Centre for Internet and Society

Open access to government data on the cards

praskrishna — 2012-03-26T07:31:48Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the original published in the Hindu

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

Open access platform to save the Odia Indian language

subha — 2014-10-24T15:32:40Z

In February 2014, the Government of India declared the South Asian language Odia as the 6th classical language of India which is one among 22 scheduled languages of India and has a literary heritage of more than 5,000 years. There are documents for more than 3,500 years, and the rest are undocumented oral histories.

The article was published by Opensource.com on October 22, 2014.

The native Odia speakers became hopeful of getting a lot of language related projects implemented to grow the lineage of this long literary heritage and see the language used and spoken globally, not just in literature but in computer and mobile games, interactive computer applications and in other digital media—and to reach the masses as a communicative language.

So far, not many federal initiatives have been put into place, nor a single policy level change has been made, to implement a standard as simple as like Unicode for easy access of information. And, there are very few mobile apps that offer concise and easy to digest content. Overall, there is not much content online that is available in a standard format that is easy to search, access, and reproduce,

Wikisource is here to change that and is working to open up a whole new world of online resources for readers.

With more than 40 million native Odia speakers living in the Indian state of Odisha and its neighboring states and the diaspora in rest of the world—primarily living in countries like the US, UK, UAE, and many of the South and East Asian counties—far less content in the Odia language has been made available on the Internet. The highest is Odia Wikipedia, with 8441 articles created by October 2014. A bigger problem is that though there are a few websites with Unicode content, government portals do not have content in Unicode to make them searchable and reusable. A non-profit Srujanika, with support from two other institutions, has digitized around 740 books under the scope of the project: Open Access to Oriya Books (OAOB), most of which were published between 1850 and 1950. This remains the largest digital archive so far for the Odia language, yet all of the books are scanned PDFs, restricting searchability of the content.

Odia Wikisource is a project that aims for the digitization of rare books that are out of copyright. The project is even allowing authors and publishers to donate their copyrighted work by re-licensing under CC0 or CC BY-SA licenses. The goal is to bring about access to large volumes of books and manuscripts and create more Open Educational Resources (OERs). The single biggest advantage of the Wikisource project at-large is that it makes text for books available in Unicode standard, making it searchable on the web and allows readers to copy and use it elsewhere. Most other conventional archival systems lack this important feature.

Wikisource is run by a volunteers and communities who often retype or prepare the books by Optical Character Recognition (OCR), a technique that converts scanned images of books into text. Participate and contribute to Odia Wikisource by visiting or.wikisource.org, the project is open to all who want to help!

As a Wikimedia project, Odia Wikisource went through a thorough and long approval process for about 1 year and 9 months, as an active incubator project—first by the Language Committee and then by the Wikimedia Foundation's Board. During this incubation phase, the project has digitized three books completely and one partially—thanks to the individual contributors. An educational institution Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) in collaboration with the Wikimedia funded Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge (CIS-A2K) are in the process of digitizing 9 books by the author Dr. Jagannath Mohanty that were re-licensed to CC BY-SA 3.0 earlier this year.

Four new Wikisource contributors joined the project in response to a tweet and a Facebook post by the author to digitize The Odia Bhagabata, classic literature compiled in 14th century. "Content that has already been typed in fonts of various non-Unicode based encoding, now they can be converted by (this) like it was done for The Odia Bhagabata, that was typed and available on the community hosted website Odia.org. New contributors did not face the problem of retyping,” says Manoj Sahukar, who along with the author designed a converter for reading text and transforming into Unicode for The Odia Bhagabata.

Questions for early contributors to Odia Wikisource

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): You have been with Odia Wikisource since its inception. How you think it will help other Odias?
Mrutyunjaya Kar, a long time Wikimedian who proofreads the books on Odia Wikisource: Odias around the globe will have access to a vast amount of old as well as new books and manuscripts online in the tip of their finger. Knowing more about the long and glorious history of Odisha will become easier.

SP: Do you think any particular section of the society is going to be benefited by this?
Nasim Ali, the oldest active Odia Wikimedian and Wikisource writer: Books contain the gist of all human knowledge. The ease of access and spread of books are the markers of the intellectual status of a society. And in this e-age, Wikisource can be helpful by not just providing easy access to a plethora of books under free licenses but also aiding the spread of basic education in developing economies. Together with Wikisource and cheaper internet this could catalyze a Renaissance of 21st century.

SP: How does it feel to be one of the few contributors to digitize Odia Bhagabata? How do you want to get involved in future?
Nihar Kumar Dalai, a Wikisource writer: This is a proud opportunity for me to be a part of digitization of such old literature. I, at times, think if I could get involved with this full time!

SP: You have digitized almost two books, are the highest contributor to the project and also one of the main reasons for Odia Wikisource getting approved. What are your plans next to grow it and take to masses?
Pankajmala Sarangi, a Wikisource writer: I would be happy to contribute by typing more books on Odia so that they can be stored and available to all. We can take this to masses through social, print and audio & visual media and organizing meetings/discussions.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/open-source-subhashish-panigrahi-october-22-2014-open-access-platform-to-save-the-odia-indian-language

Open access in the Marathi language expands by a thousand books

Subhashish Panigrahi and Abhinav Garule — 2016-01-03T11:26:49Z

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.

This was published in Wikimedia Blog on December 3, 2015.

As the Maharashtra Granthottejak Sanstha (MGS) celebrated its 121st anniversary recently, the organization re-licensed 1000 books under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license so that the books could be digitized and be made available on the Marathi Wikisource for millions of Marathi readers.^[1]

MGS is a non-profit organization working for the preservation of Maharashtra’s linguistic and cultural heritage. It was founded in Pune, India in 1894. Being an important archive for the preservation of many hundreds of years old manuscripts and historical artifacts from the Peshwa era, the institution is open to public for study and research.

During the four-day anniversary celebration, the Centre for Internet Society’s Access to Knowledge program (CIS-A2K)—an organization that supports the Wikimedia movement in India—opened a Wikipedia stall there where Marathi Wikimedians were present. Around 600 people visited the stall and learned about the news of MGS’s book donation.

Many active and new Marathi Wikimedians were present at the exhibition stall along with Abhinav Garule from the CIS-A2K program to share the incredible work Marathi Wikipedia and Wikimedia community at large are doing. Autographs of eighteen notable writers who received awards from Sanstha for different genres of writings were collected for uploading to the Wikipedia pages about them. While meeting the authors, Wikimedians also approached them to relicense some of their works under Creative Commons licenses so that they could be digitized on Wikisource and/or enrich Wikipedia—and some of the authors expressed a good deal of interest in opening up their books for Wikisource.

Some of the major books donated are Peshwa Rojnishi (diary of Peshwa), Benjamin Franklin Charitra (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin), Kekavali, S M Paranjape Charitra (autobiography), Letters Exchanged between the Sanstha and the British Government, Shinde Gharanyacha Padmamay Itihas (manuscript), and Marathwadyatil Arvachin Marathi Vangmay (modern Marathi literature from Marathwada, a region in Maharashtra) are some of the popular books read by Marathi speakers that are going to be part of the books donated by the organization.

We reached out to Avinash Chaphekar, the joint secretary of the organization, to know more about the state of book publication and readership.

Subhashish Panigrahi (SP): Could you share your ideas of opening these invaluable books for Wikisource? How they are going to be useful for the online readers to learn about the Peshwas?

Avinash Chaphekar (AC): These books are of historical importance and contain information that needs to reach more people; they cover topics that are rarely covered well anywhere else. Right after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi recommended the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as it contains a lot of messages for a common person, a lady walked up to and asked if she could read it in Marathi. Be it such autobiographies or a poetry book like “Kekavali”, such books that were published by the MGS should not be kept closed—many readers are searching for them. We donated 800 of these old books to the Marathi Wikisource because we don’t have large presence in the media or the Internet, so how would any reader who does not know us buy a book? If these books are available online, they can at least find and read them.

SP: Where do you think there is gap between publishers and readers today? Many Marathi books get published every year and if you search on the Internet, which many people today do, you would hardly find much.

AC: Online readership is increasing every day, but when you look at Marathi readers, the majority of them are still buying books. During the exhibitions here (even this year!), there is always quite a rush to buy books. Only the youth and tech-savvy people read online. But most people we meet say that they feel more comfortable holding and reading physical books. Moreover, there is no concrete research validating that most of the youngsters here are accessing information only online. I still feel reading books in a conventional way by holding books in your hands will continue to exist as there is some kind of satisfaction that lies in it.

SP: Did you know that we are going to get these books retyped, meaning that readers will not just be able to read them in their smartphones or computers but they could use the text for republishing the same books in the future? How do you think such a model will be useful for publishers?

AC: At the MGS, we don’t have funds to republish these books, and publishers are not ready to do it no matter how historically valuable the books are—even an incredibly valuable reference book called Marathi Grantha Nirmiti Watchal (the history of creation of Marathi books in Marathi), authored by SG Tulpule and published by us in 1973. This book has detailed information about Marathi publications, even those that existed before printing technology existed. As many such books are not being reprinted, we cannot leave the remaining few copies to perish. Let them go online and reach millions of people.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-blog-subhashish-panigrahi-december-3-open-access-in-marathi-language-expands-by-thousand-books

Open Access Dialogues - Report and Policy Recommendations

sumandro — 2015-12-22T06:52:58Z

The Open Access Dialogues were a series of global electronic debates facilitated by Eve Gray and Kelsey Wiens, in partnership with The African Commons Project (South Africa) and the Centre for Internet and Society (India), during November 2012 to March 2013. It was supported by the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, and was hosted at WSIS Knowledge Communities Discussion Forum.

Report: Download (PDF)

Policy Recommendations (as below): Download (PDF)

Is Open Access Only for Rich Countries?

Authors: Eve Gray, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Kelsey Wiens and Alistair Scott

It is not unusual for analysis of research systems in the developing world to provide startlingly low figures for the participation of developing countries in world research. For example, the Times of India last October cited a report that claimed that India produced only 3.5% of the world’s research – a shocking statistic, the newspaper commented. The commonly accepted figure for Africa’s contribution is even worse, at 0.3%. In reality, these figures do not reflect at all the size and shape of the national research systems in these count ries nor their productivity. Rather, they are a measure of how many journal articles are published in journals in the global North and particularly in journals in the Thomson Reuters ISI indices.

The developing world has been badly served by the scholarly publishing system inherited from the 20th century. The commercialization and consolidation of scholarly publishing over the last 60 years has progressively put the publication of the bulk of the world’s research in the hands of a small number of giant co rporations, in an environment characterized by very high and continuously escalating subscription charges, putting access to the world’s research out of the reach of most developing countries. If Harvard complains, as it did recently, that it cannot afford the subscriptions to the major journals, then what could be said for universities in Africa or India?

To add to this, the impact of the dominant systems for measuring the quality and impact of global research have a perverse effect in the developing world, consigning its research to the periphery and categorizing it as of ‘local’ interest rather than being ‘global’, or ‘international’ in its importance.

Global Open Access Policy

Global Open access policy moved forward decisively from late 2011 to early 2013, with UNESCO’s launch of its Open Access to Scientific Information Programme [1] and the World Bank’s launch of its Open Knowledge Platform [2]. At national and regional levels, the Finch Group Report in the United Kingdom [3], the White House Memorandum on Access to Federally Funded Research [4] in the US A and the announcement of the open access provisions of the Horizon 2020 Framework for Research and Innovation [5] in the European Union all marked a global move to entrench open access to publicly funded research. These policies commit political weight and financial support to policy implementation, based on an understanding of the contribution that OA can make to innovation and thus to social and economic development across the world. In the face of these developments, the developing countries, which currently tend to have fragmented OA and research communication policies, face the risk of falling even further behind in finding their place in global and locally relevant research production.

What these events have added to the policy debate about open access over the last year is not only the recognition of the need for government - level logistical and financial support for open research communication, but also a widening of the mandate for open access. Early formulations of open access policy focused on opening up ‘the peer reviewed journal literature’, as the founding document on Open Access, the Budapest Open Access initiative, defined it in 2002 [6]. The principle was that these publications should be freely available to readers, to read, to download and data-mine.. It is this approach that largely informs the UNESCO’s Policy Guidelines for the Development and Promotion of Open Access (2012) [7]. The World Bank policy, on the other hand, takes a broader view of open access, applying a Creative Commons CC-BY licence to the work that it commissions, thus allowing for reuse and repurposing of content in order to reach the widest possible audience and have the maximum development impact [8].

Open Access Dialogues

A number of policy issues emerged from the Open Access Dialogues (OAD), facilitated by Eve Gray, The African Commons Project and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India, in late 2012 and early 2013 with participants from South Africa, India and Latin America. The overriding policy outcome was an expressed desire to expand the concept of open access to include other kinds of openness, such as open education and open development and to expand beyond journal articles in leveraging the benefits of openness in developing countries, as well as involving outside - university knowledge producers and distributors in the OA agenda. O ver - reliance on the ISI Impact Factor was also a key aspect of the present OA system that came in for criticism , leading to demands for the formulation of research reward systems that are better aligned with national and institutional research strategies and development of alternative metrics for evaluating research success.

The discuss ion took place on the UNESCO/WSIS Knowledge Communities discussion forum, where a total of 19 discussants, excluding the core team, took part. Additionally, the OAD Facebook page was ‘liked’ by 116 people (as of 1 March 2013), with the most common age grou p being 25 - 34 and the gender bias being towards female users at 60%. Two (one hour - long) Twitter discussions were also organised, which attracted 83 unique users in total, who shared 530 tweets using the #developOA hashtag.

Strategic Issues and Policy Recommendations

Beyond the Impact Factor

The ISI Impact Factor (IF) remains the dominant measure for research evaluation and determining academic rewards and promotions in the Anglophone world and beyond. The discussants identified the extreme preference for publication in ('closed') journals with high Impact Factors (IF) as a central obstacle to effective research communication aligned with national and regional goals. Of particular concern was the role this system has had in aligning developing country research activities with academic interests in the universities of the global North, and thus di verting developed country research away from local challenges and opportunities. This model also renders invisible much of the research that is actually produced that addresses local/national/regional concerns. Another concern was bibliographic malpractices including bias against citing works from developing country scholars and work published in non - 'prestigious' journals. Strong argument s were made for the use of article-level metrics as opposed to journal - level impact measurement . Studies were suggested to argue that article-level impact increases with OA journals.

Policy recommendations:

Replacing reliance on bibliometric s and journal-level citation indexes with article-level metrics and emerging alternative metrics that take into consideration the circulation and usage of knowledge beyond higher education institutes.
Developing education policies and guidelines to evaluate res earch and researchers in their specific contexts of relevance and impact, and aligning academic rewards with national, regional and local development strategies.

Uneven Geographies and the Need for Sustainable Models

Attention was drawn to the unfortunate lack of awareness about the nature and potential of OA across developing countries, even in scholarly communities. Simultaneously, the discussants highlighted several success stories of OA journals in developing countries, though mostly from science disciplines. Thus the developing world experiences an uneven geography of OA awareness and adoption, where the OA agenda is being pursued successfully by specific scholarly communities but not translating into widespread support across the higher academia landscape nor into coherent national policy development.

The role played by the global commercial businesses of scholarly works in impeding the Open Access agenda in developing countries was mentioned by most of the commentators. Simultaneously, the complicity of developing country academics in reinforcing the culture of 'prestigious' journals published by global publishers was also criticized. The increasing embracing of Author Processing Charges (APC), the discussants feared, will further entrench this uneven geography of OA adoption and research visibility. This issue is crucial since it is generating a sense of cynicism about OA as yet another incarnation of commercial exploitation of scholarship that advantages the rich countries. The use of fee waivers was criticised for being only an exceptional measure that serves to reinforce exclusion of researchers outside of or new to the dominant scholarly publishing system. There is a need, it was argued, to develop a sustainable business model that is functional in making knowledge circulate in ways that are useful to society, and not solely driven by profit-making needs of publishers.

Policy recommendations:

Promoting a bottom-up strategy for OA adoption in the developing world by focusing on capacity and community building exercises. This could involve scholarly colleagues and advocates gathered around thematic and/or disciplinary forums, facilitated by institutional and governmental recognition and support.
Linking the issue of OA to academic works to the structural problems in developing country academics, adopting a wide-ranging and systematic approach to research capacitation. There is a need to promote OA through curriculum development, knowledge dissemination, training and advocacy, engaging actors ranging from senior administrators to young scholars.
Addressing and involving non-university circuits of learning, of both institutional (primary and secondary education) and non-institutional (informal learning groups around MOOC courses) varieties, and also non-governmental organisations working o n education in particular, and development in general.

A Broader Vision for Open Access

A number of discussants argued for a broader mandate for OA than the traditional journal focus. There were two aspects to this recommendation: firstly, OA should align with other forms of ‘open’ agendas , such as open science, open education and open development, and secondly, OA policies should support distribution and re - usage of a wider range of research outputs. Thus the scope of OA needs to be broadened to focus on the needs of potential consumers of research findings rather than only on the scholar-to-scholar discourse that journals constitute. This wider agenda could include research data, multimedia, 'grey literature ’ such as research and briefing papers, and policy papers. In the context of developing countries, it was argued that 'translations' of research for communities outside academia were important, especially ' recognizing the importance of publishing in a format that most appropriately meets the information and knowledge needs of those who can use the research to improve society's development', as a leading public health academic argued in the OA dialogue.

This broader vision of OA challenges the conventional hierarchy of basic research over applied research, proposing that OA can provide a communicative continuum between scholar - to - scholar discourse, teaching and learning needs, and the mobilization of research for development.

Policy recommendations:

Build on the present governmental acceptance of the OA agenda by strategically using it as an entry point to promote the broader 'open' agenda, including open sharing of research data, bibliographic data, policy papers etc.
Recognize, support and reward OA initiatives and systems that facilitate sharing of a wide range of academic outputs, from journals, books and other scholarly publications to development - focused research outputs targeted at communities outside of higher academia.
Financial and logistical support for the creation and maintenance of websites, repositories, archives and other (offline/outreach) initiatives aimed at hosting and sharing a wide-range of academic outputs, including data and multimedia, and mandating licences that allow for re-use of scholarly materials ( such as CC-BY), for development and educational needs.
A comprehensive (national and international) institutional policy approach, ensuring a central role for research communication in universities and research institutes and for integrated administrative, technology and skills infrastructure to support these roles.

Notes

[1] See: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-access-to-scientific-information/

[2] See: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/

[3] The Finch Report: http://www.res earchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-executive-summary-FINAL-VERSION.pdf

[4] The White House Open Access Memorandum: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research

[5] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-12-790_en.htm

[6] http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/openaccess/read

[7] http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/policy-guidelines-for-the-development-and-promotion-of-open-access/

[8] http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:23164491~pagePK:64257043~piPK:437376~theSitePK:4607,00.html

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-access-dialogues-report

Open Access Day

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:45:17Z

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day. Speaker include Prof. Andrew Lynn, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society.

Venue: Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

About Open Access Day

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open-access-day

Open access conference seeks to free research

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:10:58Z

Article by Amulya Gopalakrishnan in the Indian Express (New Delhi), 26 March 2009

When Newton famously remarked that if he had seen further than others, it was by “standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wasn’t just being modest. He was stating the simple fact that knowledge builds on previous knowledge, that the back and forth of ideas is vital for scientific achievement. Though the current proprietory publishing model is stacked against scholars, an emerging open access movement across the world aims to free scientific content - and India has big stakes in it.

A conference in New Delhi brought together open access evangelists including Prof. John Willinsky of Stanford University, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Surendra Prasad of IIT Delhi, Dr D K Sahu of MedKnow Publications, and Narendra Kumar of CSIR.

Now, all research papers published from CSIR labs will be made open access, either by putting the full text on freely available institutional repositories or publishing directly in open access journals. Meanwhile, across the world, MIT has become the first university to throw open all its research papers through the online repository software DSpace.

Globally, academic tenure and promotion is traditionally linked to research published in reputed, peer-reviewed journals. These journals are owned by commercial behemoths like Springer and Reed Elsevier, who own stables of journals in various disciplines, and dictate terms to university libraries. But in recent years, journal prices have shot through the roof.

Now, after years of weary negotiation, and empowered by new digital infrastructure, universities are teaming up via free institutional repository systems, to pool and circulate their collective research. In India, institutes like NIT Rourkela have adopted super-archives like DSpace for another reason — to showcase their scientific output to global peers. “NIT doesn’t have the research legacy of IIT or IISC — they needed the visibility,” says NIT director Sunil Kumar Sarangi.

Such a knowledge commons is especially valuable to developing countries — for instance, in agricultural research or public health, it is inexcusable that countries which could benefit most from the scientific debate are left out of the loop, simply because of prohibitive pricing (some journals cost up to 20,000 dollars, annually). This only widens the gulf between the state of research here and the US or Europe.

Even research produced in India with our taxpayer money is sent to big-name commercial journals and all copyright signed away, putting it out of reach for the Indian scholarly community. But all that could change if open access journals become the norm. S K Sahu, who runs MedKnow publications (over 80 open access journals), also busted claims that content on such journals tends to vanish into the ether after a few years online.

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To read the article at the Indian Express website, click here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-access-conference-seeks-to-free-research

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India

praskrishna — 2013-01-02T05:35:22Z

Professor Leslie Chan, a champion of Open Access (OA) and Associate Director of the Centre for Critical Development Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough visited Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore in December 2012 for a series of lectures. Well known advocate for OA in India and the developing world, Professor Subbiah Arunachalam, accompanied him on these tours.

Leslie gave five talks in over three days at the Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, on the morning of December 17, at the National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR on the afternoon of December 17 at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala on Decemeber 18 followed by a discussion with Satish Babu, President of the Computer Society of India and Director of ICFOSS in the afternoon, a talk at Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library on December 19, and a talk at SDM Institute for Management Development on December 20, 2012, which was more of a discussion.

Speaking on “Opportunities for Knowledge Management in the Open Access Environment” at the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management–Kerala, Leslie Chan said, “the recognition of what constitutes scholarship is still very narrow and the quality of the content is secondary. It is the brand of the journal that is still the driving force behind every western journal.” He further said that there was a tension brewing among open access, quality control and the means of measuring impact. Market forces had infiltrated the realm of knowledge as well, for it was the companies that were increasingly taking over journals that were originally published by scholarly societies.[1]His presentation touched upon what is OA and its key benefits, growth of OA in the last ten years, and opportunities for information and library professionals. See the presentation slides below.

At the Mysore University Library, Leslie gave a lecture on Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communications and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment. He dealt with the key issues of changing contexts of research discovery and dissemination in the digital environment, why greater openness is good for science, the tensions between openness, quality measures, impact and policies, collaboration and competition, interdisciplinary research, deluge of research data. Prof. Chan touched upon some key problems like the broken scholarly communication system, emerging tools not being used effectively to serve scholarship, and the need to re-design scholarly communications and impact measures. See the presentation slides below.

Emerging Trends in Scholarly Communication and Impact Measures in the Open Knowledge Environment from University of Toronto Scarborough

Therafter, Prof. Chan visited Shri Dharmasthala Manjunatheshwara Institute for Management Development and addressed scientists, librarians and academicians. There were discussions on how open access journals and repositories can help improve the visibility of an institution's research strengths, help attract research collaborators for authors and increase the return on investment. Prof. Chan was particularly critical of the current trends, in evaluating both researchers and their institutions using impact factor of journals in which they publish their research papers as the yardstick. Read the press coverage by Star of Mysore (PDF, 462 Kb).


Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam accompanied Prof. Leslie in his tours to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore

Leslie's tour to Tiruvananthapuram and Mysore which saw him deliver a series of lectures along with open forum discussions has triggered a fresh awakening to seriously debate on open access initiatives. The event was well covered by the media with the Hindu doing an exclusive interview with him.[2]

More pictures of Prof. Chan's visit can be seen here.

[1]. See “Call for efforts to promote open access platforms, The Hindu, December 19, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/10LEiBU, last accessed on December 31, 2012.
[2]. See "In defence of Open Access systems", The Hindu, December 31, 2012, available at http://bit.ly/VZfmz6, last accessed on January 2, 2013.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/leslie-chan-gives-five-talks-in-india

Online Free Content in Telugu Wikipedia

praskrishna — 2015-02-19T15:51:32Z

Wikimedians gathered at Tirupati for a strategic meet. This was covered by the regional newspaper Andhra Jyothy

Click to read the article published on the website of Andhra Jyothy.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/andhra-jyothy-february-16-2015-online-free-content-in-telugu-wikipedia

One among the clan of Wikipedians

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:49:05Z

In 2005, I lived in Johannesburg and worked as an activist to make knowledge more accessible. Between fighting copyright treaties in Geneva that would give corporations an even bigger stranglehold on our minds and finding ways to supply cheap textbooks to township schools, I talked about my work frequently. After one such event, organised by Nhlanhla Mabaso, the godfather of free and open source software in the country, I met two people who were particularly interested in my work. Their names were Angela Beesley and Erik Moller; they looked like college students, and said that they were helping to build an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia. They were bright, warm and open - and I was hooked.

Like most people, I had already started using Wikipedia by then. And also like most people, I hadn't bothered to figure out how I could participate in it. I spent the next year making nervous, anonymous edits to the entries of obscure sci-fi writers who I thought deserved more attention. I went to a meeting in Frankfurt where Wikipedians from around the world were gathering for the very first time and was relieved to discover a bunch of people who were as socially awkward as I was. I met serious people with funny names like Notafish, SJ and Anthere; I watched Richard Stallman thoughtfully pick out bits of butter and jam from his wayward beard at breakfast.

On stage, one evening, I moderated a panel of global voices. The trajectories of two people from that panel are instructive. Ting Chen, then a chronically shy and prolific editor of the German and Chinese Wikipedias, now chairs the board of trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation. Hossein Derakhshan, at the time a prominent Iranian blogger, was subsequently arrested in Iran and sentenced to a 19-year prison term for supposedly spreading anti-state propaganda.

Back home again

As for me, I moved back to Bangalore. And forgot all about Wikipedia for a while. Moving home wasn't a conscious choice; I drifted into it automatically - I had grown up here, my parents and sister lived here. At first, there was little to like. I grew up in a city where we bought eggs from the cranky woman who reared hens two houses away from us; a city in which Zafar Futehally could ride in to town from his farmhouse in Dodda Gubbi, leave his horse in a makeshift stable in my parents' garden, walk to Brigade Road to do his shopping from Mathias & Sons, and return for lunch and a quick nap before riding back. (I realise how old this makes me seem).

I rented a flat in Cooke Town, and decided that I liked my new neighbourhood.

I reminded myself of all the reasons I knew for liking Bangalore - Koshy's, Pecos, Adiga's, Premier Bookshop, Blossom and the Alternative Law Forum. I found new reasons: 1 Shanthi Road, Gallery SKE and a magical, dimly-lit bar called Upbeat.

And then, there were the Wikipedians.

New outlook

Bangalore used to bore me because I found it's middle-class boring. I can't say the same any longer. Four years and hundreds of encounters with Wikipedians later, I'm kind of excited about being home. I've been witness to some extraordinary, selfless, tireless and downright funny instances of community work, and I've seen people turn Wikipedia into something local and lovable. I've even overcome my own nervousness, and actually started editing. Perhaps it's only natural that the world's most significant repository of free knowledge would find friends here; I'm still a little surprised, and certainly very grateful.

( Achal Prabhala is a researcher and writer in Bangalore; he works on intellectual property rights in relation to medicine and knowledge, and serves on the board of the Centre for Internet & Society and on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation.)

Read the original in the Hindu here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/one-wikipedian

On World Water Day - Open Data for Water Resources

sumandro — 2019-01-28T14:41:51Z

Lack of open data for researchers and activists is a key barrier against ensuring access to water and planning for sustainable management of water resources. In a collaboration between DataMeet and CIS, supported by Arghyam, we are exploring the early steps for making open data and tools to plan for water resources accessible to all. To celebrate the World Water Day 2018, we are sharing what we have been working on in the past few months - a paper on open data for water studies in India, and a web app to make open water data easily explorable and usable. Craig Dsouza led this collaboration, and authored this post.

Project Blog: Open Water Data for Integrated Water Science (External)

Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Summary: Read (External)

Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Full Paper: Read (PDF)

Open Water Data Web App: View (External)

Open Water Data Web App - Tech Stack: Read (External)

Open Water Data Web App - Precipitation Data: Read (External)

The 22nd of March is celebrated internationally as World Water Day. Water is so tightly intertwined in every aspect of our lives that one can only scratch the surface in understanding this resource. Besides directly giving us life, it is a key non-renewable shared resource that dictates whether and how societies can grow and prosper. It has shaped the way civilization arose - on riverbanks and coastal lands. Adequate water of good quality can make or break a child’s early growth. Water available at the right time in the monsoon could shape a family’s fortunes for an entire year.

Unfortunately given the development trajectory of the last century, we have struggled to strike a balance and use water in a sustainable manner. Far too many face the ill effects of this misuse. The challenge with water lies in its nature as a common pool resource, which means that it belongs to everyone. Water is for everyone to benefit from and conversely it is no individual’s responsibility to manage and to ensure its sustainability. While some laws and policies exist to ensure sustainable use of water its fluid (pun intended) and ephemeral nature make those laws very hard to enforce. No one knows for sure how much water lies under the ground and above the surface, we only have estimates. Moreover even these estimates lie in the hands of a few. The Government of India is by far the largest entity that collects data on water across the country. Management of this resource however requires that these data points and the capacity to monitor should be decentralized. The 73rd amendment recognises this by placing the authority to plan and implement local works such as watershed management and drinking water provision under the purview of Panchayats.

To address this shortcoming Datameet and CIS in collaboration have taken first steps with a project to ensure that data and tools to plan for water resources are accessible to all. The strategy within this project has been to seek alternative data sources for water, other than government data much of which still isn’t open data. Two alternatives that have emerged are remote sensing open data and crowdsourced community data. A paper put together by the team highlights the numerous sources available for datasets such as rainfall, soil moisture, groundwater levels, reservoir storages, river flows, and water demand including domestic and agricultural water. Besides the paper the team has also put together a first iteration of a web app which seeks to provide these datasets in an easy to use intuitive and interactive format to users in the area of water planning and management. The first dataset available here is CHIRPS: a high resolution daily rainfall dataset for the whole of India.

The plans for this project in the future include making available more datasets (crop maps and Evapotranspiration) and features to access them. In addition to this the goal is also to improve our understanding of the usability of remote sensing water data with efforts to calibrate it with ground observations. A key element of these plans is to develop these resources in collaboration with end users of the data so that the tools are developed with their concerns in mind. We welcome ideas, queries, feedback, and partnerships - do contact us at pune@datameet.org.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources

OGP Asia Pacific Regional Conference

praskrishna — 2014-06-03T12:03:55Z

Open Government Partnership is organizing this conference in Bali on May 6 and 7, 2014. Sunil Abraham is a speaker for this event.

This was published on the website of Open Government Partnership

Below are the speakers and moderators that will participate in the Asia Pacific Regional Conference on 6-7 May 2014 per 5th of May 2014.

Plenary 1: 10.25 – 11.10

Reflective statements by Heads of Delegations and CSO Representatives of OGP Asian Participating Countries, followed by Q&A

Ms. Natalia Soebagjo, Chair, Executive Board, Transparency International Indonesia

Hon. Peter Dunne, Minister of Internal Affairs, New Zealand

Mr. Yoon Soon-Gu, Director-General Ministry of Security & Public Administration (MOSPA), Republic of Korea

Mr. Gan-Ochir, Advisor of Prime Minister, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of Mongolia

Ms. Malou Mangahas, Executive Director, Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism

Ms. Suneeta Kaimal, Support CSO Chair of OGP (Moderator)

Plenary 2: 11.10 – 11.55

Reflective statements by Heads of Delegations and CSO Representatives of Non-OGP Participating Countries, followed by Q&A

H.E. Mr. Ahsan Iqbal, Federal Minister for Planning, Development and Reforms, Pakistan

Ms. Nwe Zin Win, Chairperson, Myanmar National NGOs Network

H.E. Mr. Rimbink Pato, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Immigration, Papua New Guinea

Ms. Aruna Roy, Founder, Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana

H.E. Mr. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, United Kingdom

Mr. Wicaksono Sarosa, Executive Director, Kemitraan/Partnership for Governance Reform (Moderator)

Breakout Session: 14.15 – 16.15

Topic 1 Opening up: Inspiring Stories from Transparent and Accountable Local Governments

A panel on how local governments become open governments; experiences from local governments in the Asia Pacific region.

Co-organized by: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and UKP-PPP

Ridwan Kamil, Mayor of Bandung, Government of Indonesia

Sad Dian Utomo, Executive Director, PATTIRO

Thy Try, Executive Director Open Development Cambodia

Vidyadhar Mallik, former Minister for Local Government and Federal Affairs, Nepal

Aparna Daz, GIZ Sustainable Urban Habitat Programme

Dr. Birgit Kerstan (Moderator)

Topic 2 Open Data in Asia-Pacific: a Cross-Country Learning Discussion

The session seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the key enablers and obstacles in unlocking the benefits from open data in the region.

Co-organized by: Web Foundation, World Bank, and UKP-PPP

T. Nirarta Samadhi, Deputy Head President's Delivery Unit on Development Monitoring and Oversight, Government of Indonesia (UKP-PPP)

Ivygail Ong, Department of Budget and Management, Philippines

Anne Jellema, CEO, World Wide Web Foundation

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society

Soong Sup Lee, Lead Information Officer, Development Economics Data Group, World Bank

Andreas Pawelke, Project Manager, World Wide Web Foundation (Moderator)

Topic 3 Perfecting Openness: Bridging Open Government Partnership and Traditional Access to Information Law

The session seeks to elaborate on implementation of law on freedom of information (FOI)/ access to information (ATI) in the region.

Co-organized by: PATTIRO and UKP-PPP

Claudia Taya, Office’s Director for Corruption Prevention, Office of Comptroller General of Brazil
John Fresly, Information Commission Indonesia
Under Secretary Abigail Valte, Deputy Presidential Spokesperson, Office of the President, Philippines
Zahid Abdullah, Program Manager, Centre for Peace and Development Initiatives
Maryati Abdullah, Publish What You Pay Indonesia, OGP Steering Committee Member (Moderator)

Topic 4 Roundtable on Open and Good Governance in Post-2015 Development Agenda

The roundtable aims to brainstorm and discuss the central role of transparency, public participation and accountability to achieve sustainable development in various contexts, with a focus of Asia-Pacific region.

Organized by: UKP-PPP

Noeleen Heyzer, Special Adviser of the United Nations Secretary General for Timor-Leste

Iftekhar Zaman, Executive Director, Transparency International, Bangladesh

Sugeng Bahagijo, Executive Director, INFID

Beate Trankmann, Country Director, United Nations Development Programme, Indonesia

Yanuar Nugroho, Special Advisor to the Indonesian President's Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight (Moderator)

Topic 5 Measuring Civic Engagement for Better Open Government Policies and Services

The session aims to present and discuss international principles and good practices on how to measure citizens’ participation throughout the full cycle of governance in the Asia-Pacific Region.

Organized by: OECD and UKP-PPP

Ms. Inda Loekman, Program Manager for Indonesia Governance Index (IGI), Kemitraan

Mr. Juan Carlos Botero, Executive Director, The World Justice Project

Mr. Toby Iles, Senior Analyst, Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)

Ms. Dra. RD Siliwanti, Direktur Politik dan Komunikasi, Bappenas

Mr. Paul Maltby, Director of Open Data and Government Innovation, Cabinet Office, UK

Ms. Keitha Booth, Programme Leader, Open Government Information and Data Programme, Land Information, New Zealand

Mr. Zeric K. Smith, Deputy Director, Office of Democratic Governance, USAID Indonesia

Mr. Alessandro Bellantoni, Policy Analyst and Project Manager, OECD (Moderator)

Topic 6 OGP-GIFT Fiscal Openness Working Group Session

The session aims to share experiences and lessons learned from Asian countries who have noticeably improved their fiscal openness policies, institutions, and practices especially in utilizing government budget transparency for public services solutions and citizen engagement.

Co-organized by: Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) Fiscal Openness Working Group and UKP-PPP

Malou Mangahas, Executive Director, Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism

Murray Petrie, GIFT Technical Expert

David Gentry, Advisor, International Monetary Fund

Suyoto, Regent of Bojonegoro, Government of Indonesia

Joko Purwanto, Bojonegoro Institute, Indonesia

Dr. Juan Pablo Guerrero, GIFT Network Director (Moderator)

Warren Krafchik, International Budget Partnership (Moderator)

Jim Brumby, World Bank (Moderator)

Topic 7 Building Trust between Private and Public Sectors for a Competitive and Sustainable Economy

The session aims to explore participative strategies for the private sector to express their expectations of government while demonstrating willingness to take shared accountability that encourages openness and transparency.

Co-organized by: Indonesia Global Compact Network (IGCN) and UKP-PPP

H.E. Mr. Stig Traavik, Royal Norwegian Ambassador to Indonesia

Thomas Darmawan, Chairman, AP5I (The Indonesian Fishery Product Processing & Marketing Association)

Erick Stephens, Chief Technology Officer, Microsoft Asia Pacific

Peter Bakker, President, World Business Council for Sustainable Development

David Brain, President & CEO, Edelman Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa

Andrew Wilson, Co-Chair of the Council on Private Sector Engagement and CIPE Deputy Director, Programs and Strategic Planning

Ahmad Yuniarto, Chairman, Schlumberger Indonesia (moderator)

Topic 8 OGP 101: Everything You Need To Know About Open Government Partnership

This session will introduce participants to the Open Government Partnership and familiarize attendees with key OGP institutional processes, requirements for participation, and resources available to participant countries.

Organized by: OGP Support Unit

Abhinav Bahl, Director, Global Integrity

Jack Mahoney, Program Associate, OGP Support Unit

Patrick Lim, Department of Budget and Management of Philippines and OGP SC member (TBC)

Alejandro Gonzales, GESOC and OGP SC member (TBC)

Plenary 3: 16.45 – 17.45

Topic Keeping an Open Mind: Perspectives from Other Region

This session aims to explore the elements of success in achieving a more open government in other regions and also the unique nature of each region that must be taken into account in moving forward.

H.E. Robert Blake, US Ambassador to Indonesia

Mr. Paul Maltby, Director for Transparency and Open Data for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General, OGP SC Member

Ms. Roberta Solis Ribeiro, Chief International Affairs Advisor, Office of the Comptroller General of Brazil

Mr. Alejandro Gonzalez, Director General, GESOC, OGP SC Member

Mr. Martin Tisne, Director, Policy, Omidyar Network, OGP SC Member

Mr. Warren Krafchik, Director, International Budget Partnership, OGP SC Member (Moderator)

Day 2, Wednesday, 7 May 2014

Lightning Talks Session: 09.12 – 10.1509.12 – 10.15

Topic Lightning Talks on Open Government Solutions

In this session, seven individuals from government, the private sector and civil society will present case studies of innovative and impactful open government reforms in Asia Pacific.

Diah Setiawaty, API Pemilu, Perludem (Association for Elections & Democracy), Indonesia

Jose Solomon Cortez, The Integrity Initiative, Makati Business Club, Philippines

Budiyanto Sidiki, E-Monitoring & Evaluation, Gorontalo Province, Indonesia

Sowmya Kidambi, Society of Social Audit, State of Andhra Pradesh, India

Sayed Ikram Afzali, Community-Based Monitoring Program, Integrity Watch Afghanistan

Undral Gombodorj, Check My Service, Democracy Education Center Mongolia (DEMO)

Fiona Tweedie, GovHack, Open Knowledge Foundation Australia

Wimar Witoelar, Founder, InterMatrix Communication (Moderator)

Breakout Session 1: 10.15 – 10.45

Topic 1 How To (& Not To) Open Data: Lessons on Designing and Implementing Open Data Interventions

The session seeks to present practical recommendations and discuss the key factors that need to be considered when designing and implementing successful and sustainable open data initiatives, or a project that has open data at the core of its design. Co-organized by: Web Foundation, World Bank, and UKP-PPP

Satyarupa Shekhar, Transparent Chennai

Gabriel Baleos, Co-Lead Coordinator Open Data Philippines, Department of Budget and Management

John Taylor, Director, Yayasan Kota Kita

Promita Sengupta, Head of Rule of Law Program, GIZ Bangladesh

Dr. Vijay Pingale, Joint Commissioner, Corporation of Chennai, India

Ramda Yanurzha, Ambassador for Open Knowledge Indonesia

Daniel Dietrich, Steering Committee Member, OGP Open Data Working Group (Moderator)

Topic 2 Be the Change! Social Accountability Success Stories and Obstacles

The session seeks to provide an overview of the topic of citizen empowerment, with leaders sharing insights on lessons learned, success stories, and obstacles.

Co-organized by: Hivos, Omidyar Network, and UKP-PPP

Nikhil Dey, MKSS

Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, Head of Indonesian President's Delivery Unit for Development Monitoring and Oversight

Undersecretary Richard Moya, Department of Budget and Management, Government of the Philippines

Marjan Besuijen, Director, Making All Voices Count

Otgonbayar Chimeddorj, Legal and Procurement Policy Department, Ministry of Finance, Mongolia

Rakesh Rajani, Head, Twaweza (Moderator)

Topic 3 Transparent and Accountable Policing for Safer Community

The panel aims to discuss ways in which transparency and public participation can improve policing policies, practices and outcomes.

Co-organized by: Open Society Foundations (OSF), Tifa Foundation, and UKP-PPP

Brigjen Pol Moch Naufal Yahya, Coordinator for Bureaucracy Reform, Indonesia National Police

Geo Sung-Kim, Chairperson, Transparency International South Korea

Wajahat Habibullah, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) India

Monica Tanuhandaru, National Project Coordinator, United Nation on Drugs and Crime (Moderator)

Topic 4 Sustaining the Open Government Partnership: Youth as New Agent of Open Governance

The session aims to provide platforms for young people to exchange views on transparency, public participation and accountability and also to explore meaningful ways to sustain youth participation in OGP.

Organized by: UKP-PPP

Haidy Ear-Dupuy, Social Development Specialist, Asian Development Bank
Zaw Win Than, Chief of Staff, The Myanmar Times
Joel Mark Barredo, ASEAN Youth Movement
Clara Fok, Amnesty International
Ou Ritthy, Oxfam Cambodia
Lia Toriana, Transparency International Indonesia
Emily Swan, Fudan University
Gatra Priyandita, Asia Pacific Youth Organization (Moderator)

Topic 5 Opening Government: Citizen Engagement in Policymaking

This session will explore examples of good practice of citizen engagement in government policymaking and will apply the principles and lessons discussed to the development and implementation of OGP National Action Plans.

Organized by: OGP Support Unit

Tim Hughes, Involve
Shita Laksmi, Program Manager, Southeast Asia Technology and Transparency Initiative (SEATTI), Hivos Regional Office Southeast Asia
Sowmya Kidambi, Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT), India
Patrick Lim, Department of Budget and Management of Philippines and OGP SC member
Maryati Abdullah, Publish What You Pay Indonesia, OGP Steering Committee Member
Linda Frey. Executive Director, OGP Support Unit (Moderator)

Breakout Session 2: 14.00 – 16.00

Topic 1 Co-creation and Partnership: Improving Service Delivery through Social Accountability

This session aims to “dig deep”, focusing on social accountability in service delivery, with a special emphasis on partnerships.

Co-organized by: Hivos, Omidyar Network, and UKP-PPP

Dr. Kemal Siregar, Secretary of the National AIDS Commission (KPAN), Indonesia
Aditya Wardhana, AIDS Coalition, Indonesia
Redempto S. Parafina, The Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific (ANSA-EAP)
Mr. Michael Macaulay, Transparency International, New Zealand
Gordon Davis, Head of Legal & Integrity Advice Group, New Zealand Government
Maria Ressa, CEO and Executive Director, RAPPLER INC (Moderator)

Topic 2 Civil Society and the Media: Levers for Transparency, Participation, and Accountability

This session seeks to highlight the ways in which citizen empowerment interacts with a lively media, and ways in which a proactive media environment can contribute to accountability.

Co-organized by: Hivos, Omidyar Network, and UKP-PPP

Adnan Pandu Praja, Commissioner of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Indonesia
Umar Idris, Independent Journalist Alliance
Malou Mangahas, Philippines Centre for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ)
Thaung Su Nyein, CEO, Information Matrix
John Wonderlich, Sunlight Foundation
Stephen King, Partner, Omidyar Network (Moderator)

Topic 3 Better Access to Information for Better Accountability and Public Services Delivery

The session will explore some ideas in developing coherent relationship between government and non-government representatives in implementing transparency as well as access to information and the relation of these strategies to quality improvement of public service delivery.

Co-organized by: PATTIRO and UKP-PPP

Sad Dian Utomo, Executive Director, PATTIRO
Juan Pablo Guerrero, Secretary General, Federal Institute for Access to Information & Data Protection, Mexico
Tanka Raj Aryal, Executive Director, Citizen's Campaign for Right to Information, Nepal
Gulbaz Khan, Senior Manager, Governance and Capacity Development Citizen Engagement for Social Service Delivery
Yuli Ismartono, Board of Editors, Tempo (Moderator)

Topic 4 Legislative Openness Working Group Workshop: Building Openness and Citizen Engagement in the Legislative Process

The session will focus on positive examples of legislative openness and citizen engagement projects from the Asia region and around the world, seeking to present options that are at a range of stages of development in terms of their methods for openness and citizen engagement.

Co-organized by: Legislative Openness Working Group and UKP-PPP

Hon. Eva Kusuma Sundari, Member of the House of Representatives, Indonesia
Hon. Peter Dunne, Minister of Internal Affairs, New Zealand
Dante Preisser, Senior Advisor to Senator Arely Gómez González, Senate Member, Chair Committee on the Guarantee of Access to Information and Transparency, Mexico
Lucy Park, Director, Team POPONG, South Korea
Chaksu Roy, Head of Outreach, PRS Legislative Research, India
Dan Swislow, National Democratic Institute (Moderator)

Topic 5 Models of Openness in Sustainable Natural Resources Management

The session aims to discuss and explore options for cooperation and strategies in developing greater transparency and civic participation mechanisms in the natural resources management both at national and sub-national level.

Co-organized by: Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), Publish What You Pay (PWYP), RWI (Revenue Watch Institute), and UKP-PPP

Emanuel Bria, Senior Associate for Asia Pacific, Revenue Watch Institute
Lalanath de Silva, Director, The Access Initiative Global Network
Suyoto, Regent of Bojonegoro, Government of Indonesia
Elisea G. Gozun, Board of Trustees, Government Social Insurance System (GSIS), Philippines
Josi Khatarina, REDD+ Agency Special Team (Moderator)

Closing Plenary: 16.30 – 17.30

Topic Take Actions! Innovative Openness in Asia Pacific

The session would feature one representative from each different groups of community that are represented at the Conference who will provide brief impression on their two-day experience and mark their respective action plan to drive further innovative openness.

Maryati Abdullah, OGP Steering Committee Member, Publish What You Pay Indonesia
Dr. Michael James Macaulay, Deputy Director of the Institute of Governance and Policy Studies, Australia
Mr. Ahmad Yuniarto, CEO of Schlumberger Indonesia
Phil Matsheza, Practice Leader, Democratic Governance, Asia-Pacific Regional Centre, UNDP
Joel Mark Barredo, ASEAN Youth Movement
Ms. Czarina Medina, Executive Director, Union of Local Authorities of The Philippines
Wimar Witoelar, Founder, InterMatrix Communication (Moderator)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-govt-partnership-asia-pacific-regional-conference-may-6-7-2014

OER16: Open Culture

praskrishna — 2016-01-30T06:53:26Z

The 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, OER16: Open Culture, will be held on April 19 and 20, 2016 at the University of Edinburgh. The event is organized by Association for Learning Technology.

As a part of the programme committee, Subhashish Panigrahi is currently reviewing the submissions for the 7th Open Educational Resources Conference, "OER16: Open Culture" that is being organised during April 19 and 20, 2016 at University of Edinburgh, UK. See the details of the Programme Committee here. Download a PDF of the flyer for OER16.

The vision for the conference is to focus on the value proposition of embedding open culture in the context of institutional strategies for learning, teaching and research. The conference will be chaired by Melissa Highton, Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, and Lorna Campbell, OER Liaison at the University of Edinburgh and EDINA Digital Education Manager.

OER16 will focus on:

The strategic advantage of open and creating a culture of openness.
Converging and competing cultures of open knowledge, open source, open content, open practice, open data and open access.
Hacking, making and sharing.
The reputational challenges of openwashing.
Openness and public engagement.
Innovative approaches to opening up cultural heritage collections for education.

Follow #oer16 to keep up to date with all conference news. Register for the event Now.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/oer16-open-culture

OdishaDiary conferred prestigious Odisha Youth Inspiration Award 2012 to Odia Wikipedia team

praskrishna — 2012-12-05T04:55:20Z

OdishaDiary (Orissadiary.com) conferred the prestigious Odisha Youth Inspiration Award 2012 to the team of contributors of Odia Wikipedia.

This report by Pravuprasad Routray was published in the Orissa Diary on November 23, 2012. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

Health Minister Dr. Damodar Rout, Revenue Minister Surjya Narayan Patro and Energy and IPR Minister Arun Sahoo presented this award to the the Odia Wikipedians in a function in Jayadev Bhawan, Bhubaneswar.

Odia Wikipedia (http://or.wikipedia.org) is a web based free encyclopedia in Odia language. Odia Wikipedia is flagship project of Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the US. The content of Wikipedia are crowd sourced from the voluntary contributors across the world. English Wikipedia being the 5th popular website on internet Odia Wikipedia is the most visited website with more than 4.7 lakh unique visitors every month and the largest website in Odia language with more than 3100 articles. Currently more than 25 editors are contributing in this project.

Odia Wikipedia aims to provide free encyclopedic content in Odia language which could be accessed online and used for academic, research and expanding someone's own knowledge base. The interesting part of wikipedia is the openness for giving the freedom to users to edit and enhance an article. Most of the articles on Wikipedia start from scratch, small articles.

Over the period of time many readers find more information and start adding them on it and that is how articles grow in quality and content. Most people end up thinking that Wikipedia articles are written by paid editors just like any other newspapers and journals. But surprisingly, any person can who notices a factual mistake can correct it and add more information to enhance the articles. Contributing to Odia Wikipedia will not only create more free content online in Odia language, but also will bring more academicians and intellectuals together to a common platform.

At the same time students and academicians who are seeking information in Odia language can make use of it without even buy volumes of books and spending time in library. “We are receiving this award for all the Odias, who has contributed a bit for the language. Everyone here is welcome to join us and be a part of this family”, said Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer of Centre for Internet Society, a grantee of Wikimedia foundation while receiving the award. Odia Wikipedia could be accessed at: http://or.wikipedia.org

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/orissa-diary-november-23-2012-pravuprasad-routray

Odisha: Wikipedia workshop at IIMC, Dhenkanal

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T10:15:25Z

Wikipedia workshop was held at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal, on Monday. The workshop was inaugurated by Head of IIMC, Dhenkanal, Dr Mrinal Chatterjee.

This post was published in Odisha Diary on September 30, 2013.

Inaugurating the workshop, Dr Chatterjee said, “We are always sourcing knowledge from Wikipedia. So now it becomes our duty to enrich it by writing articles for Wikipedia.”

He specifically asked Odiya Journalism students to write more in Odia Wikipedia as there is less content in Odia as compared to other Indian languages.

Subhashish Panigrahi, Program Officer, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet Society, coordinated the entire event along with members of Odia Wikipedia, Dr Subas Chandra Rout, Mrutyunjaya Kar and Sasanka Sekhar Das. They provided hands-on training about editing, styles and techniques of writing on Wikipedia to the students.

“Anybody can write and edit available articles on Wikipedia,” Panigrahi said while encouraging students to volunteer for Wikipedia.

Not only Odiya and English, students were also encouraged to contribute articles in various other Indian languages. Students of both Odiya and English Journalism were present during the day-long workshop.

Odiya Wikipedia team are planning to organise a series of workshop with IIMC, Dhenkanal in coming months.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/odisha-diary-september-30-2013-odisha-wikipedia-workshop-at-iimc

Odisha: Odia Wikipedia reaching 5000 article mark!

praskrishna — 2013-12-31T05:10:30Z

Many are not aware of the existence of Odia Wikipedia and other Indian language Wikipedias. But Odia Wikipedia has been growing gradually all these years and has become the most searched website and largest online encyclopedia in Odia language.

The Report by Odisha Diary bureau, Bhubaneswar was published on December 17, 2013. Subhashish Panigrahi is quoted.

Initiated in 2002 Odia Wikipedia saw its first edit in 2004 and suffered from low contribution for almost seven years. But slowly the gloomy scene changed with the first workshop in Bengaluru which started initiating more consecutive Wikipedia training workshops in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Nalconagar, Baleswar, Dhenkanal and many other cities. Over these years after many outreach workshops individuals who are experts in different subject areas and organizations and institutions like Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal and KIIT University have been associated with the Odia Wikipedia editor community.

After Gopal Chandra Praharaj's Purnachandra Ordiya Bhashakosha and Binod Kanungo's Jnanamandal no such progressive encyclopedic compilation was done in Odia. Where the encyclopedias take years for reprinting which is also negligible in regional languages Odia Wikipedia articles get revised every now and then. “This has been possible because of the collaborative writing mechanism of Wikipedia All of us keep editing the articles that refine the content and make it free from biased and incorrect facts.”, says Mrutyunjaya Kar, one of the very active Wikipedians. Some time ago noted linguists like Natabara Satpathy and Deepak Kanungo raised questions about the authenticity and writing standards of the articles on Odia Wikipedia.

"But I think we have overcome those issues of poor quality content. And the very thing Wikipedia got is the gradual growth of articles in terms of amount of information and accuracy. Something that attracted me to Odia Wikipedia is the way one liner stub articles grow to good quality articles in few days", says Subhashish Panigrahi, Programme Officer to Centre of Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program that is working for the growth of Indian languages. Many of the valuable aspects of Odisha's history, diverse languages, cultural heritage and tourism are being documented and shared for free on the internet which otherwise would not ever come to the limelight.

Available in 286 world languages Wikipedia is edited by more than 77,000 contributors across the world. Odia Wikipedia has only a small community consisting handful of contributors. We aim to reach out to more people to spread the sum of the entire knowledge in our own language, says another active contributor Shitikantha Dash. Odia Wikipedia could be accessed at: https://or.wikipedia.org

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/orissa-diary-december-17-2013-odia-wikipedia-reaching-5000-article-mark