Centre for Internet and Society

What's Needed Is User-Centric Design, Not Good Intentions

Shyam Ponappa — 2013-01-25T11:26:40Z

The inadequacy of essentials and conveniences around us results from a slack approach to both design and execution. We know we are deficient in execution, but we need to be more aware of deficiencies in approach and design. Good intentions, while important, cannot substitute for good systems design and execution.

Shyam Ponappa's column was published in Organizing India Blogspot on January 6, 2013 and in the Business Standard on January 3, 2013.

Things That Work…
Simple aspects of everyday living that actually work in India can leave one wonderstruck. Like the daily newspapers, organised and delivered seamlessly, reasonably early in the day, almost regardless of where one lives provided it’s a city or town. Or the availability of milk, eggs, bread, vegetables, fruit, and whatever else for daily provisions. And this despite the supposed shortcomings of our logistics and organisation in the context of wholesale and retail markets. Some of the revolutions that we’ve lived through in the last two decades include the manifestation of such wonders, like the phenomenal and ubiquitous growth in the supply of dairy and poultry products.

On a different plane, as it were, are the changes in the quality of automobiles and the improvements in India’s roads, although patchy and considerably lagging. Likewise, there have been revolutions in mobile communications and in air travel, disregarding anomalies such as the horror of Mumbai airport on private airlines, with its incompetent cab mafia on arrival, and a disorganised and demeaning crush on departure, squeezing past crowded boarding gates. (This is the state of the commercial capital? Woe betide us — but I digress...) Another source of wonder is the performance of the Indian Railways. Much abused by exploitative politicians, given short shrift on everything from cleanliness and toilets to much else, overloaded by hapless passengers in desperate need of transportation. One can only marvel at these services.

…And Things That Don’t
And yet, there are debilitating areas that seem utterly intractable, like sanitation, water, power supply and communications services for data (apart from voice).

Comparing the state of sanitation or power with the railways, one might say the latter had the benefit of being set up as an integrated system since the 1850s, although deprived in recent times of systematic development and investment, and so reduced to decrepitude. By contrast, sanitation has been playing catch-up on our old, established society, behind the curve for hundreds of years, never having had the advantage of installation as ab initio systems. Open drains are an Indian feature, even in Delhi. A similar situation obtains in power supply, where the contradictions and inequities of piecemeal, encapsulated interventions that tried to address power generation first were followed by sporadic efforts to address transmission and distribution, with realpolitik all the while playing to the users’ self-indulgence of having it all without paying for it. This sense of entitlement without accountability has resulted in the vicious circle of “free power” that leads to no power, annihilating possibilities for improvement.

In communications services for data (broadband), we have a different kind of problem. For one, governments, citizens and activists don’t seem to get it that these services are as essential to infrastructure as energy and transportation. There is no logic to their exclusion, but it has taken the National Telecom Policy of 2012 (NTP-2012) to announce the objective that telecom is part of infrastructure, although the associated benefits, such as lower interest rates, are yet to follow.

User-Centric Systems
The malady with sectors such as power, communications and transport is that solutions seem to be designed without an integrated, end-to-end, goal-oriented perspective favouring users. For instance, otherwise successful initiatives like the Delhi Metro provide services from an islanded “product perspective” that is simply not user-centric in its orientation. This results in insufficient feeder buses, inadequate parking at the Metro stations, a gaggle of disorganised cycle-rickshaws at stations like Mayur Vihar, and so on. Instead of being an unadulterated blessing, a Metro station in the neighbourhood becomes a curse, because user needs are not treated as being central to the delivery of the service. Passengers are left floundering while people in the environs (like the denizens of Mayur Vihar) are left to fend for themselves. There is also the question of capacity and demand. Again, the “product perspective” results in overcrowding and other inconveniences. On the flip side, well-meaning though misguided critics attack attempts to build capacity in anticipation of demand, as was the Metro by proponents of a Bus Rapid Transit system pushing for the latter as a silver bullet instead of as an adjunct.

What Could Have Been, But Isn’t Yet
The Unique Identification Authority of India’s Aadhaar augured a potentially revolutionary electronic enabler. In practice, however, its design has been baffling. A brilliant concept – abstracting a smart identification number from a smart card – has been reduced to an identifier for cash transfers to bank accounts. The question is, why to bank accounts and not to transactions, whether for retail or for services, activated by a mobile phone? Kenya’s M-Pesa was the pioneer for mobile money transfer, subsequently enhanced to include interest earned on virtual accounts.[*] Introduced in India by ICICI Bank with Vodafone in November 2012 and State Bank of India in January 2013, not only would this be much more practicable as the majority of our population doesn’t have bank accounts, it would cost far less, while being much more convenient for users. It would obviate setting up millions of physical micro-accounts at relatively high cost at banks, as well as giving users proximate access to products and services.

Another puzzling aspect is the contradictory, sometimes changing signals about Aadhaar. It is supposedly voluntary, yet reportedly mandatory now for marriage registrations, yet not accepted by banks for account opening, nor by some mobile phone operators, nor for passport applications, nor for driver’s licences. And inexplicably, except as a ruse to garner votes from non-citizens, it is for all residents (who choose to apply?), and although it could include citizenship information, it doesn’t.

It is best to start out right, recognising that we need user-centric, end-to-end systems design and execution, and apply this approach across the board going forward.

[*]. http://on.ft.com/UpzONs

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-january-6-2013-what-is-needed-is-user-centric-design-not-good-intentions

What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now

anja — 2011-08-02T09:25:39Z

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?

Among those who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion, critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or adivasis, often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and intense. In a recent video posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist – called on the nation to support the adivasis and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested people to get off the Internet:

Is me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge.

[To the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach the common people, neither will we come to know the country's problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people].

Not everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online. But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the only way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the context of the Free Binayak Sen campaign, for example, there is considerable recognition that the website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of 2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist who had worked for more than twenty five years among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website, and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.

In this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres of movements are online, despite their protestations against online activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case, it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the kind of elements that determine whether you are an online activist. What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only work online is not sufficient.

Importantly, such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once come across “online activists” who started their conversation with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all. Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to identify as an activist among participants in the Blank Noise project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming), a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on here, (earlier posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why people refused the “activist” label was generally not because they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a clear difference between their own contribution and that of the full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process – the “jholawallahs”, as one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do, however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:

I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am convinced, that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference, you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.

Clearly, then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense, but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even though small that difference often may be.

In many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as contributions of non-activists have always played an important role in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free; lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return; people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much easier to contribute to publicising and building community around issues that are close to movements' heart as well.

So how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have platforms such as MoveOn or Avaaz, that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly embedded in communities of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists, from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media, valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can and does infuse the method, at least for now.

This, then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people willing and available to help building such communities in a more or less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core “activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more and more people start to care as the message of social movements is amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly, and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a forward-looking alternative to the existing progressive politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the space to such challengers.

The point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and minds of activists and non-activists alike.

With thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.

References

Angelina, M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague, International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now

What Women Want: The ability debates

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T12:08:44Z

In this article published in the Hindu, Deepa Alexander argues that the proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (1957) are restrictive and discriminatory.

The triumphs and disasters of the differently-abled in India are two ends of the spectrum. Among the 70 million disabled in our country are those who have conquered peaks, won gold at the Paralympics, and raced in Himalayan and desert car rallies. But, millions more struggle to meet daily challenges in a society that tends to portray the disabled as either heroes or victims with little or no access to their rightful resources. The proposed amendments to the Copyright Act (1957) are seen as restrictive and discriminatory, as the copyright exception, which aims at allowing persons with disability easy access to copyrighted material, applies only to certain types of disability. We spoke to activists who address these issues, not as charity or welfare but as matters of development and dignity.

Change in attitude

National Trust's programmes work on building capacity, changing patronising attitudes, building trust in the abilities of people with developmental disability and creating an equal playing field. Unfortunately, deeply entrenched attitudes continue to exclude people with disabilities. Even if an opportunity is given, it is given only once; if a person with disability fails, incapacity is assumed.

But, in the recent case of a young woman with intellectual disability who had been raped in a women's home, the Supreme Court upheld her right to ‘choose' to keep her baby, and she has proved to be a competent mother. However, the disapproval of the intelligentsia in the media is an indicator of the social prejudices people with disabilities have to live with.

Poonam Natarajan, Chairperson, National Trust (Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment), New Delhi

Implement their rights

Ability Foundation's thrust is on creating an equitable society. Through our magazine Success & Ability, we spread this message at a time when service to the disabled was seen only at the physical, and not at the emotional level. Persons with disabilities need access to inclusive education, employment and public places. Being ‘accounted' in the Census 2011 will open up a plethora of possibilities. Accurate data will enable Government intervention at various levels, leading to proactive action. We need ramps for wheelchair users, audio announcements in bus / train stations for the visually-impaired, and video announcements for the hearing-impaired. Floor numbers in Braille for lifts, sign language interpreters in every hospital, police station and court of law, slip-proof flooring in malls, and large-print books in public libraries for those with low vision are the other needs. The implementation of the rights of persons with disabilities as per the United Nations convention and the Persons with Disabilities Act (PWD), in letter and spirit, is also essential.

Jaysheree Ravindran, Founder and Honorary Executive Director, Ability Foundation, Chennai

A development issue

My daughter Tamana was born with cerebral palsy. It pushed me to found an organisation in 1984 to fulfil the dreams of children with special needs and those of their parents. Therapy and counselling for children and their families is essential for optimum adult rehabilitation. Since Independence, the disabled have been categorised along with sections such as women, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. While these have had powerful political lobbies, there has been no spokesperson for the disabled. The dichotomies between the Ministries of Education and Social Justice further worsen the exclusion. Most policy-makers look at disability as a welfare, not a development issue. Disability should be jointly addressed by the Ministries of Health, Women and Child Development, HRD, Social Justice and Empowerment. The definition of disability in the PWD Act does not include autism, which leaves out nearly two million autistic persons in India. Admitting disabled children in normal schools is not enough — you need to have professionally trained staff, who are sensitised. I also hope for a different curriculum for special children, even as they are being integrated in the mainstream. Better pay scales will also bring in more jobs in the disability sector.

Dr. Shyama Chona, President, Tamana, New Delhi

Public-private partnership

NGO-run establishments provide free schooling for disabled children. The Government has provided legislative intent through the Inclusive Education Act, which makes it mandatory to include all kinds of impaired children. However, Government schools that cater to the poor are generally marked by grossly inadequate infrastructure and teaching aids, so imagine the predicament of the disabled.

I would like a public-private partnership for day-care and residential institutions which provide educational and recreational service on a long-term basis. This needs to be supported by research institutions which focus on technology, communication and teaching aids. We need to benefit from global expertise, and customise them to local needs.

As Childline's primary mandate is child protection, I feel that the Government must compulsorily provide for a child protection policy in any institution that deals with disabled children, as, such children are more vulnerable to abuse.

Kajol Menon, Executive Director, Childline India Foundation, Mumbai

The copyright angle

The Centre for Internet and Society is associated with the copyright amendment movement for persons with disabilities, and is one of the founding organisations for the Indian Right to Read campaign. At present, the proposed copyright amendment is detrimental to the disability sector's needs. The exception extends only to ‘specially designed' formats such as Braille and sign language, and does not benefit the millions who have cerebral palsy, dyslexia and low vision, and the visually-impaired persons who do not know Braille. Such persons require audio, reading material with large fonts and electronic texts, which are not ‘specially designed' formats. For conversion to non-specialised formats, the amendment proposes a licensing system, which will permit only organisations working for the benefit of the disabled to undertake conversion and distribution. This will prevent educational institutions, SHGs, other NGOs and print-disabled individuals from undertaking conversion. The licensing system will also require approaching the Copyright Board for each work, which will be extremely time-consuming. The waiting period for obtaining permissions and subsequent conversion will result in students losing academic years, a violation of their right to education.

The proposed amendment violates the Constitutional guarantee of equality under Article 14 since it discriminates between those visually-impaired persons who know Braille and those print-disabled persons who do not. It is important for the nation as a whole to take the concern of persons with disabilities as a mainstream concern.

Nirmita Narasimhan, Programme Manager, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Read the original article in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/what-women-want

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference?

sailesh — 2019-06-22T09:37:23Z

The Wikimedia Education SAARC conference is on 20th June 2019. A conference for Wikimedians, Wikimedia education leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement.

The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is the regional union of nations in South Asia. Wikimedians belonging to these nations share several common challenges and many of them are emerging communities within the Wikimedia movement. The community members to attend the Wikimedia Education SAARC conference are involved in Indic language Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference will be the first of its kind conference in SAARC countries which will engage Wikimedians, education program leaders, educators and researchers engaged with Open Education and free knowledge movement. We believe that the students of all ages should not only consume the knowledge available on the Internet but also be a part of the larger Open Internet movement, and help in creating open knowledge resources.

The event will be organised in and by the Christ (Deemed to be University) in Bengaluru from 20th June 2019 to 22nd June 2019. CIS-A2K team has been working with the department of languages in this university from 2013, where students of the university are contributing to multiple Wikimedia projects. Our education activity at this university has inspired us to plan this event. To know more about this university, Please see here.

This conference will allow us to understand the different efforts made by the SAARC communities involved in the Wikimedia Education movement. This will help us to create models, templates and documents that can be replicated in by other institutions or programs.

Conference Goals:

To know the Wikimedia Education activities happening in South Asia by different community members/Languages.
Sharing the knowledge and best practices of how to build "trust relationship" with new partners/teachers and how to improve trust in Wikimedia projects.
Challenges on student retention and how to engage them in the broader Wikimedia movement.
The best method to evaluate and measure the quality of the work done by the students.
To introduce tools like the dashboard, not in your language, and other tools which will be useful for the tracking, assessment, allocation of the topics and others.

The program structure for Wikimedia Education SAARC conference has been developed by keeping the general and specific challenges and opportunities in South Asia, and the submission selected from the participants.

Follow the hashtag #EduWikiSAARC19 for more updates.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/what-is-wikimedia-education-saarc-conference-1

What is net neutrality and why it is important

praskrishna — 2014-02-03T08:24:34Z

Internet is built around the idea of openness. It allows people to connect and exchange information freely, if the information or service is not illegal.

The article was published in the Times of India on January 20, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Much of this is because of the idea of net neutrality. If you like the current state of the internet, you should know about net neutrality. Many web users are aware of it. But if you are not, don't worry. We explain it here:

What is net neutrality?
Net neutrality is an idea derived from how telephone lines have worked since the beginning of the 20th century. In case of a telephone line, you can dial any number and connect to it. It does not matter if you are calling from operator A to operator B. It doesn't matter if you are calling a restaurant or a drug dealer. The operators neither block the access to a number nor deliberately delay connection to a particular number, unless forced by the law. Most of the countries have rules that ask telecom operators to provide an unfiltered and unrestricted phone service.

When the internet started to take off in 1980s and 1990s, there were no specific rules that asked that internet service providers (ISPs) should follow the same principle. But, mostly because telecom operators were also ISPs, they adhered to the same principle. This principle is known as net neutrality. An ISP does not control the traffic that passes its servers. When a web user connects to a website or web service, he or she gets the same speed. Data rate for Youtube videos and Facebook photos is theoretically same. Users can access any legal website or web service without any interference from an ISP.

Some countries have rules that enforce net neutrality but most don't. Instead, the principle is followed because that is how it has always been. It is more of a norm than a law.

How did net neutrality shape the internet?
Net neutrality has shaped the internet in two fundamental ways.

One, web users are free to connect to whatever website or service they want. ISPs do not bother with what kind of content is flowing from their servers. This has allowed the internet to grow into a truly global network and has allowed people to freely express themselves. For example, you can criticize your ISP on a blog post and the ISP will not restrict access to that post for its other subscribers even though the post may harm its business.

But more importantly, net neutrality has enabled a level playing field on the internet. To start a website, you don't need lot of money or connections. Just host your website and you are good to go. If your service is good, it will find favour with web users. Unlike the cable TV where you have to forge alliances with cable connection providers to make sure that your channel reaches viewers, on internet you don't have to talk to ISPs to put your website online.

This has led to creation Google, Facebook, Twitter and countless other services. All of these services had very humble beginnings. They started as a basic websites with modest resources. But they succeeded because net neutrality allowed web users to access these websites in an easy and unhindered way.

What will happen if there is no net neutrality?
If there is no net neutrality, ISPs will have the power (and inclination) to shape internet traffic so that they can derive extra benefit from it. For example, several ISPs believe that they should be allowed to charge companies for services like YouTube and Netflix because these services consume more bandwidth compared to a normal website. Basically, these ISPs want a share in the money that YouTube or Netflix make.

Without net neutrality, the internet as we know it will not exist. Instead of free access, there could be "package plans" for consumers. For example, if you pay Rs 500, you will only be able to access websites based in India. To access international websites, you may have to pay a more. Or maybe there can be different connection speed for different type of content, depending on how much you are paying for the service and what "add-on package" you have bought.

Lack of net neutrality, will also spell doom for innovation on the web. It is possible that ISPs will charge web companies to enable faster access to their websites. Those who don't pay may see that their websites will open slowly. This means bigger companies like Google will be able to pay more to make access to Youtube or Google+ faster for web users but a startup that wants to create a different and better video hosting site may not be able to do that.

Instead of an open and free internet, without net neutrality we are likely to get a web that has silos in it and to enter each silo, you will have to pay some "tax" to ISPs.

What is the state of net neutrality in India?
Legally, the concept of net neutrality doesn't exist in India. Sunil Abraham, director of Centre for internet and Society in Bangalore, says that Trai, which regulates the telecom industry, has tried to come up with some rules regarding net neutrality several times. For example it invited comments on the concept of net neutrality from industry bodies and stakeholders in 2006. But no formal rules have been formed to uphold and enforce net neutrality.

However, despite lack of formal rules, ISPs in India mostly adhere to the principal of net neutrality. There have been some incidents where Indian ISPs have ignored net neutrality but these are few and far between.

Will the concept of net neutrality survive?
Net neutrality is sort of gentlemen's agreement. It has survived so far because few people realized the potential of internet when it took off around 30 years ago. But now when the internet is an integral part of the society and incredibly important, ISPs across the world are trying to get the power to shape and control the traffic. But there are ways to keep net neutrality alive.

Consumers should demand that ISPs continue their hands-off approach from the internet traffic. If consumers see a violation of net neutrality, they ought to take a proactive approach and register their displeasure with the ISP. They should also reward ISPs that uphold the net neutrality.

At the same time, as Abraham says, Trai needs to come out with a set of clear and precise rules that protect the net neutrality. "We have started seeing ISPs trying to take control of the traffic that flows from their servers but Trai can regulate them. It can keep the internet open and consumer-friendly by forming rules that protect net neutrality. These are early days so it is easy to do. If ISPs manage to change the system, it may become too late," he says.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-january-20-2014-what-is-net-neutrality-and-why-is-it-important

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

subha — 2016-10-22T04:12:40Z

The number of internet users in India was expected to reach 460 million by 2015, as the growth in the previous year was 49 percent. The total number of users for Hindi content alone reached about 60 million last year.

This was published by Your Story on October 20, 2016.

State of Indian languages on the internet

Based on a study, Internet activist Anivar Aravind mentioned that in 2014, although 89 percent of Indian population used mobile phones, only 10 percent of the population used smartphones (contributing to 13 percent of total mobile users). This means we can safely assume that a large section of online activity in India is through mobile devices ‑ thanks to the declining data charges because of high competition. That said the mobile internet connectivity in rural India is growing at a fast pace and vernacular content plays an important role in this great journey. With over 90 percent of the users being comfortable in their own native languages, websites that are producing content in Indian languages are going to drive this bandwagon.

Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Open access, in a nutshell, would mean research outputs and other educational resources that are free from restriction of access and use. The former includes resources like journals that are not paywalled, and the latter is freedom from copyright restriction. Open access as a movement encourages license migration ‑ a process of migrating from several copyrighted license terms to Creative Commons licenses and several other licenses that provide freedom to use, share and remix. In a country like India where there are only a handful of research journals available in vernacular languages, the need for open content becomes much more important. The more the restricted content, the less will be the access to knowledge. Creating more vernacular content with open licenses is like digging a well in a dessert.

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

It’s been almost a decade since most largely spoken Indian languages started having a Wikipedia project of their own. Presently, there are 23 Indian language Wikipedias, including newest entrants like Konkani and Tulu. That said, these projects are growing with more and more encyclopedic content written with a neutral point of view, which any internet user will find useful. Wikipedia is considered as the people’s encyclopedia and hence can have quite contrasting content ‑ some being poor because some volunteer editors lack expertise in high quality articles written by professionals. A great example of creating very high quality content in one particular subject area is Open Textbook of Medicine ‑ an offline encyclopedia consisting of Wikipedia articles related to medicine that was created by a group of dedicated volunteer medical professionals that happened to be Wikipedia editors. There is enormous potential to grow Wikipedia in multiple languages with high quality content.

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

The list of challenges to grow Wikipedia-like projects with volunteer effort could be endless. And one of the biggest challenges is bringing self-motivated people who are willing to contribute as volunteers. Also, there are many such people who are not aware that they can contribute to Wikipedia. The Wikipedia community has created an ecosystem by having several Wikimedia chapters and other affiliates that are run by both volunteers and paid staff ‑ the Wikimedia Foundation, a paid staff-run organisation that is responsible for fundraising, major technological and some community support. In India, Wikimedia India, Centre for Internet and Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K) and Punjabi Wikimedians are three such official affiliates that are working on catalysing the growth of the content and the communities. Where the affiliate Punjabi Wikimedians focuses on Punjabi language (in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts), both Wikimedia India and CIS-A2K focus on all the Indian languages. CIS-A2K also specially focuses on five languages; Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia and Telugu. Indian language Wikipedia projects can only grow if people can edit their own language Wikipedias.

With the Open Access Week—a week dedicated for promoting Open Access globally—around the corner with “Open in Action” as the theme of the year, there is no better time for anyone who can read and write in their native Indian language.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/your-story-subhashish-panigrahi-october-20-2016-what-indian-language-wikipedias-can-do-for-greater-open-access-in-india

What 66A Judgment Means For Free Speech Online

geetha — 2015-03-27T16:50:43Z

This week India's Supreme Court redefined the boundaries of freedom of speech on the internet. With the Court's decision in Shreya Singhal & Ors. v. Union of India, Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, has been struck down in entirety and is no longer good law.

Geetha Hariharan's article was originally published in the Huffington Post on March 26, 2015.

This week India's Supreme Court redefined the boundaries of freedom of speech on the internet. With the Court's decision in Shreya Singhal & Ors. v. Union of India, Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, has been struck down in entirety and is no longer good law. Through a structured, well-reasoned and heartening judgment, the court talks us through the nuances of free speech and valid restrictions. While previously, intermediaries were required to take down content upon suo moto determination of lawfulness, Section 79(3)(b) of the Act -- the intermediary liability provision -- has been read down to require actual knowledge of a court order or a government notification to take down content. Section 69A of the Act and its corresponding Rules, the provisions enabling the blocking of web content, have been left intact by the court, though infirmities persist.

The Supreme Court's decision comes at a critical moment for freedom of speech in India. In recent years, the freedom guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution has suffered unmitigated misery: Wendy Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History was banned for hurting religious sentiments, publisher Orient Blackswan fearing legal action stayed its release of an academic work on sexual violence in Ahmedabad, the author Perumal Murugan faced harsh criticism for his novel One Part Woman and chose to slay his authorial identity.

"The Supreme Court's decision comes at a critical moment for freedom of speech in India. In recent years, the freedom guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution has suffered unmitigated misery."

The tale of free speech on the Internet is similar. In response to takedown requests, intermediaries prefer to tread a safe path, taking down even legitimate content for fear of triggering penalties under Section 79 of the IT Act. The government has blocked websites in ways that transgress the bounds of 'reasonable restrictions' on speech. Section 66A alone has gathered astounding arrests and controversy. In 2012, Shaheen Dhada and her friend were arrested in Maharashtra for observing that Bal Thackeray's funeral shut down Mumbai, Devu Chodankar in Goa and Syed Waqar in Karnataka were arrested in 2014 for making posts about PM Narendra Modi, and a Puducherry man was arrested for criticizing P. Chidambaram's son. The misuse of Section 66A, and the inadequacy of other provisions of the IT Act, were well-documented.

Section 66A: No longer draconian

In a writ petition filed in 2012, the law student Shreya Singhal challenged the constitutionality of Section 66A on grounds, inter alia, of vagueness and its chilling effect. More petitions were filed challenging other provisions of the IT Act including Section 69A (website blocking) and Section 79 (intermediary liability), and these were heard jointly by justices Rohinton F. Nariman and G. Chelameshwar. Section 66A, implicating grave issues of freedom of speech on the internet, was at the centre of the challenge.

"It is difficult -impossible, in fact - to foresee or predict what speech is permitted or criminalised under Section 66A. As a result, there is a chilling effect on free speech online, resulting in self-censorship."

Section 66A makes it a criminal offence to send any online communication that is "grossly offensive" or "menacing", or false information sent for the purposes of causing "annoyance, inconvenience, insult, injury, obstruction, enmity, hatred, ill will", etc. These terms are not defined. Neither do they fall within one of the eight subjects for limitation under Article 19(2). It is difficult -impossible, in fact - to foresee or predict what speech is permitted or criminalised under Section 66A. As a result, there is a chilling effect on free speech online, resulting in self-censorship.

With yesterday's decision, the Supreme Court has struck down Section 66A on grounds of vagueness, excessive range and chilling effects on speech online. What is perhaps most uplifting is the court's affirmation of the value of free speech. In the midst of rising conservatism towards free speech, the Court reminds us that an "informed citizenry" and a "culture of open dialogue" are crucial to our democracy. Article 19(1)(a) shields us from "occasional tyrannies of governing majorities", and its restriction should be within Constitutional bounds enumerated in Article 19(2).

What speech is protected?

There are three types of speech, the court says: Discussion, advocacy and incitement. Discussion and advocacy are at the heart of Article 19(1)(a), and are unquestionably protected. But when speech amounts to incitement - that is, if it is expected to cause harm, danger or public disorder- it can be reasonably restricted for any of these reasons: public order, sovereignty and integrity of India, security of the State and friendly relations with foreign states.

" The Union of India argued that Section 66A is saved by the clauses "public order", "defamation", "incitement to an offence" and "decency, morality". But as the court finds that these are spurious grounds."

Section 66A, however, does not meet the legal standards for any of the limitation-clauses under Article 19(2), and so is unconstitutional. The Union of India argued that Section 66A is saved by the clauses "public order", "defamation", "incitement to an offence" and "decency, morality". But as the court finds that these are spurious grounds. For instance, Section 66A covers "all information" sent via the Internet, but does not make any reference (express or implied) to public order. Section 66A is not saved by incitement, either. The ingredients of "incitement" are that there must be a "clear tendency to disrupt public order", or an express or implied call to violence or disorder, and Section 66A is remarkably silent on these. By its vague and wide scope, Section 66A may apply to one-on-one online communication or to public posts, and so its applicability is uncertain. For these grounds, Section 66A has been struck down.

For freedom of speech on the internet, this is fantastic news! The unpredictability and threat of Section 66A has been lifted. Political commentary, criticism and dialogue are clearly protected under Article 19(1)(a). Of course, the government is still keen to regulate online speech, but the bounds within which it may do so have been reasserted and fortified.

Section 69A and website blocking

Section 69A empowers the government and its agencies to block websites on any of six grounds: "in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above". The blocking procedure is set out in the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009. It requires that a Committee for Examination of Request (CER) examines each blocking request, and gives the content-generator or host 48 hours to make a representation. The Secretary of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology then issues the blocking direction to the intermediary.

"[The court has] failed to consider the impact of Section 69A and its Rules. Our free speech rights as listeners are equally affected when legitimate websites containing information are blocked. Transparency, blockpage notifications and judicial review are essential to determine whether each blocking direction is valid."

Now, the Supreme Court decision has left Section 69A and its Rules intact, stating that it is a "narrowly drawn provision with several safeguards". However, the Court has overlooked some crucial details. For instance, no judicial review is available to test the validity of each blocking direction. Moreover, Rule 14 of the Blocking Rules requires that all blocking requests and directions are kept confidential. This means that neither the content-generator, nor the reader/listener or general public, will have any idea of how many blocking directions have been issued or why. There is no standard blockpage display in India, either, and this further aggravates the transparency problem.

Lamentably, the Supreme Court has not considered this. Though the court has recognised and upheld the rights of viewers, readers and listeners in its decision on Section 66A, it failed to consider the impact of Section 69A and its Rules on readers and listeners. Our free speech rights as listeners are equally affected when legitimate websites containing information are blocked. Transparency, blockpage notifications and judicial review are essential to determine whether each blocking direction is valid.

Section 79 and the intermediary as a judge

Section 79 provides a safe harbour for intermediaries: if they abide by the requirements of Section 79(2), they retain immunity. But under Section 79(3)(b), intermediaries can lose their immunity from prosecution if, after receiving a takedown notice, they do not take down content in three circumstances: (1) if they have actual knowledge that third-party information within their control is being used to commit an unlawful act (i.e., by suo moto deciding the lawfulness of content); (2) if a court order requires takedown of content; (3) if a government notification requires takedown. Rule 3(4) of the Intermediaries Guidelines Rules, 2011 has a similar provision.

"The Supreme Court has wisely put an end to private adjudication of lawfulness. Section 79(3)(b) and Rule 3(4) have been read down to mean that the intermediary must have actual knowledge of a court order or government notification."

This leads to a situation where a private intermediary is responsible for deciding what constitutes lawful content. Previous studies have shown that, when placed in such a position, intermediaries prefer overbroad blocking to escape liability. As readers, we can then only access uncontroversial content. But the freedom of speech includes, as the European Court of Human Rights emphasised in Otto-Preminger Institut, the freedom to "offend, shock and disturb".

In Shreya Singhal, the Supreme Court has wisely put an end to private adjudication of lawfulness. Section 79(3)(b) and Rule 3(4) have been read down to mean that the intermediary must have actual knowledge of a court order or government notification. Even if an intermediary chooses not to act in response to a private takedown notice, it will retain its immunity under Section 79.

With Shreya Singhal, India has reaffirmed its protections for freedom of speech on the internet. One may now freely speak online without fear of illegitimate and unconstitutional prosecution. However, a re-examination of the blocking procedure, with its infirmities and direct impact on speech diversity, is essential. But today, we celebrate!

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/huffington-post-geetha-hariharan-march-26-2015-what-66-a-judgment-means-for-free-speech-online

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics

praskrishna — 2011-11-08T05:01:14Z

The Western Ghats portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state on biodiversity informatics on 25 November 2011 at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), Bangalore.

Schedule

09:00 – 09:20	Registration of participants
09:20 – 09:30	Welcome / Introduction
09:30 – 11:15	Plenary talks - Technology behind biodiversity informatics (3 talks)
11:15 – 11:30	Tea break
11:30 – 12:30	Plenary talks - Scientific commons and policy (2 talks)
12:30 – 13:00	Discussion
13:00 – 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 – 16:00	Biodiversity portals in India - Presentations by different teams/panel discussion
16:00 – 16:15	Tea break
16:15 – 17:00	Discussions and networking

Spheres of the Workshop:

Plenary I: Technology behind biodiversity informatics - 0930 - 1115 hrs

Development of Information System, Open Data standards, Archive and Geospatial solutions, Visualization in Bhuvan - Arul Raj, National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Exploring the semantic web for species pages - M. Sravanthi, Western Ghats Portal - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Challenges on the emerging discipline of Biodiversity Informatics - Donald Hobern, Atlas of Living Australia - 30mins + 10 mins discussion

Focus:

The objective of this session is to understand the global developments in biodiversity informatics in relation with developments in India. The session will focus on:

the evolution of the discipline of biodiversity informatics and its current status
the development of standards in Indian context
the technologies for biodiversity informatics
the challenges in biodiversity informatics

Plenary II: Scientific commons and policy - 1130 - 1300 hrs

Commons in the context of Biodiversity Information - Danish Sheikh, Alternative Law Forum - 20 mins + 10 mins

Open data in the scientific realm - Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society - 20 mins + 10 mins

Discussion on Scientific commons and Policy - 30 mins

Focus:

The objective of the session is to understand the commons principle and its implications for scientific research. The session will focus on:

the experience of developing a creative commons policy in Indian scenario and the resulting impacts for scientific collaboration, open data and open access
policy and social implications of open data sharing

Plenary III - Biodiversity portals in India - 1400 - 1700 hrs

Moderation: R. Prabhakar/ MD Madhusudhan
Panelists: (Introductory note by each of the panelists - 10 minutes each)

Suhel Quader, Season Watch (www.seasonwatch.in), Migrant Watch (www.migrantwatch.in)

Sanjay Molur, Pterocount (www.pterocount.org/)

K.N.Ganeshaiah - Indian Bioresource Information Network (www.ibin.co.in)

Ramesh BR - Western Ghats Portal (www.thewesternghats.in/)

Shwetank Verma, Biodiversity of India, formerly Project Brahma (http://www.biodiversityofindia.org)

Krishnamegh Kunte, ifoundbutterflies (http://ifoundbutterflies.org/)
Vijay Barve, DiversityIndia (http://diversityindia.org/)
Deepak Menon, India Water Portal (http://www.indiawaterportal.org/)
Chitra Ravi, India Biodiversity Portal (http://indiabiodiversity.org/)
Mr D.K Ved, Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (http://envis.frlht.org)

Focus:

The objective of the session is to learn from each other’s experience and develop a combined vision for the future of biodiversity informatics in India. The panelists will present a focused summary of the

key features available on their portals
the experience of building the portal
the key lessons learnt
future plans

We believe these four aspects will be of common interest to all participants and the presentations are expected to stimulate discussion around these four aspects.

Summary of the Day: R Prabhakar - Call for synergy/collaboration/Thank you!!

Concept Note

Rapid advancements in the domains of computer Science and information technologies have allowed integration of biodiversity information and analytical capabilities to collaborate on social networks, leading to the emergence of a new discipline, Biodiversity Informatics. The dynamics in this discipline are defined by integrating multiplicity with the semantic web and enabling of democratic social networks focused on biodiversity. We are bound to see tremendous diversification in the scope of biodiversity informatics globally and in India.

Harnessing technology for aggregating, storing, querying and analyzing biodiversity data has seen major developments over the last decade. There has been a plethora of biodiversity information resources that include mailing lists and discussions groups, occurrence records, geographical databases, biodiversity image libraries, institutional databases, species description pages, specimen records of herbaria and museum databases, and biodiversity focused Internet sites. The challenges on the biodiversity informatics landscape are on two fronts: (1) A semantic web framework to link these biodiversity information islands; and (2) Effective and flexible data exchange standards for seamless information sharing among these sites.

The evolution of social networks and communities around biodiversity information systems has been a unique factor in influencing the ways in which these information systems have developed. The assimilation and aggregation of user-generated biodiversity data and dissemination under the 'commons' principle has gained momentum globally. It has changed the way scientific collaborations are being made, and created possibilities for effective citizen-science initiatives. It is now possible to ask fresh questions, with more data, newer methods, better tools and for citizens to participate and report data from different geographies. With this, local-level data can be integrated with large-scale data leading to a better understanding of biodiversity.

With the increased penetration of the Internet into developing economies, and the widespread adoption of web technologies, biodiversity informatics has spawned an impressive variety of initiatives. These initiatives range from global knowledge bases and networks, national initiatives, eco-region based initiatives, as well as sharply focused initiatives which address a single species or event. There have been tangible advantages for stakeholders from these initiatives which has inspired many other endeavours. Success stories exist at both global and local level, and learning from these experiences can help one understand the multi-faceted nature of this discipline.

The Western Ghats Portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state of biodiversity informatics as expressed in three spheres: i) technology behind biodiversity informatics, ii) scientific commons and policy and iii) biodiversity portals in India. With these objectives in mind, we welcome your active participation during the workshop. It could provide an opportunity for us to interact and learn from similar endeavors in this discipline.

Download the agenda here [PDF, 124 kb]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop

War Driving in Lhasa Vegas

Oxblood Ruffin — 2015-08-17T08:19:56Z

This post by Oxblood Ruffin is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Oxblood Ruffin is a hacktivist and film maker. He joined the CULT OF THE DEAD COW in 1996 as its Foreign Minister. Colonel Ruffin is co-author of the Hacktivismo Enhanced Source Software Licencse Agreement (HESSLA), network curmudgeon, and line cook. He will publish a book on information warfare in 2016. In this essay, Colonel Ruffin traces the history of Internet access in Dharamsala, and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof”
— Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept
— Dalai Lama

Dharamsala is on the frontline of the Indian internet, fuelled by information activists. Its transition from a sleepy hill station to the residence of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile clearly politicised the region. The Tibetan diaspora was its primary network. Information flowed in and out of Dharamsala along conventional means. Students of Buddhism, backpackers, and tourists began to arrive after reading exotic press reports. And then almost overnight everything changed. The internet arrived and with it an explosion of content and possibility. Dharamsala transitioned again.

In 1959 the Dalai Lama (HHDL) escaped from Tibet to India after the Chinese invasion. And estimated six thousand monasteries and temples were destroyed by the Peoples Liberation Army and up to 1.2 million Tibetans - approximately one sixth of the population - were killed or died of starvation after China invaded Tibet in 1950. A large influx of Tibetan refugees followed HHDL which in turn made Dharamsala a popular tourist destination.

It is equally chaotic. Like much of touristic India it is full of shambolic hawkers in pursuit of the gora dollar; Israeli twenties fresh from the military and hot for bhang; American unicorns stinking of patchouli in their first pair of harem pants; and young Punjabi men drowning in beer on the weekends. Dharamsala is all of these things, and it is more. Dharamshala is a Hindi word loosely translated into English as 'spiritual dwelling' or 'sanctuary'.

The region is surrounded by pine forests. The Dalai Lama’s residence in McLeod Ganj and the headquarters of the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government in exile, or CTA) are also located in Dharamsala. Some folks from Delhi have remarked that when they’re in McLeod Ganj they have the feeling that they aren’t in India. Much of the architecture is in the Tibetan style and the diversity of town-life is atypical. The local Gaddi [tribal] community is supplemented by Kashmiri merchants and Tibetan vendors. Then there is the steady stream of tourists from every point on earth; many having come to study Tibetan culture and Buddhism. Even though HHDL arrived in this mountain town ten years before the first nodes of the internet were deployed, Dharamsala had become a hotbed of activism waiting to connect.

In the earliest days campaigning was contained within the Tibetan community, and the bustling Dharamsala of today had yet to emerge. But over time, year by year, volunteers from the outside would drift through. Most would work for a few weeks or a few months. Some would never leave. Networks were formed and the technologies of those times were worked overtime. Printing presses, fax machines, photocopiers, tape recorders, photography and, film. Everything was used to get the Tibetan message out, and all of these technologies were used to preserve Tibetan culture in ways that were forbidden in Chinese occupied Tibet. And steadily another technology was developing. The internet.

In 1986 the Education and Research Network (ERNET) was initiated by the Department of Electronics and transmitted India’s first email exchange. But email had rapidly been flourishing years before on military and university networks in the West. The push came from the outside to get Dharamsala on the internet and to think about email as an emerging communications alternative. In 1989 Indira Singh - a New York based computer consultant - envisioned a globally connected Dharamsala. And at the same time Thubten Samdup - a Tibetan living in Montreal - was wrestling with the problem of how to bring communication costs down. Ms. Singh sent the first email message over an ad-hoc telephone connection from Dharamsala to the Office of Tibet in New York.

“Hello from Dharamsala”, it said.

It did not take long to convince officials from the CTA that email and the internet were the future of communications from Dharamsala. While discussions of the technology caused many eyes to glaze over the economics did not: email was cheaper and faster than regular mail. The sell was that simple. Not to mention that Tibetan activists in North America and Europe were already using email. Thubten Samdup founded World Tibet Network News (WTN) on Usenet in 1992; and established eleven different listservs in different languages serving various verticals in the Tibetan diaspora. Although the internet existed in India at the time, it was rather rarefied. Research institutes and military networks primarily in urban centres formed the earliest nodes. The further and mountainous reaches of Dharamsala were not on the drawing board, until they were pushed onto the internet from the outside. In 1993 the International Centre for Human Rights and International Development in Montreal donated fifteen thousand dollars to buy three computers and set up email service for the CTA.

Other developments followed apace.

Back in 1989 when Ms. Singh first contemplated an interconnected Dharamsala another computer scientist was sorting out his own vision. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was fiddling with what was to become the World Wide Web. He released the code to the public on Christmas day 1990, and with that the seeds to the mainstreaming of the internet were planted. In 1995 the dial-up internet was introduced for the public in six major cities in India by VSNL. Dharamsala was not included in the rollout, but technical experts in the CTA had been quietly working behind the scenes. In cooperation with North American hackers the CTA’s official Website Tibet.net was launched in 1996 under the stewardship of Thubten Samdup. That same year Sabeer Bhatia, a U.S. based engineer from Bangalore released Hotmail, a free Web email service that garnered 100,000 Indian subscribers within the first three weeks.

The following year five Bay Area technical experts under the supervision of Dan Haig made a forty hour haul from San Francisco to Dharamsala. Their mission was to set up an intranet for the CTA using sixty thousand dollars of their own money, and carrying one hundred and sixty-five pounds of cables and hardware in their backpacks. The mountain had come to Muhammed if that metaphor is not too strained for Tibetan Buddhists. Once again Dharamsala’s international support network kickstarted the local process. Haig and his colleagues wired the seven ministries of the CTA and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives giving them high-speed intranet connections. The also created and email system and dial-up service for many cultural institutions in the Dharamsala area that were too far away to be on the network.

For a town far away in the mountains full of monks and political refugees, Dharamsala was making great strides on the Indian internet. The next leap forward came in the form of an accidental activist. Yahel Ben-David had been a young officer in the Israeli Defence Forces, a successful Linux entrepreneur, and an avid hiker. When he got a call in 1998 to help the CTA install a satellite dish he jumped. What could be better than a three week working vacation in the mountains? Three weeks turned into three months; eventually he relocated to Dharamsala with his wife where he would spend the next eight years working on tech projects. For the next four years Ben-David developed a Local Area Network (LAN) for the CTA and switched everything to ethernet. Monasteries, the Dalai Lama’s private office, and NGOs were all connected. But Ben-David was still dissatisfied.

Given Dharamsala’s remoteness and the cost-prohibitive realities of proper infrastructure development, the region wouldn’t be seeing a high speed internet any time soon. Radio networks were a technical possibility but the cost of licensed solutions was prohibitive. WiFi could have been a solution but was to be illegal for public use until 2004, and then only indoors. Ben-David put his ham radio knowledge to use by tearing part every Linux SOHO (small office/home office) networking device he could find. He founded the Tibetan Technology Centre (TTC) with Phuntsok Dorjee, a non-profit technology company that would train local talent and develop bespoke routers. And finally in January 2005 the Indian government deregulated WiFi for public use. Within hours of that ruling Ben-David put up the first node of the Dharamsala Community Wireless Mesh Network. It had effectively become the first public WiFi network in the country.

Testing and tweaking the nodes was a continuous process. In addition to the demanding mountainous terrain environmental issues had to be factored in: Four distinct seasons which included a heavy monsoon; daily power outages; and last but not least, monkeys. They are particularly destructive creatures when they discover something new to play with. Ben-David settled on tamper-proof cages to encase the routers. Similarly the power outages were countered with solar panels. TTC was putting itself on the map for its innovations internationally, and Dharamsala began to attract more and more technical talent. The town that had once been the preserve of backpackers and Buddhists was broadening to include networking and security experts and open-source developers. None of this was lost on the Chinese intelligence community.

Dharamsala had been an embarrassment to the Chinese ever since the Dalai Lama escaped in 1959. The town has been constantly monitored as have been prominent activists and all of the Tibetan Support Groups. China was particularly displeased when Tibetan activists in Dharamsala partnered with the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) hacking group to protest Google’s operations in China. Increasingly Tibetans suffered targeted malware attacks. Listservs and networks were compromised and sensitive information about the CTA, Dalai Lama and activists found its way back to the Chinese intelligence community. A typical exploit of the time involved forged email headers appearing to come from a friendly source. It would include a PDF file containing a message of support. Once opened a friendly enough document would appear, however, it contained a modified version of a PDF-Encode vulnerability. The exploit silently dropped and ran a file called C:\Program Files\Update\winkey.exe. It was a keylogger that collected and sent everything typed on the affected machine to a server running in China. By 2008 Dharamsala appeared to be on the frontline of China’s cyber-espionage ambitions.

Security researchers at the University of Toronto were approached by the office of the Dalai Lama to examine its computers. Something wasn’t right. The ensuing investigation confirmed that malware had been installed on these machines. They were able to monitor the commands on the infected computers and discover the names of the documents exfiltrated from Dharamsala. Further investigation pointed to specific correspondence stolen and that those behind the attack had gained control of the email servers in the Dalai Lama’s office. One incident was particularly telling. After an email invitation was sent to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the same diplomat discouraging the meeting. And a young woman working for a Dharamsala group making chat connections between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet. She was shown copies of her chat sessions and ordered to stop her political activities. What followed was extraordinary.

The Toronto researchers discovered that the Dalai Lama’s Dharamsala network was completely compromised, and also those of Tibetan exile groups in India, Brussels, London, and New York. And then the kicker. Additionally their investigations revealed that the command and control centre infecting the computers from China had also taken over more than 1300 computers in 103 countries. Much of the malware had been attached embassies and foreign ministries, including the Indian embassy in Washington. What had originally been thought to be Chinese interference in the Dalai Lama’s affairs and those of the Tibetan Support Groups turned out to only be the tip of the iceberg. The researchers uncovered an international spying operation. But even when exposed and caught by compelling evidence, Chinese officials denied any involvement and dismissed the researchers report as propaganda.

Despite China’s cries of innocence, the Tibetan community took some satisfaction from the incident. They had been the objects of Chinese interference for years and now the world could see that they weren’t just being paranoid about Chinese hackers. It also garnered wider support in Dharamsala and the Tibetan diaspora for greater security awareness. Groups like Students for a Free Tibet and Tibet Action Institute who had been offering security workshops for years experienced increasing demand for their services. And one thing should also be noted. While the Tibetan community had been on the receiving end of computer hacking and online harassment for years, they never responded in kind. Dharamsala’s response to Chinese aggression has always been non-violent action, online and offline. Two examples come to mind.

The Dalai Lama had always wanted to be able to speak directly to the Chinese people. Thubten Samdup who had spearheaded a number of internet initiatives organised a group of Chinese speaking Tibetans to engage mainland Chinese via chat online. The strategy was simple. Let people on the other end know that they are chatting with Tibetans, and did they have any questions? The internet probed to be a great leveller and one by one some minds were cleared of disinformation about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Even though this project met with modest success things were becoming worse in occupied Tibet. Beginning in 2009 Tibetans began self-immolating as a desperate form of non-violent protest. Were it not for a network of monks most of the details of the 138 immolations to date would not be known to the world.

From the first self-immolation China initiated an information blackout in Tibet. Foreign journalists were not allowed into Tibet and all communications networks were heavily monitored. However one man managed to get the message out. Gyanak Tsering is a Tibetan studying at the Kirti Monastery in Dharamsala. He escaped from Tibet in 1999 and began experimenting with the internet and mobile technology. Working with security experts in Dharamsala Mr. Tsering began to covertly transfer information to and from Tibet. Mobile phones are the primary communication devices in Tibet and increasingly smartphones are used to access the mobile Web. Whenever a self-immolation is reported in the press it is because Mr. Tsering has been sent the details from Tibet. When he has verified the details with three separate sources in Tibet he releases the information to the press. Some wags in Dharamsala refer to Mr. Tsering as the Jason Bourne Buddhist.

Technical innovation in Dharamsala has always been driven by necessity. Initially it was because the internet was cheaper and faster than conventional communications. Then WiFi development brought more people online because it was easier to deploy than conventional infrastructure. Whatever challenges were faced in Dharamsala there was always some workaround, and others began to notice. Largely as a result of the Dharamsala Community Wireless Mesh Network (later rechristened AirJaldi) open-source developers began flocking to the region. It is now one of India’s more attractive development hubs with IT conferences, new businesses, coding workshops, and hacker spaces. What was once a sleepy hill station emerged as a Tibetan refuge that adapted to the internet and proved that anything was possible.

Note: The post, including the image, is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_war-driving-in-lhasa-vegas

Vodafone Report Explains Government Access to Customer Data

joe — 2014-06-19T10:38:01Z

Vodafone Group PLC, the world’s second largest mobile carrier, released a report on Friday, June 6 2014 disclosing to what extent governments can request their customers’ data.

The Law Enforcement Disclosure Report, a section of a larger annual Sustainability Report began by asserting that Vodafone "customers have a right to privacy which is enshrined in international human rights law and standards and enacted through national laws."

However, the report continues, Vodafone is incapable of fully protecting its customers right to privacy, because it is bound by the laws in the various countries in which it operates. "If we do not comply with a lawful demand for assistance, governments can remove our license to operate, preventing us from providing services to our customers," The report goes into detail about the laws in each of the 29 nations where the company operates.

Vodafone’s report is one of the first published by a multinational service provider. Compiling such a report was especially difficult, according to the report, for a few reasons. Because no comparable report had been published before, Vodafone had to figure out for themselves, the “complex task” of what information they could legally publish in each country. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that Vodafone operates physical infrastructure and thus sets up a business in each of the countries where it provides services. This means that Vodafone is subject to the laws and operating licenses of each nation where it operates, unlike as a search engine such as Google, which can provide services across international borders but still be subject to United States law – where it is incorporated.

The report is an important step forward for consumer privacy. First, the Report shows that the company is aware of the conflict of interest between government authorities and its customers, and the pivotal position that the company can play in honoring the privacy of its users by providing information regarding the same in all cases where it legally can. Additionally, providing the user insight into challenges that the company faces when addressing and responding to law enforcement requests, the Report provides a brief overview of the legal qualifications that must be met in each country to access customer data. Also, Vodafone’s report has encouraged other telecom companies to disclose similar information to the public. For instance, Deutsche Telekom AG, a large European and American telecommunications company, said Vodafone’s report had led it consider releasing a report of it’s own.

Direct Government Access

The report revealed that six countries had constructed secret wires or “pipes” which allowed them access to customers’ private data. This means that the governments of these six countries have immediate access to Vodafone’s network without any due process, oversight, or accountability for these opaque practices. Essentially, the report reveals, in order to operate in one of these jurisdictions, a communications company must ensure that authorities have, real time and direct access to all personal customer data at any time, without any specific justification. The report does not name these six nations for legal reasons.

"These pipes exist, the direct access model exists,” Vodafone's group privacy officer, Stephen Deadman, told the Guardian. “We are making a call to end direct access as a means of government agencies obtaining people's communication data. Without an official warrant, there is no external visibility. If we receive a demand we can push back against the agency. The fact that a government has to issue a piece of paper is an important constraint on how powers are used."

Data Organization

Vodafone’s Report lists the aggregate number of content requests they received in each country where it operates, and groups these requests into two major categories. The first is Lawful Interceptions, which is when the government directly listens in or reads the content of a communication. In the past, this type of action has been called wiretapping, but now includes reading the content of text messages, emails, and other communications.

The second data point Vodafone provides for each country is the number of Communications Data requests they receive from each country. These are requests for the metadata associated with customer communications, such as the numbers they have been texting and the time stamps on all of their texts and calls.

It is worth noting that all of the numbers Vodafone reports are warrant statistics rather than target statistics. Vodafone, according to the report, has chosen to include the number of times a government sent a request to Vodafone to "intrude into the private affairs of its citizens, not the extent to which those warranted activities then range across an ever-expanding multiplicity of devices, accounts and apps."

Data Construction

However, in many cases, laws in the various companies in which Vodafone operates prohibit Vodafone from publishing all or part of the aforementioned data. In fact, this is the rule rather than the exception. The majority of countries, including India, prohibit Vodafone from releasing the number of data requests they receive. Other countries publish the numbers themselves, so Vodafone has chosen not to reprint their statistics either. This is because Vodafone wants to encourage governments to take responsibility for informing their citizens of the statistics themselves.

The report also makes note of the process Vodafone went through to determine the legality of publishing these statistics. It was not always straightforward. For example, in Germany, when Vodafone’s legal team went to examine the legislation governing whether or not they could publish statistics on government data requests, they concluded that the laws were unclear, and asked German authorities for advice on how to proceed. They were informed that publishing any such statistics would be illegal, so they did not include any German numbers in their report. However, since that time, other local carriers have released similar statistics, and thus the situation remains unresolved.

Other companies have also recently released reports. Twitter, a microblogging website, Facebook, a social networking website, and Google a search engine with social network capabilities have all released comparable reports, but their reports differ from Vodafone’s in a number of ways. While Twitter, Google, and Facebook all specified the percent of requests granted, Vodafone released no similar statistics. However, Vodafone prepared discussions of the various legal constraints that each country imposed on telecom companies, giving readers an understanding of what was required in each country for authorities to access their data, a component that was left out of other recent reports. Once again, Vodafone’s report differed from those of Google Facebook and Twitter because while Vodafone opens businesses in each of the countries where it operates and is subject to their laws, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are all Internet companies and so are only governed by United States law.

Google disclosed that it received 27,427 requests over a six-month period ending in December, 2013, and also noted that the number of requests has increased consistently each six-month period since data began being compiled in 2009, when fewer than half as many requests were being made. On the other hand Google said that the percentage of requests it complied with (64% over the most recent period) had declined significantly since 2010, when it complied with 76% of requests.

Google went into less detail when explaining the process non-American authorities had to go through to access data, but did note that a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty was the primary way governments outside of the United States could force the release of user data. Such a treaty is an agreement between the United States and another government to help each other with legal proceedings. However, the report indicated that Google might disclose user information in situations when they were not legally compelled to, and did not go into detail about how or when it did that. Thus, given the difficulty of obtaining a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty in addition to local warrants or subpoenas, it seems likely that Google complies with many more non-American data requests than it was legally forced to.

Facebook has only released two such reports so far, for the two six month periods in 2013, but they too indicated an increasing number of requests, from roughly 26,000 to 28,147. Facebook plans to continue issuing reports every six months.

Twitter has also seen an increase of 22% in government requests between this and the previous reporting period, six months ago. Twitter attributes this increase in requests to an increase in users internationally, and it does seem that the website has a similarly growing user base, according to charts released by Twitter. It is worth noting that while large nations such as the United States and India are responsible for the majority of government requests, smaller nations such as Bulgaria and Ecuador also order telecom and Internet companies to turn over data.

Vodaphone’s Statistics

Though Vodafone’s report didn’t print statistics for the majority of the countries the report covered, looking at the few numbers they did publish can shed some light on the behavior of governments in countries where publishing such statistics is illegal. For the countries where Vodafone does release data, the numbers of government requests for Vodafone data were much higher than for Google data. For instance, Italy requested Vodafone data 605,601 times, while requesting Google data only 896 times. This suggests that other countries such as India could be looking at many more customers’ data through telecom companies like Vodafone than Internet companies like Google.

Vodafone stressed that they were not the only telecom company that was being forced to share customers’ data, sometimes without warrants. In fact, such access was the norm in countries where authorities demanded it.

India and the Reports

India is one of the most proliferate requesters of data, second only to the United States in number of requests for data from Facebook and fourth after the United States, France and Germany in number of requests for data from Google. In the most recent six-month period, India requested data from Google 2,513 times, Facebook 3,598 times, and Twitter 19 times. The percentage of requests granted varies widely from country. For example, while Facebook complies with 79% of United States authorities’ requests, it only grants 50% of India’s requests. Google responds to 83% of US requests but only 66% of India’s.

Facebook also provides data on the number of content restrictions each country requests. A content restriction request is where an authority asks Facebook to take down a particular status, photo, video, or other web content and no longer display it on their site. India, with 4,765 requests, is the country that most often asks Facebook to remove content.

While Vodafone’s report publishes no statistics on Indian data requests, because such disclosure would be illegal, it does discuss the legal considerations they are faced with. In India, the report explains, several laws govern Internet communications. The Information Technology Act (ITA) of 2000 is the parent legislation governing information technology in India. The ITA allows certain members of Indian national or state governments order an interception of a phone call or other communication in real time, for a number of reasons. According to the report, an interception can be ordered “if the official in question believes that it is necessary to do so in the: (a) interest of sovereignty and integrity of India; (b) the security of the State; (c) friendly relations with foreign states; (d) public order; or (e) the prevention of incitement of offences.” In short, it is fairly easy for a high-ranking official to order a wiretapping in India.

The report goes on to detail Indian authorities’ abilities to request other customer data beyond a lawful interception. The Code of Criminal Procedure allows a court or police officer to ask Vodafone and other telecom companies to produce “any document or other thing” that the officer believes is necessary for any investigation. The ITA extends this ability to any information stored in any computer, and requires service providers to extend their full assistance to the government. Thus, it is not only legally simple to order a wiretapping in India; it is also very easy for authorities to obtain customer web or communication data at any time.

It is clear that Indian laws governing communication have very little protections in place for consumer privacy. However, many in India hope to change this reality. The Group of Experts chaired by Justice AP Shah, the Department of Personnel and Training, along with other concerned groups have been working towards the drafting of a privacy legislation for India. According to the Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy, the legislation would fix the 50 or so privacy laws in India that are outdated and unable to protect citizen’s privacy when they use modern technology.

On the other hand, the Indian government is moving forward with a number of plans to further infringe the privacy of civilians. For example, the Central Monitoring System, a clandestine electronic surveillance program, gives India’s security agencies and income tax officials direct access to communications data in the country. The program began in 2007 and was announced publicly in 2009 to little fanfare and muted public debate. The system became operational in 2013.

Conclusion

Vodafone’s report indicates that it is concerned about protecting its customer’s privacy, and Vodafone’s disclosure report is an important step forward for consumer web and communication privacy. The report stresses that company practice and government policy need to come together to protect citizen’s privacy and –businesses cannot do it alone. However, the report reveals what companies can do to effect privacy reform. By challenging authorities abilities to access customer data, as well as publishing information about these powers, they bring the issue to the government’s attention and open it up to public debate. Through Vodafone’s report, the public can see why their governments are making surveillance decisions. Yet, in India, there is still little adoption of transparent business practices such as these. Perhaps if more companies were transparent about the level of government surveillance their customers were being subjected to, their practices and policies for responding to requests from law enforcement, and the laws and regulations that they are subject to - the public would press the government for stronger privacy safeguards and protections.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/vodafone-report-explains-govt-access-to-customer-data

Vidhi Doshi - Fingerprint Payments Prompt Privacy Fears in India (The Guardian)

Vidhi Doshi — 2017-02-13T09:21:42Z

This article by Vidhi Doshi on the use of Aadhaar-based payments by private companies in India was published by The Guardian on February 09, 2017. Sumandro Chattapadhyay is quoted in the article.

Originally published by The Guardian.

For two years, Indian officials have been trawling the country, from city slums to unelectrified villages, zapping eyeballs, scanning fingerprints and taking photographs.

Last month, Indian shoppers started to see the results. With the launch of a government-backed fingerprint payment system, tied to India’s growing biometric data bank, registered citizens can – in theory at least – now pay for things with the touch of a finger.

India’s extraordinary biometric database, named Aadhaar after a Hindi word for ‘foundation’, is the biggest of its kind in the world. It was initially sold to the public as a welfare delivery mechanism that would ensure the country’s 1.25bn citizens were each receiving the right quantity of subsidised rice or cooking fuel, while weeding out fraudsters.

But now this pool of more than a billion people’s biometric data is being used by banks, credit checking firms and other private companies to identify customers, raising questions about privacy and security.

As one of his flagship policies, prime minister Narendra Modi pledged to create a “digital India” in which the country’s cash-centric economy would switch to credit and debit cards, squeezing the parallel economy of untaxed cash transactions and giving more citizens access to digital financial services.

In a surprise television announcement last November, Modi announced the demonetisation of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes (around £6 and £12), wiping out 85% of the country’s circulating currency overnight.

Two days later, when the banks reopened, long queues snaked around almost every branch, with millions lining up to open bank accounts for the first time. Many used their 12-digit Aadhaar number, linked to their biometric profile, to sign up. Within three weeks, 3m bank accounts had been opened using fingerprint verification, according to estimates.

The moment marked a radical change for India’s banking system, under which applicants were traditionally required to file photocopies of passports or voter IDs. Banks could take weeks, sometimes months, to verify them. Now applicants’ encrypted biometric data can be sent to the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), a government agency, to be matched against their Aadhaar data, re-encrypted and sent back to the bank.

Despite technical teething problems, the system is designed to allow very fast authorisation. “All this happens in a matter or two or three seconds,” explains Ajay Bhushan Pandey, UIDAI’s director general.

For Pandey, the benefits are clear: paper documents are easy to forge and hard to verify, especially in India where until recently thousands of people still used handwritten passports. Not so biometric data.

Privacy fears

Pandey emphasises that private banks and companies aren’t able to access the entire Aadhaar database, only to use the government interface, which allows them to verify identities.

Nonetheless, many Indians are worried about the privacy implications. Sumandro Chattapadhyay, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society thinktank, is one of them.

For starters, says Chattapadhyay, the law governing use of the biometric database, fast-tracked through parliament last year, is flimsy when it comes to the private sector. Since India lacks a general privacy or data protection law, this leaves corporate use of Aadhaar services effectively unregulated, he says.

This is particularly worrying, says Chattapadhyay, because of the data-sharing possibilities opened up by Aadhaar. It makes it easier for companies not only to share information on individuals’ consumption and mobility habits, but also to link this data up with public records like the electoral register, he says. “Both lead to significant threats to privacy of individuals.”

Chattapadhyay’s fear is that private companies could eventually gain access to government-held personal data, such as income or medical records, while the government could use company data like phone records to target specific individuals in political campaigns.

Already companies are linking Aadhaar numbers with collected metadata. Credit-checking startup CreditVidya, for example, identifies clients using their biometric ID in combination with their internet browsing history and other data, to assign credit scores for users who have no record of loan repayments. Banks then store this processed metadata, for example whether or not someone’s Facebook name is consistent with the name on their bank account.

Its founder Abhishek Agarwal admits there are risks for users: “[I]f someone managed to hack the bank’s security system, as well as the Aadhaar database, they could potentially be able to link your Facebook or LinkedIn data with your biometric information.” But he says this would be hard to do.

Pandey insists the companies are carefully vetted before they can use Aadhaar authentication. But, like Agarwal, he acknowledges the system can never be 100% secure: ““I wouldn’t say it is impossible to break the system, but it is very, very difficult.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/vidhi-doshi-fingerprint-payments-prompt-privacy-fears-in-india-the-guardian

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli

Admin — 2018-11-06T01:36:39Z

CIS-A2K has collaborated with Tribal Research and Training Institute (TRTI) to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation. These contents will become a part of "Van Bodh Knowledge repository".

Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, Bombay University has formulated and going to start a "Diploma course in Community Resource Management " with the support of TRTI, Pune from 2nd of oct 2018. This is a historic attempt to impart education of the level of a diploma to rural, especially tribal youth without any condition of academic qualification. The course was conducted at Mendha(Lekha) an hamlet in Dhanora taluk of Gadchiroli District. CIS-A2K has collaborated with TRTI to facilitate development of Open knowledge resources on Community Forest Resource and content development in Wikimedia projects with community participation.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/events/van-bodh-workshop-for-content-development-on-forest-resources-at-gadchiroli

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

subha — 2014-04-08T01:48:18Z

The blog post throws light on providing access to Vachana Sanchaya, a eleventh century Kannada literature.

The article was published in Open Access Week on April 3, 2014.

During early 11th century a form of spiritual Kannada language poetry in the Indian state of Karnataka called Vachana sahitya became quite popular. It started flourishing in the 12th century by a religious movement called Lingayatha movement. More than 259 Vachana writers, called Vachanakaru, compiled over 11,000 vachanas (verses). 21,000 of these verses in 15 volumes were published by the Government of Karnataka into an online portal called Samagra Vachana Samputa. Two Wikimedians along with two linguists brought these verses on a standalone project called Vachana Sanchaya. Kannada Wikimedians, Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI along with Kannada linguist O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy converted the font to Unicode to make the verses searchable on this project. The entire collection is now ready to enrich the Kannada WikiSource.

The text in Samagra Vachana Samputa were typed using fonts of ISCII, an Indian character encoding standard. Indic characters generally replace Latin ones inside the font that makes them completely useless when someone does not have the particular font installed in the computer. This is a typical problem with non-Latin fonts, especially Indic typefaces. In case of this particular publication, there were more than 5 ISCII standards which made searching and reusing content completely impossible. Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash started writing scripts to make the Vachanas searchable through an index. This demanded a user friendly platform for the linguistic researchers, students, and the public interested in accessing this literature.

Omshivaprakash worked on designing the architecture for this platform using open source software tools. Hanchagaiah was involved in providing critical hacks for digitization and valuable inputs through suggestions, feedback, and quality assurance.

At present, Vachana Sanchaya project has around 200,000 unique words that were derived from these verses. The public has been using the repository and accessing vachana from Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. There are thousands of people now who read a Vahana as part of their daily routine. Vachana Sanchaya is not only a gateway for reading the literature, but also a research platform for Kannada language and literature. It has options for researchers to help in reviewing content which in turn will help to add references from research papers.

All of the content is currently available to the public through the OpenData API, and once the reviewing the work is complete, it will be distributed in the public domain through WikiSource. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers, and anyone interested in building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. Users will be able to use our code to digitize any book available in the public domain. Early literature in any language is well-respected, so making it available via an open platform allows for reuse of the content for research, publication, and other documentation work.

Other similar projects could take help from this project and use any part of the processes.

Plans going foward:

To initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researches help to tag words and grow the glossary.
To continue work on subsequent, similar projects for Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya (work has begun) and Vyāsa and Muddann (work to be started)
To extend this platform to other the contemporary literature works available in the public domain.

Authored by Pavithra Hanchagaiah, Omshivaprakash HI and Subhashish Panigrahi. Draws inspiration from another article published on Opensource.com under CC-BY-SA 4.0

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/openaccessweek-april-3-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-vachana-sanchaya

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

subha — 2014-03-20T11:13:22Z

Kannada Wikipedian Omshivaprakash, Pavithra and I co-authored this article on digitizing Vachana Sahitya, a 11th century Kannada literature on WikiSource.

Pavithra Hanchagaiah and Omshivaprakash HI, Wikimedians from India are co-authors with Subhashish Panigrahi in this article. This was originally posted on Wikimedia blog and published by GlobalVoices on March 18, 2014.

In the poetry of Kannada (an Indic language), Vachana sahitya is a form of rhythmic writing that evolved in the 11th Century C.E. and flourished in the 12th century, as part of the “Lingayatha” movement. More than 259 Vachanakaras (Vachana writers) have compiled over 11,000 vachanas. 21,000 of these verses which were published in a 15 volume “Samagra Vachana Samputa” by the government of Karnataka have been digitized. Two Wikimedians along with a Kannada linguist and author O. L. Nagabhushana Swamy are involved in the Unicode conversions, corrections and writing preface for these verses. The entire work is now available as a standalone project called “Vachana Sanchaya” and ready to enrich Kannada Wikisource.

This project was started a year ago when Kannada Wikimedian Omshivaprakash was trying to help Professor O.L. Naghabhushana Swamy and Kannada author and publisher Vasudhendra access the vachana (verses) of Vachana Sanchaya. Swamy had trouble using publicly available content on Vachanas since the data was in ASCII standard and searching text was a huge problem. I (Pavithra Hanchagaiah) started to help gather information about vachanas and document it in Unicode by writing scripts for open source software. Further discussions were had to get thousands of vachanas in the form of a database, so that they could be easily searchable with an index. This demanded us to build a platform supporting all these activities, which would help the linguistic researchers, students and members of the general public who have an interest in reading and studying Vachana literature. With this idea, Omshivaprakash started designing the model, and his colleague Devaraju started building it. In the meantime I was running various scripts to fix errors in conversion of ASCII text to Unicode, confirming that the data was ready to consume by the modules developed for concordance. We spent weekends & holidays executing this project from home. With the constant feedback and guidance from Mr. Swamy and Vasudendra, we learned how concordance of text is used by researchers and what would make it easier for them to research on Vachana Sahitya. Omshivaprakash worked on the architecture of the platform, decided the infrastructure requirements – free and open source software technologies were used to keep the platform active while managing the entire project. I provided critical hacks for digitization and gave feedback through suggestions.

Working System Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!	Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Working System

Currently, the system has around 200,000 unique words in its repository. Vachana Sanchaya is meant for research rather than just a repository of text on the web. While you search the words on our system, you can see who has used the word in all Vachanas. To make the research more readable, we highlight the text searched in each Vachana that would be displayed. To repeat the search for a specific Vachanakara (poet) you just need to click on his name on the graph on the results page. We have used MediaWiki’s jquery-ime input tool architecture that helped us provide a feature to directly enter Kannada text in Unicode for searches. So just type, and get results!

Vachana Sanchaya Website Screenshot

Public Response

We are glad to see people accessing vachanas from our Facebook, Twitter and Google+ channels. There have been approximately 500,000 pageviews to our site in the first few months of our platform’s public launch. Interestingly, commonly searched Kannada words like “ಕರ್ಮ”(Karma en:Work/Deed) , “ಸತ್ಯ” (Sathya -en:Truthfulness ) and “ನದಿ” (River) have resulted in quick and easy results.

Plans for the future

ಆಂಗೀರಸ, ಪುಲಸ್ತ್ಯ, ಪುಲಹ, ಶಾಂತ,ದಕ್ಷ, ವಸಿಷ್ಠ, ವಾಮದೇವ, ನವಬ್ರಹ್ಮ, ಕೌಶಿಕ, ಶೌನಕ, ಸ್ವಯಂಭು, ಸ್ವಾರೋಚಿಷ, ಉತ್ತಮ, ತಾಮಸ, ರೈವತ, ಚಾಕ್ಷಷ, ವೈವಸ್ವತ, ಸೂರ್ಯಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಚಂದ್ರಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಬ್ರಹ್ಮಸಾವರ್ಣಿ, ಇಂದ್ರ ಸಾವರ್ಣಿ ಇವರು ಇಪ್ಪತ್ತು ಮಂದಿ ಪ್ರಪಂಚ ನಿರ್ಮಾಣ ಸಹಾಯ[ದ]ವರು. ಹತ್ತೊಂಬತ್ತು ಎಂದರೆ ಪುಣ್ಯನದಿಗಳು. ಅದು ಎಂತೆಂದಡೆ: ಗ್ರಂಥ

Our system is extensible with respect to adding new feature – we have a review desk for researchers to help us with the review of content. Later we will also be adding required references to Vachanas from various research works that have been done around this literature. The content is available to the public through OpenData API and will be distributed as public domain through Wikisource once the review work is complete. This will open up the system for students, developers, researchers and anyone interested in working around building linguistic tools for Kannada and other Indic languages. This system is meant to evolves around other works rather than having to change and re-invent the wheel for more such projects. Vachana Sahitya will further help us to initiate Natural Language Processing (NLP) projects if more researchers get together to tag the words, glossary etc in the coming days. We can also fulfill the need of various language tools like spelling and grammar checker for users through crowd-sourcing the development. The next projects under the “Kannada Sanchaya” are Sarvagnana Vachanagalu and Dāsa Sanchaya which are in the pipeline with initial phases of work underway. Our idea is to extend this platform from Vyasa to Muddanna and possibly the contemporary literature work available in the public domain.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/vachana-sanchaya-11th-century-kannada-literature-to-enrich-wikisource

Vacancy: Programme Officer (Delhi)

pranav — 2019-03-29T08:44:03Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) is seeking applications for the position of Programme Officer, for research on intellectual property rights and access to knowledge. The position is full time and will be based in CIS’ Delhi office.

Responsibilities

To support and drive new research initiatives of the work done by the IP team, the Programme Officer will be primarily responsible for the following tasks –

Planning and developing research in the subject areas (including, but not limited to) of access to knowledge, international trade and IP treaties, intermediary liability, limitations and exceptions in copyright law, software patents, licensing of SEPs;
Participating in strategic meetings organised by stakeholders;
Locating opportunities and building research partnerships with stakeholders contributing to current and emerging issues;
Contributing to current debates in the relevant research areas.

Core Competencies

Awareness of issues at intersection of Intellectual Property law and emerging tech
Critical appreciation of open knowledge initiatives
Effective communication and collaboration
Intellectual curiosity and openness
Respect for diversity

Functional Competencies

Ability to learn-at-work, especially about the IP-Access to Knowledge and tech ecosystem
Highly organised, motivated, and able to take initiative;
Ability to produce high quality writing outputs regularly
Able to travel for domestic and international engagements

Required Skills and Experience

A degree in law (at a minimum)
Publications to demonstrate good writing and analytical capabilities
Excellent communication skills

Location and Remuneration

This position is based out of the Delhi Office of CIS.

Monthly remuneration for the position will be INR 50,000 (including taxes).

Application Process

We invite interested (and eligible) candidates to apply for the position by sending the following documents to anubha@cis-india.org and copy sunil@cis-india.org, with “Application for Programme Officer (IP)” as the subject.

Cover letter: This should introduce your relevant academic, professional, and other experiences, and describe the kind of work you look forward to do as part of the IP team. We strongly recommend reading CIS’ outputs under this vertical while writing this letter.
CV: This should provide details of your academic, professional, and other achievements.
Work Samples: The position will require you to produce high quality writing outputs regularly. Please share two samples of your writing (published or unpublished). At least one sample should demonstrate an in-depth understanding of intellectual property law.

Interested candidates are invited to send their applications at the earliest - latest by Sunday, March 31st. The shortlisted candidates will be interviewed by the CIS team. If needed, there will be multiple rounds of interviews. We will take the final hiring decision by early April, and invite the selected person to join us from May 1st, 2019.

Please do not hesitate to write to us at anubha@cis-india.org for any clarification regarding this.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-programme-officer-delhi

Centre for Internet and Society

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Change in attitude

Implement their rights

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The copyright angle

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference?

What is net neutrality and why it is important

What Indian Language Wikipedias can do for Greater Open Access in India

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Why open access is important for Indian languages?

Indian language Wikipedias as open access journals

How to grow open access in Indian languages using Wikipedia as a tool

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Section 66A: No longer draconian

What speech is protected?

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Section 79 and the intermediary as a judge

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Schedule

Spheres of the Workshop:

Plenary I: Technology behind biodiversity informatics - 0930 - 1115 hrs

Plenary II: Scientific commons and policy - 1130 - 1300 hrs

Plenary III - Biodiversity portals in India - 1400 - 1700 hrs

Concept Note

War Driving in Lhasa Vegas

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof” — Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept — Dalai Lama

Vodafone Report Explains Government Access to Customer Data

Direct Government Access

Data Organization

Data Construction

Vodaphone’s Statistics

India and the Reports

Conclusion

Vidhi Doshi - Fingerprint Payments Prompt Privacy Fears in India (The Guardian)

Privacy fears

Van Bodh Workshop for content development on Forest Resources at Gadchiroli

Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature

Vachana Sanchaya: 11th century Kannada literature to enrich Wikisource

Working System

Public Response

Plans for the future

Vacancy: Programme Officer (Delhi)

Responsibilities

Core Competencies

Functional Competencies

Required Skills and Experience

Location and Remuneration

Application Process

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof”
— Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept
— Dalai Lama