer programmes per se” from the scope of patenting, was introduced.<br /> <br />The amendment implied that while computer programmes themselves were not eligible for patents, programmes used in combination with hardware were. The Act was further amended through an ordinance in 2005 to narrow the scope of software excluded, but the ordinance was rejected by the Indian<br /> <br />Parliament and the Act effectively reverted to what it was after the 2002 amendment. “The law has left it somewhat ambiguous,” said Abraham. “Nobody is sure what can or cannot be patented. Many people are using the clause “computer programmes per se” to get pure software patents.”<br /> <br />This occurs either due to incompetence among patent officers or by accident, he said. “While many of the patent officers have expertise in the area of industrial inventions or medical inventions, very few know enough about software patents at the moment.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-- Akhila Seetharaman</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/time-out-software-patenting'>https://cis-india.org/news/time-out-software-patenting</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpennessSoftware PatentsAccess to Knowledge2013-01-16T06:39:27ZNews ItemOpenness, Videos, Impressions
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport
<b>The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The notion of free and open is under great debate even under
that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further
splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the
tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively
perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away
with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different,
often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost
endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.</p>
<p>Open video, in that matter, has gone through different
iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it
variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for
the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and
open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective
hearing, through the day: <strong>Access, Archive,
Share, Remix, Repurpose</strong>. And it is these five that we need to now
imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups
today.</p>
<p><strong>Access</strong> has been one primary question that almost everybody
dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements,
where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and
content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging
information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access,
privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To
contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something
that different participants have voiced the need for.</p>
<p><strong>Archive</strong> is a preoccupation with most people because
archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and
usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to
different people, there are older questions of representation, voice,
empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In
education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge
production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of
issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of
access, distribution etc.</p>
<p><strong>Sharing </strong>is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open
and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what
sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to
be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions
of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do
we share it with? Tools by which sharing
leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning
practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks
can be built up?</p>
<p><strong>Remix</strong> has been of great value because it means that you are
being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the
process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the
possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is
interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just
putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc.
can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic
and mechanics seems to have emerged.</p>
<p><strong>Repurpose </strong>is my additional reading of something that perhaps
needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact
remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that
enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms,
protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and
there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still
seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up
and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport</a>
</p>
No publishernishantConferenceOpen StandardsArtWorkshopDigital AccessFLOSSOpen ContentArchivesOpennessOpen InnovationMeetingOpen Access2011-09-22T12:23:13ZBlog EntryWhen the virtual world gets a room
https://cis-india.org/news/when-the-virtual-world-gets-a-room
<b>Wikipedians have found a permanent abode, and the comfort of increasing numbers, at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy organisation.</b>
<p>Those of us familiar with the Wikipedia way of life know by now that the internet-based encyclopaedia is an online community effort powered by scores of volunteering wiki editors. However, few would have heard about the offline extension of this bonhomie — a cult of wikipedians who congregate, share a laugh or two and put their heads together every now and then.</p>
<p>This growing community, and its passion, is perhaps what has driven the growth of Indian content — in English and at least 15 other Indian languages — on the web in recent years. What started off as a high-profile meeting when Jimmy Wales visited the country in 2006, faded into oblivion soon after the Wikipedia co-founder packed his bags.</p>
<h3>Offline meet</h3>
<p>However, a few months ago Wikipedia editor Tinu Cherian, a software engineer by profession, convened an offline wiki meet in his home. Today, six meetings later, these meets have found a permanent abode, and the comfort of increasing numbers, at the office of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy organisation.</p>
<p>So students, busy software engineers, entrepreneurs and random wiki enthusiasts turn lazy Sunday afternoons into an intense session of brainstorming, discussing everything from technical wiki editing solutions to quality control mechanisms. Mr. Cherian who has been involved in English, Malayalam and Hindi wiki editing, says it is unfortunate that most wiki users do not even notice the ‘Edit’ function. “In India unfortunately, wiki editing is confined to the techie population, unlike in the West where doctors, researchers and random non-experts are contributing.” He hopes that these meet-ups will help bridge that barrier and get more people to realise that wiki editing is no rocket science.</p>
<p>So far, it appears that putting a face to virtual names has worked in tangible ways and helped get more people onboard. Take pre-university student Srikanth Ramakrishnan, for instance, who says that meet-ups have helped turn online acquaintances into fast friends in just a couple of months. Barely 18, wiki editing is a “sheer obsession” for young Srikanth, whose current interest is enriching the ‘transport in India’ wiki page, which he helped build from 25 to 145 references.</p>
<h3>Transliteration tools</h3>
<p>The wiki meet on Sunday afternoon, which started with technical discussions on tools that help wiki edit, went on to include a short presentation by an expert from Google on transliteration tools. Wiki meets, though located in Bangalore, draw a motley crowd comprising people who edit wiki pages in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada, among others.</p>
<p>While presentations by corporates are not customary, this one proposed to help drive growth of vernacular content; a noble intention that even snowballed into a healthy debate on why “quality control” of content is sacrosanct to wikipedians.</p>
<p>Getting the Indian Wikipedia rolling is not just about creating new inventories. It is also about increasing Indian content on the web, particularly in local languages. Given that about half the existing Indic language content on the web can be traced to the wiki community, vernacular wikis are attracting a lot of attention.</p>
<p>Balasunder Raman, a wiki editor of five years, says initiatives such as these have a tangible effect on the community. “It provides us a forum to group together, share our experiences and even work on other outreach programmes that can help spread the word.”</p>
<p>Check out http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/WP:MBL</p>
<p> <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hindu.com/2009/12/22/stories/2009122250740200.htm">Link to the original article</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/when-the-virtual-world-gets-a-room'>https://cis-india.org/news/when-the-virtual-world-gets-a-room</a>
</p>
No publisherPrasadOpenness2011-04-02T14:09:19ZNews ItemWatch what you read on that website
https://cis-india.org/news/watch-what-you-read-on-that-website
<b>Google has decided to give newspapers better control over their content appearing on the search engine but netizens don’t seem too pleased about it, says an article by NT Balanarayan of DNA on December 9, 2009</b>
<p>While many newspaper heads are rejoicing Google's decision to provide more control over their content appearing on the search engine, netizens don't seem too pleased about it.</p>
<p>More than Murdoch's stand demanding visitors to pay for news, what surprised most was the fact that Google made it easier for them to do so. "Anyone who owns a website knows that they can add or remove their content from search engines by modifying the robots.txt file, and that's what newspapers like Wall Street Journal should have done. But instead, many newspapers kept blaming search engines for their falling readership. Now that Google's provided such a tool, they have no more reason to complain," Jayant M, a city-based blogger says.<br /><br />First Click Free, a tool from Google lets users view a limited number of articles on a website before being asked to register or to pay up to move ahead. But this tool again uses browser cache and cookies to keep track of how many stories a visitor has viewed. This can easily be overcome by clearing the cache or by using another browser. Google spoke out after an initial rumour of Microsoft holding talks with News Corp for exclusive indexing of the news sites on their Bing search engine gained traction. Microsoft later denied any such move.</p>
<p>"It's not like I'm not ready to pay a news website for news. But I wouldn't pay a news service for a few stories once in a while. I'll readily pay a local newspaper, if they demand a reasonable amount and provided it's not just agency news that's thrown my way," Suresh Nayak, a Bangalore-based techie says.</p>
<p>A few are ready to pay for content online, but a lot of people say they'll depend on other sources like blogs which provide news for free. "Mostly, in a newspaper, I don't read the full story because I get most of the information from the first few paragraphs. There are a lot of bloggers who post the most important news snippets on their blogs too. That is enough information most of the time," Jayant adds.</p>
<p>According to Sunil Abraham, executive director at Bangalore-based Centre of Internet and Society, every generation brings in disruptive new models which affect the existing ones. New business models are coming up and the ongoing discussions between search engines like Bing, Google and newspapers is just a part of it.</p>
<p>"As far as India is concerned, the question is not whether the media will provide their content for free or not, but if they come with a medium which can sustain them. It could be paid, ad-based or even based on a system where search engines pay for indexing them," he says.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.dnaindia.com/bangalore/report_watch-what-you-read-on-that-website_1321839">Link to the original article</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p><br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/watch-what-you-read-on-that-website'>https://cis-india.org/news/watch-what-you-read-on-that-website</a>
</p>
No publisherPrasadOpenness2011-04-02T14:10:54ZNews ItemMozilla Open Web Talks
https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-talks
<b>Give a talk, or just listen - On December 16 in Bangalore, Mozilla and The Centre for Internet and Society are holding an evening of talks about the future of the open internet.
</b>
<p></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">We're inviting you to to give a 5 minute talk, or just to
come listen:</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/CIS-Bangalore">https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/CIS-Bangalore</a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Presentations will either:</p>
<ol><li>Explain the open web and
why it matters and<br /></li><li>Describe a concrete project idea that will make
the web better.</li></ol>
<p>If you're interesting in giving a talk, please sign up
here:</p>
<a href="http://fcroadshow.net/?page_id=7">http://fcroadshow.net/?page_id=7</a>
<p>If you'd like to simply attend and listen, please RSVP
here: </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><a href="http://bit.ly/51OOXf">http://bit.ly/51OOXf</a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Mozilla%20Drumbeat.jpg/image_preview" alt="Mozilla Drumbeat" class="image-inline" title="Mozilla Drumbeat" /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-talks'>https://cis-india.org/events/mozilla-talks</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaOpenness2011-04-05T04:19:15ZEventPresent, tense: Future classrooms
https://cis-india.org/news/present-tense-future-classrooms
<b>An article by Nishant Shah in the December issue of Teacher Plus - the magazine for the contemporary teacher. </b>
<p>In the world of education, the emergence of Wikipedia – an online, user generated, knowledge production referencing system – has drawn strong battle lines. The divide is fairly well drawn between those who swear by Wikipedia and those who swear at it. On the one hand are the students and teachers (more students than teachers) who look upon the democratic modes of knowledge production, the easy access to information, and the multiple perspectives that get embedded in the global system of producing knowledge, as one of the most revolutionary moments in the history of teaching and research in the world. On the other hand are the teachers and students (more teachers than students) who grow green in the face, pointing out the errors and problems within Wikipedia, often layering their objections with much more complex problems of plagiarism, lack of research ethics and absence of rigour.</p>
<p>Especially in classrooms, where students often bring in information retrieved from Wikipedia to cope and engage with their curricula, there seems to be a strained sense of tension where the students are increasingly depending upon Wikipedia (or other such user generated knowledge production spaces) for their first introductions to different knowledges, and the teachers, used to the sacredness of books and library based research, feel a sense of despair at the click-copy-paste cultures that the students bring to the classrooms. This tension between the students and the teachers, and the concern over authenticity and accuracy, is symptomatic of a much larger changing relationship between students and teachers within academia in emerging information societies.</p>
<p>While it is possible to, almost infinitely, perpetuate these debates, there is a certain transformative moment which is being lost in the cacophony that emerges from both the sides trying to prove their points, and often delving into pointless, albeit intelligent, chatter. It is this moment that I am interested in articulating, because it captures, for me, a change in the learning-teaching environments in classrooms that is not very clearly articulated in the Wikipedia (or at a much larger level, Internet) and education debates.</p>
<p>The classroom, across cultures and geographies has been marked by a romantic imagination of being a hallowed space of elevated learning and knowledge. While this is indeed true, it is necessary to place the classroom in another more pragmatic context of Knowledge production industries and services. While there are often certain intangible and affective bonds of faith between the teacher and the students, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the classroom is essentially a site of knowledge industries, where certain information, knowledge and skills are transferred from the teacher – who serves as the access point to relevant data – to the students who need to be trained and taught into becoming possessors of knowledge.</p>
<p>And it is this particular relationship that the Internet technologies are changing – this hitherto accepted role of the teacher as the bearer of knowledge and the student as a recipient of the same. I want to look at three particular ways in which Wikipedia and other similar spaces have challenged our understanding of the classroom and the teacher-student relationship in the traditional classrooms.</p>
<p>Wikipedia, which is at the centre of the debates, is actually more demonstrative of this changing knowledge structure because of its contours as well as the larger aesthetics and politics it embodies. In the world of Wikipedia, there are no hierarchies of knowledge dependent upon personal credentials or antecedents. All contributors, are, instead, sorted on the basis of their skill for research, writing, and providing evidence. More often than not, an article on Wikipedia is a collaborative effort which plays on the strengths of many different collaborators. Each contributor is not expected to be a proficient scholar with all the required skills. Instead, different contributors take on different roles and help in producing collaborative knowledge. Such a system of knowledge production challenges the dominant understanding of knowledge production and contribution, especially in the school and university set-ups, which are contingent upon individual genius and comprehensive skills.</p>
<p> <img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Wikipedia.jpg/image_preview" alt="Wikipedia" class="image-inline" title="Wikipedia" /></p>
<p>A space like Wikipedia thus, produces not only a level field of learning, collaborating and sharing knowledge, which is often at logger-heads with the classrooms as we know them, it also leads to a new flow of knowledge. In traditional classroom conditions, the teacher is envisioned as an expert and the flow of information is meant to be one-way, imitating a broadcast model that earlier technologies like print and cinema have embraced. With Wikipedia, there is a shift from education to learning. Everybody on Wikipedia is imagined to be a valuable person who pools his/her skills into a common database, from which knowledge is now produced and perfected. This dismantling of the teacher figure, the placing of the teacher in a condition of learning rather than teaching is the source of much anxiety that internet technologies bring forth. The recognition that the experiences, the skills, and the information that the students have are equally, if not more valuable, in the process of knowledge production and dissemination, is a significant shift in our understanding of the classroom.</p>
<p>The last point that I want to touch upon is the way in which the accepted role of curricula is challenged with the emergence of such easy access to different knowledge systems. For younger users of technology, who are being exposed to alternative voices, politics of dissent and a wider horizon of theory and practice, the prescribed curriculum becomes often restrictive and sometimes redundant. Because information is now easily available, the premium is on knowledge – abilities to analyze, sift, research and thinking through questions – thus changing the role of teachers, especially in schools. Many teachers are often faced with situations where the students have more information at their finger tips than is in the text-book or indeed, is available to the teacher around a particular area. In such instances, new forms of coping with curriculum, novel ways of understanding classroom pedagogies, and creative ways of incorporating the students’ experiences and information in the teaching practices need to be developed.</p>
<p>There is no denying the fact that the emergence of internet technologies are leading to different crises in the classrooms. However, instead of formulating it in binaries – virtual classroom versus physical classroom, Wikipedia versus Encyclopaedia Britannica, Information versus Knowledge, etc. – it is more fruitful to examine the ways in which these technologies are helping us revisit the classroom as one of the most crucial sites of the knowledge industries, and questioning many concepts and ideas that we had taken for granted in our existing education and teaching systems.</p>
<p>The author is the Director – Research at The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. He is currently working with the Networked Higher Education Initiative on a project on technology and education on networked campuses in India. He can be reached at itsnishant@gmail.com.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.teacherplus.org/2009/december-2009/present-tense-future-classrooms">Link to the original article</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/present-tense-future-classrooms'>https://cis-india.org/news/present-tense-future-classrooms</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaOpenness2011-04-02T14:11:51ZNews ItemCreative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons
<b>The Centre For Internet and Society and JAAGA organised a CC Salon on 02nd December, 2009 at 7.30pm. </b>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">CIS and JAAGA organised a CC Salon (<a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon">http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon</a>)
by Jon Phillps on Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Venue: JAAGA<br />Time: 7.30pm</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">The aim of this get together was to share knowledge and
experiences of alternative copyright licensing.
Artists, lawyers dealing with copyright licensing and others are
encouraged to highlight their own work, experiences and queries about Creative
Commons and other alternative licenses.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">An abstract of the presentation and the bio of Jon
is given below.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">ABSTRACT:</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Creative Commons is a well-known nonprofit
organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration. Its key tools
are six licenses that fit between public domain and complete control,
copyright, to give you control over how your work is shared with the world.
This presentation explores high level case studies that use Creative Commons
licenses to make a successful project. The key featured case study is
Status.Net, a new status updating hosted service and open source software that
uses Creative Commons licensing for content.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><a href="http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon">http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon</a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">BIO:</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText">Jon Phillips is a community and business
developer
contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. In 2002
he
helped launch the open source drawing tool, Inkscape and founded the
Open Clip
Art Library. From 2005 until 2008 he built Creative Commons’ community
and
business development projects and is currently a Creative Commons
Fellow.
Currently, he is growing the media company Fabricatorz with Cantocore
Art Exhibitions,
Laoban Open Soundsystems, and is recently assisting with an upcoming
re-launch
of Status.Net (Identi.ca). He is known for growing successful open
communities globally, leading international business development
in Asia (particularly China), and developing Open Marketing.</p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"><a href="http://rejon.org/bio/#images">http://rejon.org/bio/#images</a></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> <img class="image-inline" src="../../../../home-images/Evite%20GI-CC%20New.jpg/image_preview" alt="CC Salon" /></p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<h3>Videos</h3>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbSACwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbSATAA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbSBdQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbTbOwA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbTcNQA"></embed>
<embed height="250" width="250" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://blip.tv/play/g_dIgbTcUQA"></embed>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p class="MsoPlainText"> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/creative-commons</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaOpenness2011-08-18T05:08:58ZBlog EntryFree Culture Roadshow
https://cis-india.org/events/free-culture-roadshow
<b>The Free Culture Roadshow from 07th December, 2009 to 22nd December, 2009: A presentation on The Right to Share and The Promise of Open Video.
</b>
<p>CIS in association with different institutions across India invites you to join in the Free Culture Roadshow: A presentation on The Right to Share and The Promise of Open Video.</p>
The Co-hosts, Dates and the Venues for the Talk are given below:
<ol><li>Co-Host: Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay<br />Date: 07th December, 2009 from 10am to 2pm<br />Venue – IIT-B, Mumbai</li><li>Co-Host: Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay <br />Date: 07th December, 2009 from 4.30pm to 7pm<br />Venue – TISS, Mumbai</li><li>Co-Host: Department of Media Sciences, CEGC, Anna University, Chennai<br />Date: 08th December, 2009 from 9.30am<br />Venue – Seminar Hall, Dept. Of Media Sciences, Anna University, Chennai</li><li>Co-Host: Dept. Of Management Studies, IIT-M, and BodhBridge Espl. <br />Date: 09th December, 2009 from 9.30am to 01.30pm<br />Venue – Central Lecture Theatre, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.</li><li>Co-Host: Dept. Of Journalism, Mount Carmel College, Bangalore <br />Date: 14th December, 2009 from 10am to 01pm<br />Venue – Golden Jubilee Hall, Bangalore</li><li>Co-Host: National Law School, Bangalore<br />Date: 17th December, 2009 from 2.30pm onwards<br />Venue – National Law School, Bangalore</li><li>Co-Host: Faculty of Architecture, Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad<br />Date: 18th December, 2009 from 4pm to 7pm<br />Venue – Auditorium, CEPT</li><li>Co- Host: Magic Lantern Foundation<br />Date: 20th December, 2009 from 9am to 1pm<br />Venue - Conference Room 2, India International Centre, Max Mueller Marg, New Delhi</li><li>Co-Host: The Media Lab, Jadavpur University, Kolkata<br />Date: 22nd December, 2009 from 11.30am to 3.30pm<br />Venue – Jadavpur University, Kolkata</li></ol>
<p>A Brief Abstract of the two discussions and the profile of the speakers are given below:</p>
<h3>The Right to Share: What Does Copying Have to Do with Freedom?</h3>
<p>The Internet has unleashed the potential to communicate and collaborate like never before, and the result has been an unprecedented flow of culture and information. Millions of individuals are now sharing and creating culture: copying, cutting, remixing, and participating in new and different ways.<br />Sometimes this activity is transformative. Sometimes it's straight copying. In either case, there is a clear connection between this sharing of culture and personal freedom.<br />This talk will explore how various conceptions of "freedom" have shaped the social movements for free software, free culture, and free knowledge, and how this ideology has manifested itself in real action. It will connect theory with practice, exploring the cultural innovations and political changes that have spawned forth from these movements. Lastly, it will make the case that the broad-based availability, accessibility, and abundance of culture is a good thing for our global society.</p>
<h3>Speaker Profile:</h3>
<p><strong>Elizabeth Stark</strong> is a leader in the global free culture movement. She is a Fellow at the Yale Information Society Project and a Lecturer in Computer Science at Yale University. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Stark founded the Harvard Free Culture Group and served on the board of directors of Students for Free Culture. While at Harvard, she was Editor-at-Large of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, and worked on using new media to promote human rights with the Harvard Advocates for Human Rights. Elizabeth has worked extensively with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and has taught courses in Cyberlaw, Digital Copyright, Technology and Politics, and Electronic Music. She recently produced the inaugural Open Video Conference in NYC, garnering over 8000 viewers across the web. Elizabeth regularly gives talks around the world on free culture, and has collaborated with myriad organizations on promoting shared knowledge and the open web.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Elizabeth%20Stark.jpg/image_preview" alt="Elizabeth Stark" class="image-inline" title="Elizabeth Stark" /></p>
<h3>The Revolution Will Be Recorded, Remixed, and Redistributed: The Promise of Open Video</h3>
<p>Between news, cinema, television, and documentary film, we find ourselves swimming in a sea of moving images. This has been the story of the 20th century. Yet in this age, the tools for creating and sharing video are becoming widely distributed in the hands of millions of individuals. Desktop video editing software is pervasive; webcams and video-equipped mobile phones abound. Video now belongs to everyone. It is becoming a powerful medium for self-expression, a kind of cultural currency. <br />How will this phenomenon change the Internet? How will it change society? What questions persist for the architecture of the Internet, and how will public policy address this ultimately political transformation? This talk sets forth a vision of networked video as a truly participatory medium, one that will power the next 10 years of innovation on the web. Dean Jansen and Ben Moskowitz introduce some core technologies for open video, and the obstacles they face on the road to mass adoption.</p>
<h3>Speaker Profiles:</h3>
<p><strong>Dean Jansen</strong> is a Free Culture activist and guerrilla artist based in New York. He attended Harvard University and was a leader in the Harvard Free Culture Group. Dean assisted in teaching media studies and law courses at MIT and Harvard, and has organized numerous academic conferences. <br />He currently serves as outreach director at the non-profit Participatory Culture Foundation, makers of the Miro internet TV player. His art projects can be viewed at www.notthemessiah.net.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/deanzo.jpg/image_preview" alt="Dean" class="image-inline" title="Dean" /><br /><br /><strong>Ben Moskowitz</strong> is general coordinator at the Open Video Alliance, a coalition to democratize the moving image. Ben co-founded the UC Berkeley chapter of Students for Free Culture and taught a seminar on the politics of piracy at Berkeley's School of Information. <br />He currently serves on the board of directors of the international organization Students for Free Culture, dedicated to promoting access to knowledge, technological freedom, and participatory culture.</p>
<p> <img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/benzo.jpg/image_preview" alt="Ben" class="image-inline" title="Ben" /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/events/free-culture-roadshow'>https://cis-india.org/events/free-culture-roadshow</a>
</p>
No publisherradhaOpenness2011-04-05T04:20:44ZEventOpen Standards Workshop at IGF '09
https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dcos-workshop-09
<b>The Centre for Internet and Society co-organized a workshop on 'Open Standards: A Rights-Based Framework' at the fourth Internet Governance Forum, at Sharm el-Sheikh. The panel was chaired by Aslam Raffee of Sun Microsystems and the panellists were Sir Tim Berners-Lee of W3C, Renu Budhiraja of India's DIT, Sunil Abraham of CIS, Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft, and Rishab Ghosh of UNU-MERIT.</b>
<p>Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the session with an address on various rights. Rights, he noted can range from being things like the rights to air and water to the right not to have the data carrier you use determine which movie you watch. Then, there are tensions between rights: the right to anonymity can clash with the right to know who posted information on making a bomb. Berners-Lee stated that for 2009, he has chosen to pursue one particular right: the right to government-held data. This data can include everything from where schools are to emergency services such as locations of hospitals. Today, we are talking about standards. </p>
<p>The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a fifteen-year old body in which all kinds of people come together for purposes of setting standards around the World Wide Web. Thus, everything from HTML, which is used to write Web pages to WCAG, which are guidelines to enable people with disabilities access websites through assistive technologies. W3C conducts its discussions openly: anybody who has a good idea has a right to participate in its discussions -- it does not matter who one works for, who one represents -- what does matter are the ideas one brings to the table. The kinds of standards that W3C deals with are of interest to an immensely wide-ranging group of people. Even ten-year olds have actually expressed their opinions about standards like HTML. All this openness of participation must be guaranteed while ensuring that the processes move forward.</p>
<p>Next spoke Renu Budhiraja of the Department of Information and Technology, which is a part of the Indian government. She started off by hoping that this workshop would be not only a platform to share knowledge, but also to reach consensus on a few matters. Next, she laid out why open standards are extremely important for the Indian government. What citizens want in their interactions with the government are ease of interaction and efficiency. For them it is immaterial whether a certain service is provided by Department A or Department B. Thus we need to move towards a single-window government service for citizens, enabling them to interact easily with the government's various departments. While such an initiative must be centralized for it to be effective, it is crucial that its implementation be decentralized and suited to each district or localities' needs.</p>
<p>There is, understandably, a huge institutional mechanism behind ensuring that these systems are based on open standards. We have expert committees, consisting of academics and knowledgeable bureaucrats, and working groups, which include industry groups. Through these, we have evolved a National Policy on Open Standards, which is currently in a draft stage, but shall be notified soon. This policy outlines the principles based on which particular standards required for governmental functioning are to be chosen or evolved. This document will ensure long-term accessibility to public documents and information, and seamless interoperability of various governmental services and departments. It will also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and reduce costs, and thus ensure long-term, sustainable, scalable and cost-effective solutions.</p>
<p>Ms. Budhiraja noted that there are a few aspects of the policy that bear discussion in a forum such as the IGF. First is the issue of whether royalty-free is the only choice for innovation. All other things equal, between royalty-free and reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) standards, of course royalty-free is to be preferred. But what if a superior technology (JPEG200 vs. JPEG) is RAND? What should the government's position be in such a case? Further, what should the government's position be when in a particular domain a RAND standard is the only option? </p>
<p>Next is the issue of single vs. multiple open standards. When interoperability is what we are aiming at, can multiple standards be recommended as some in the industry are asking us to do? And then is the issue of market maturity. The government sometimes finds itself in a situation where a standard is available, but well-developed products around that standard aren't and there aren't sufficient vendors using that standard. All these issues are of great practical importance when a government works on a policy document on standards.</p>
<p>Next up was Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society. His presentation was on open standards as citizens' and consumers' rights. He started off by citing the example of the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application (SCOSTA) standard, and the implications that the SCOSTA story has on large-scale projects such as the National Unique ID project currently under way in India. SCOSTA, an open standard, was being written off as unimplementable by all the MNC smart card vendors who wished to push RAND standards. IIT Kanpur helped the government develop a working implementation. Within twenty days, the card manufacturers submitted modified cards for compliance testing by NIC. Because of SCOSTA being an open standard, local companies also joined the tender. The cost went down from Rs. 600 per card to Rs. 30 per card. This shows the benefits of open standards as a means of curbing oligopolistic pricing, and working for the benefit of consumers.</p>
<p>From a rights-based perspective, access to the state machinery is a primary right. Citizens should not be required to pirate or purchase software to interact with the state. If e-governance solutions are based on proprietary standards, not all citizens would be equal. The South African example or requiring a particular browser to access the election commission's website shows that in a rather drastic fashion. When intellectual property interferes with governmental needs, governments have not been shy of issuing compulsory licences. This was seen when during the Great War the United States government pooled various flight-related patents and compulsorily licensed them, as well as what we are currently seeing with many Aids-related drugs being compulsorily licensed in developing countries. Thus, there are precedents for such licensing, and governments should explore them in the realm of e-governance. Many countries now have statutes that guarantee the right to government-held information. Government Interoperability Frameworks should take these into account, and mandate all government-to-citizen (G2C) information be transacted via open standards. This must be backed up by a strong accessibility policy to ensure that the governments don't discriminate between their citizens.</p>
<p>Proprietary standards act like pseudo-intellectual property rights, just as DRMs do. They add a layer on top of rights such as copyright, and can prevent the exercise of fair use and fair dealing rights because of an inability to legally negotiate the standards in which the content is encoded in a cost-free manner. In guaranteeing this balance between copyrights and fair dealing rights, free software and alternative IP models play a crucial role. Because of software patents being recognized in a few countries, development of free software which allows citizens to exercise their fair use rights is harmed in all countries.</p>
<p>Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft spoke next and placed the standards debate in a large context. He noted that standards are a technicality that are only a small part of the large issue which is interoperability in e-governance and delivery to citizens. The real challenges are organizational and semantic interoperability. Frequently interoperability is not harmed by technical issues, but by legal and organizational issues. Governments used to work on paper; during the shift to electronic data, they didn't engage in any organizational changes. Thus they continue to function with electronic data the same way that they did with paper-based data. Governments often lack strong privacy policies regarding the data that each of their departments holds. This harms governmental functioning. Additionally, legacy hardware and software have to be catered to by the standards we are talking about: sometimes an open standard just will not work. </p>
<p>Standards don't guarantee interoperability, and there is significant work done on this by noted academics ("Why Standards Are Not Enough To Guarantee End-to-End Interoperability" Lewis et al.; "Difficulties Implementing Standards" Egyedi & Dahanayake; "Standards Compliant, But Incompatible?" Egyedi et al.). Mandated standards lists will not help address interoperability issues between different implementations of the same standard. What would help? Transparency of implementations; collaboration with community; active participation in maintenance of standards, etc., would help. There is a need for continued public sector reform, with a focus on citizen-centric e-governance, and a need to engage with the question of whether government-mandated standards lists lead the market or follow the market.</p>
<p>Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at UN University, Maastricht, spoke next. He started by noting that technical standards are left to technical experts. That needs to change, which is why discussing open standards at the IGF is important. He next set off a hypothetical: imagine you go to the city council office in Sharm el Sheik, and at the parking lot there it says that your car has to be a Ford if you are to park there; or if the Dutch government insists that you have a Philips TV if you are to receive the national broadcaster's signal. While these might seem absurd, situations like this arise all the time when it comes to the realm of software. Thus, the social effects of open standards are of utmost importance, and not just their technical qualities. Analysing the social effects of open standards takes us back to the economics of technology and technological standards. Technological standards exhibit network externalities: their inherent value is less than the value of others using them. Being the only person in the world with a telephone won't be very useful. Technological standards also exhibit path dependence: once you go with one technological format, it is difficult to change over to another even if that other format is superior to the first. Thus, clearly, standards benefit when there is a 'natural monopoly'. The challenge really arises when faced with the question of how to ensure a monopoly in a technology without the supplier of that technology exhibiting monopolistic tendencies. This can only be done when the technology is open and developed openly, of which the web standards and the W3C are excellent examples. If the technology or the process are semi-open, then because of the few intellectual property rights attached to the technology, some would be better off than others. Just as governments cannot insist on driving a particular make of cars as a prerequisite for access to them, they cannot insist on using a particular proprietary standard as a means of accessing them.</p>
<p>Many interesting questions arose when the floor was thrown open to the audience. "Should governments only mandate a particular standard when it is certain that market maturity exists?" Not really, since governmental decisions also give signals to the market and help direct attention to those standards. It would be best if roadmaps were provided, with particular under-mature standards being designated as "preferred standards", thus helping push industry in a particular direction. Examples where this strategy has borne fruit abound. This is also the strategy found in the Australian GIF. On the issue of multiplicity of standards, Sir Tim was very clear that they have to be avoided at all costs. He gave the example of XSLT and CSS, which are both stylesheet formats. He noted that their domain of operation was very different (with one being for servers and the other for clients), so having two standards with similar functions but different domains of operation does not make them multiple standards. Multiple standards defeat the purpose of the standardization process.</p>
<p>It was noted that governmental choices are of practical importance to citizens. During the Hurricane Katrina emergency, the federal emergency website only worked properly if Internet Explorer was used. How do we move forward? We must move forward by having policies that strike a balance between allowing for the natural evolution of standards and stability. The Government Interoperability Frameworks must be dynamic documents, allowing for categorization between standards and having clear roadmaps to enable industry to provide solutions to the government in a timely fashion. Governments must be strong in order to push industry towards openness, for the sake of its citizens, and not let industry dictate proprietary standards as the solution. Some opined that since there are dozens of domains that governments function in, maintaining lists of standards is a time-consuming process that is not justified, but others rebutted that by noting that for enterprise architectures to work, governments have to maintain such lists internally. Opening up that list to citizens and service providers would not entail greater overheads.</p>
<p><strong>Sunil Abraham talking Open Standards at IGF09</strong></p>
<p>(Video added on December 30, 2009)<br /><br /><br /><a title="<OBJECT>, shockwave-flash@http://www.youtube.com/v/woC_6GddD6A&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" class="__noscriptPlaceholder__" href="http://www.youtube.com/v/woC_6GddD6A&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1">
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dcos-workshop-09'>https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dcos-workshop-09</a>
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No publisherpraneshOpen StandardsConsumer RightsDigital GovernanceFair DealingsFLOSSWorkshopOpenness2011-08-23T02:54:03ZBlog EntryAsia Source 3 Meeting
https://cis-india.org/news/asia-source-3-meeting
<b>The Asia Source 3 Meeting Reinforces Asian Free and Open Source Software Movement -
More than 150 Asian Open Source activists met in the Philippines from 07th November to 12th November to discuss the latest IT-tools for NGOs and SMEs and this time the Main Theme of Asia Source 3 was: Building Capacities and Empowering Humanity through FOSS</b>
<p>Asia Source 3 Meeting Reinforces Asian Free and Open Source Software Movement</p>
<ul><li>More than 150 Asian Open Source activists discuss latest IT-tools for NGOs and SMEs in the Philippines</li><li>Gathering ends with knowledge sharing and plans to migrate to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)</li><li>Main Theme of Asia Source 3: Building Capacities and Empowering Humanity through FOSS</li></ul>
<p>Silang, Cavite - While most technology conferences happen as swanky, slick, and well-rehearsed events, the recently concluded Asia Source 3 took the opposite track and ran a camp that was spartan yet spontaneous. From November 7 to 12, 2009, Asia Source 3 gathered 150 representatives in the Yen Center to discuss developments in open source. For those six days, the campers lived in a communal environment that married fun and relaxation with exchange of ideas.<br />Asia Source 3 campers represented a large cross section of non-governmental organizations, small businesses, youth networks, and technology entrepreneurs from 15 countries (see full list below). While technology issues permeated the discussions, it took place with an emphasis on the economic and social context of cooperation among developing countries.</p>
<p>This is the third such event in the region, organized by the International Open Source Network (IOSN) and InWEnt - Capacity Building International of Germany ; earlier camps took place in Bangalore, India in 2005 and Sukabumi, Indonesia in 2007. It is based on the source camp template of the Tactical Technology Collective, an NGO that consults for other NGOs on technology. The Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ), the ASEAN Foundation and the Open Society Institute funded Asia Source 3, with the aim to increasing awareness and adoption of free and open source software.</p>
<p>"We believe that the continuous strengthening of the Free Software community through source camps like this contribute to a more open collaborative environment," said Dr. Alvin Marcelo, Director of IOSN for ASEAN+3. "While the rising popularity and relevance of open source software is now unstoppable, the challenge is to harness the many activities into a coherent whole. And we are able to achieve this through community building."</p>
<p>Asia Source 3 also marked the official highlight of five years of regional FOSS support by InWEnt in Southeast Asia. "We are honored to be part of this movement through our training and network program it@foss" said Balthas Seibold, Senior Project Manager of InWEnt. InWEnt has trained and connected more than 1000 experts from Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and the Philippines in more than 30 training courses under its it@foss program.</p>
<p>In the tradition of previous camps, Asia Source 3 emphasized spontaneity over rigid planning. “We try to create an environment of collaboration and community," said Allen Gunn, the event's head facilitator. "No keynote speakers, no panels, no powerpoint slides. Instead, we set-up mini-discussions."</p>
<p>This approach makes the exchange of knowledge and development of relationships more organic and natural. It creates opportunities to broaden expertise, and forge new ideas and connections. Asia Source 3’s theme dwelt on building capacity among technical experts and organizational practitioners. It dealt with the topics of managing and broadcasting information through free and open source software and migration from proprietary alternatives.</p>
<p>Asia Source 3 was jointly organized by UNDP-International Open Source Network (UNDP-IOSN) through its ASEAN+3 Centre of Excellence (based at the University of the Philippines Manila) and InWEnt - Capacity Building International Germany, together with the Tactical Technology Collective, Aspiration (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India). Funders include the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ), the ASEAN Foundation and the Open Society Institute.</p>
<p>Asian countries represented in Asia Source III include Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Timor Leste, Vietnam.</p>
<p><strong>PRESS CONFERENCE</strong><br />Asia Source 3 held a press conference last November 13, 2009, 12:00 pm, at the Yen Center, International Institute for Rural Reconstruction in Silang, Cavite. Press pictures and video footage can be found at http://asiasource3.net/blogs.</p>
<p><strong>MORE INFORMATION</strong><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.asiasource3.net">More information on Asia Source 3, and information on all organizers and funders</a><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.as3community.iosnasean.net">To join the community</a><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.iosn.net">More information on the International Open Source Network (UNDP-IOSN)</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/asia-source-3-meeting'>https://cis-india.org/news/asia-source-3-meeting</a>
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No publisherradhaOpenness2011-04-02T14:27:11ZNews Item