Openness Main
Wikipedia workshop in the theme of “Sau Dhuni Teen” in Pune University
A two-day Wikipedia workshop was organised in the Srimati Savitribai Phule Pune University on the 20th August 2015. The workshop was focused on enriching Wikipedia with 100 articles related to notable Indian women under the scope of the “Sau Dhuni Teen” project.
Survey of Estimates of Economic Value of Open Government Data
This is a survey of estimates of economic value of open government data, and public sector information in general, across regions, countries, and sectors offered by several reports published during the last decade. The survey is undertaken by Ömer Faruk Sarı, a student of Business Administration at Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and research intern with CIS.
Edit-a-thon to improve Kannada-language science-related Wikipedia articles
A three-day Kannada Wikipedia edit-a-thon was conducted for science lecturers of institutions who gathered at the District Institute of Education and Training (DIET), Bengaluru this August 18. The idea of this event was to improve science-related articles that are part of the Government of Karnataka's high school syllabus.
Journalism Students of the SDM College Ujire Enrich Karnataka’s Folklore And Folk Art in Kannada Wikipedia
As part of an ongoing partnership with the Shree Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara (SDM) College Ujjire, with active support from a few Kannada Wikipedia editors, CIS-A2K began an outreach programme so that the journalism students could help many Kannada readers about Karnataka’s rich folklore and folk art.
Wikipedia edit-a-thon in Mangalore to bring Tulu Wikipedia live
A Wikipedia edit-a-thon was organised in Mangalore, Karnataka this 14th to encourage more Tulu-language speakers to contribute to Tulu Wikipedia. Tulu Wikipedia is is currently in the Incubator but the enthusiastic editor community is putting their best effort to bring it live out of Incubator. This edit-a-thon is one of the many activities the Tulu Wikimedia community has organised.
Rare Telugu religious and historical work preserved at Annamacharya library to come on Wikisource!
Telugu Wikipedia Community and the Centre for Internet & Society conducted a day long edit-a-thon at Annamaya Library on August 6, 2015 at Andhra Loyola College, Vijayawada.
Odia Wikisource has a new Wikisourcer, and he is the youngest in the Odia Wikimedia community!
Prateek Pattanaik (User:Shrijagannatha on Odia Wikisource) is a young researcher of Odia literature and Odissi music. He has not just digitized as many as 54 Odia-language poetry dating early 18th century but has also annotated, both poetic and prosaic translation in his blogs “Sri Jagannatha” and “Utkal Sangeet”. He has also brought a complete book “Kisora chandranana champu” on Odia Wikisource. A recent entrant into the Odia Wikimedia community, Prateek is also the youngest Odia Wikimedian. He has also digitized 18-19th century 54 poem written by various poets.
Konkani Wikipedia Goes Live After 'Nine Years' of Incubation
Konkani Wikipedia is the second Wikimedia project after Odia Wikisource that has gone live out of incubation. The project stayed in the incubation for nine long years and the community has gone through a long debate to have a Wikipedia of their own. Here is a blog highlighting three Konkani Wikimedians and an advocate of the Wikipedia movement whose efforts finally paid off.
Reading Devanagari script based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada Script
This is a small hack to read websites with Devanagari script (used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Maithili and a few more languages) based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada script.
Odia Wikipedia meets Google Developer Group
This is a guest post by Wikimedian Sailesh Patnaik who has been a ardent contributor in Odia-language Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and has led outreach and partnership building initiatives to grow the Wikimedia projects in Odia and other Indian languages. In this post Sailesh shares his personal experience from his interaction at the Google Extended I/O organised by Google Developer Group in Bhubaneswar, Odisha. All the views are author’s personal views.
Magic words in Wikipedia
The struggle of finding solutions for replacing and retrieving content /words/facts and figures, in this day and age of machines that seem to know everything should ideally be a non-issue. Yet, for many of us who write reports based on the data available at that moment, it is nothing less than a nightmare to come to know that there has been a significant change in the data with which our reports have been written.
Train the Trainer: Running effective outreach activities in India
It is heartening to report that many Wikimedia projects in Indian languages have sustained, and even experienced an upward trend in, editor engagement. However, in terms of content creation, the majority of these projects are still facing grave challenges that put their very existence at risk.
Open Data Intermediaries in Developing Countries - A Synthesis Report
The roles of intermediaries in open data is insufficiently explored; open data intermediaries are often presented as single and simple linkages between open data supply and use. This synthesis research paper offers a more socially nuanced approach to open data intermediaries using the theoretical framework of Bourdieu’s social model, in particular, his concept of species of capital as informing social interaction... Because no single intermediary necessarily has all the capital available to link effectively to all sources of power in a field, multiple intermediaries with complementary configurations of capital are more likely to connect between power nexuses. This study concludes that consideration needs to be given to the presence of multiple intermediaries in an open data ecosystem, each of whom may possess different forms of capital to enable the use and unlock the potential impact of open data.
How the Odia Wikimedia community is enriching Wikipedia with character encoding technology
Last year, I wrote about the development of Odia language character encoding converters that the Wikipedia community was working on. These converted text into Unicode, a universal encoding standard. These converters have now been made available for use, just in time for today’s thirteenth anniversary of the Odia Wikipedia.
The Newly Updated Indic Keyboard App Now Supports 22 Asian Languages
This blog post was written in my personal capacity.
Indian government includes open source in RFPs
The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment.
Workshop on Open Data for Human Development
Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Sunil Abraham will take part in the workshop being organised for government officials from Bhutan, Maldives, Meghalaya, Sikkim, and Tripura, by the International Centre for Human Development (IC4HD) of UNDP India, during June 3-6, 2015. The workshop will be held at the National Institute of Advanced Studies Campus in Bengaluru. Sunil will be one of the panelists in the opening discussion on 'data and transparency in governance,' and Sumandro will provide input for and lead the sessions on developing the draft implementation plan for the Sikkim Open Data Acquisition and Accessibility Policy. Sumandro worked with the IC4HD team to design the objectives and the agenda of the workshop.
ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଉଇକିପିଡିଆ: ନୂତନ ଯୁଗର ଆରମ୍ଭ
My op-ed on Odia Wikipedia and its journey of 13 years was published in Odia daily "The Samaja".
Odia Language Wikipedia Page Grows to 800K Page Views A Month
Odia Wikipedia is one of the first few Indian language Wikipedia projects celebrating such an old age. The Wikimedia community will gather in Odisha's capital of Bhubaneswar on June 3 to celebrate Odia Wikipedia's 13th anniversary.
FOSS for Public Use: Free and Open Source Software for Digital India
I attended a round-table meeting on May 29, 2015 at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. The meeting was organized by SFLC in collaboration with the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software, and the Centre for Internet & Society.
Document Actions
