The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 801 to 815.
Wikipedia and Free Culture
http://editors.cis-india.org/events/wikipedia-and-free-culture
<b>Bangalore International Centre, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, hosts a discussion focusing on Wikipedia and free culture, with Jimmy Wales (Founder, Wikipedia) and Sue Gardner (Wikimedia Foundation)</b>
<p>Bangalore International Centre, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, </p>
<p>cordially invites you to an interactive discussion</p>
<p><em><strong>Wikipedia and Free Culture</strong></em></p>
<p>with</p>
<p><strong>Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales</strong></p>
<p><em>Founder, Wikipedia </em></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong>Sue Gardner</strong></p>
<p><em>Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will deliver a presentation about the history, growth, and prominence of Wikipedia on the internet today. Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has risen quickly to become the largest information resource and free knowledge repository in history, now with over 11 million articles in over 250 unique language editions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, will speak on the origins of the Wikimedia Foundation, the San Francisco based non profit organisation that operates Wikimedia and other free knowledge projects.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lawrence Liang, member, Alternative Law Forum, and author of <em>A Guide to Open Content Licences</em>, will steer the discussions.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Date and Time:</strong> Saturday, 13 December 2008, 6.00 pm-8.00 pm</p>
<p><strong>Venue: </strong></p>
<p>Bangalore International Centre Auditorium</p>
<p>TERI Complex,</p>
<p>4th Main, 2nd Cross,</p>
<p>Domlur II Stage,</p>
<p>Bangalore 560 071</p>
<p><strong>Registration: </strong></p>
<p>Please register for the event with the Bangalore International Centre (phone: +91 80 2535 9680).</p>
<h3>Videos<br /></h3>
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLV9RMA.html" frameborder="0" height="250" width="250"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLV9RMA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/events/wikipedia-and-free-culture'>http://editors.cis-india.org/events/wikipedia-and-free-culture</a>
</p>
No publishersachiaOpenness2011-10-21T08:31:01ZEventDelhi Declaration on Open Access
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/delhi-declaration-on-open-access
<b>Open Access India recently released a statement to promote openness in science and research communities. CIS contributed to the text and introduced it to the participants of OpenCon 2018, Delhi. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Published by Open Access India on February 14, 2018. Read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://openaccessindia.org/delhi-declaration-on-open-access/">post here</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This declaration was drafted by a group comprising of researchers and professionals working for opening up access to research outputs for public good in India. The declaration is aimed at scientific communities, scholarly societies, publishers, funders, universities and research institutions to promote openness in science and research communications.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Preamble</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The South Asian region, home to 24% of the world’s population faces major challenges such as hunger, poverty and inequality. These challenges become the collective responsibility of scholars and experts in research universities across the country. Consequently, it becomes imperative that research institutes share scientific research outputs and accelerate scientific research. The Open Access movement which aims for making all ‘publicly funded research outcomes publicly available for the public good’ is gaining momentum.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>“</i><i>Open</i><i> means </i><i>anyone</i><i> can </i><i>freely access, use, modify, and share</i><i> for </i><i>any purpose</i><i>(subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)” –</i><a href="http://opendefinition.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><i>Open Definition</i></a><i>.</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As per the Budapest Open Access Initiative (<a href="http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">BOAI</a>), ‘Open Access’ (to scholarly literature) is “<i>free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself</i>”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Since the launch of the BOAI on 14th Feb. 2002, efforts are being made by various scholarly societies, academic communities and governments to make scholarly content Open. However, due to various reasons, the full potential of Open Access is not realised by the producers (scholars), publishers and readers (scholars and society at large) of this knowledge and the world is still disconnected in terms of sharing the scholarly content openly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As per the Scimago Journal & Country Rank<a href="http://www.scimagojr.com/countrysearch.php?country=in" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> (SJR</a>), India ranks 9th in the year 2016 producing about 13 lakhs articles. However, 82% of them are not Open Access and the Institutional Repositories in India are sparsely populated in spite of having Open Access mandates in place. The Directory of Open Access Journals (<a href="https://doaj.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">DOAJ</a>) lists only 200 out of the 20,000+ journals being published from India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The historical BOAI is now 16 years old, but still there is a need for all of us to be educated and empowered to realize the power of Open Access to scholarly content and harness it for public good in India. With burgeoning commercial scholarly publications and increasing diversity in terms of availability of & accessibility to the information, we need to create a necessary framework for making Open Access the default by 2025 in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">To ensure the wide availability and encourage the use of of research data and information for the purpose of addressing multifaceted challenges, Open Access to publicly funded research and scholarly outputs are to be made available under Open Licenses (e.g. <a href="https://creativecommons.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a>) while duly acknowledging the intellectual property (work/rights of the creators/producers/authors).</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://openaccessindia.org/delhi-declaration-on-open-access-brief/">Declaration</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>We, the contributors and signatories of this declaration, members of the Open Access India, Open Access communities of practice in India and the attendees of the <a href="http://www.opencon2017.org/opencon_2018_new_delhi" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">OpenCon 2018 New Delhi</a> held on 3rd Feb., 2018 at Acharya Narendra Dev College, Kalkaji, New Delhi (University of Delhi) agree to issue this declaration:</i></p>
<ol style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>We advocate for the practice of Open Science (sharing research methods and results openly which will avoid “reinventing the wheel”) and adoption of open technologies for the development of models for sharing science and scholarship (Open Scholarship) to accelerate the progress of research and to address the real societal challenges</li>
<li>We will strive to publish our interim research outputs as preprints or postprints (e.g. Institutional Repositories) and encourage our peers and supervisors to do the same to make our research open and actionable in a timely manner.</li>
<li>We will practice and encourage researchers and scientists to implement openness in peer-reviewing and other editorial services, influence the scholarly societies to flip their journals into Open Access and will contribute for the development of whitelist of Open Access journals in India adhering to the “<a href="https://publicationethics.org/news/principles-transparency-and-best-practice-scholarly-publishing-revised-and-updated" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing</a>”.</li>
<li>We will garner support of the relevant stakeholders (scholars, journal editorial teams, university libraries, research funders, authorities’ in-charge of dissemination of scholarship in higher education) for spearheading the Open Access movement.</li>
<li>We will take forward the concept of Open Access to further bring all the publicly funded research outputs (not limited to journal literature alone) to be freely available under open licenses to the public to use, reuse and share in any media in open formats.</li>
<li>We will impress upon policy makers to adopt an open evaluation system for research and an institutional reward system for practicing openness in science ,scientific communications and academic research across disciplines including Humanities and Social Sciences</li>
<li>We will support and work for an alternate reward system in recognition and promotion not in terms of the ‘Impact Factor’ of the journals, but the ‘Impact’ of the articles/scholarship in science and the society and impress upon all the scientists/scholars, research funders, research institutes, universities, academies and scholarly societies to sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (<a href="http://www.ascb.org/dora/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">DORA</a>).</li>
<li>We strongly agree with the Joint<a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/news-and-in-focus-articles/all-news/news/joint_coar_unesco_statement_on_open_access/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> COAR-UNESCO Statement on Open Access</a> , <a href="http://jussieucall.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Jussieu Call</a> and <a href="http://www.codesria.org/spip.php?article2595&lang=en" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dakar Declaration</a>. And will also follow the international initiative<a href="https://oa2020.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> Open Access 2020</a>, to develop roadmaps to support sustainable Open Access scholarly communication models which are free of charge for the authors and free of charge availability to the readers.</li>
<li>While learning from South South cooperation on Open Access, will work for developing a framework for Open Access in India and South Asia: National Policies for Open Access and country-specific action plans will be formulated aimed at making Open Access as the default in India and South Asia, by 2025.</li>
<li>For creating more awareness on Open Access, infrastructure, capacity building, funding and policy mechanisms, as well as incentivizing for the Open Access, we come forward to share success stories, studies and discussions during the Open Access Week.</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Adopted on 14th February 2018</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Signatories (along with their affiliation):</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Anasua Mukherjee, BRICSLICS</i><br /><i>Anubha Sinha, CIS India</i><br /><i>Anup Kumar Das, Open Access India; CSSP, JNU</i><br /><i>Arul George Scaria, NLU Delhi</i><br /><i>Barnali Roy Choudhury, Open Access India</i><br /><i>Bhakti R Gole, Open Access India</i><br /><i>Girija Goyal, ReFigure.org</i><br /><i>Javed Azmi, Jamia Hamdard</i><br /><i>Kavya Manohar, Open Access India</i><br /><i>Neha Sharma</i><br /><i>Nirmala Menon IIT Indore</i><br /><i>Sailesh Patnaik, Access to Knowledge, CIS</i><br /><i>Savithri Singh, Creative Commons India</i><br /><i>Sridhar Gutam, Open Access India</i><br /><i>Subhashish Panigrahi, Internet Society, O Foundation</i><br /><i>Vijay Bhasker Lode, Open Access India</i><br /><i>Virendra Kamalvanshi, Banaras Hindu University</i><br /><i>Tanveer Hasan A K, Access to Knowledge, Bangalore</i><br /><i>Waseem A Malla</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ahsan Ullah, Bangladesh<br />Anila Sulochana, Central University of Tamil Nadu<br />Anoh Kouao Antoine, Ecole Supérieure Africaine des TIC, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast)<br />Antonio Solís Lima,México<br />Atarino Helieisar, FSM Supreme Court Law Library, Federated States of Micronesia<br />Bidyarthi Dutta, Vidyasagar University<br />Binoy Mathew, INELI<br />Boye Komla Dogbe, Ministère De La Communication, De La Culture, Togo<br />Srikanth Reddy, CBIT<br />Cajetan Onyeneke, Imo State University, Nigeria<br />Chantal Moukoko Kamole, Universitty of Douala, Cameroun<br />D Puthira Prathap, Extension Education Society<br />Daniel Bossikponnon, Ministère du plan et du Développement, Bénin<br />Dare Adeleke, the Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria<br />Dilip Man Sthapit, TU Central Library/LIMISEC, Nepal<br />Emmy Medard Muhumuza, Busitema University Library, Uganda<br />Fabian Yelsang, Institute for Interdisciplinary Research and Consultancy Services, Ghana<br />Fayaz Loan, University of Kashmir<br />GJP Dixit, Central Library, Central University of Karnataka<br />Gurpreet Singh Sohal, GGDSD College<br />Harinder Pal Singh Kalra, Punjabi University<br />Hue Bui, Thainguyen University of Sciences, Vietnam<br />Jacinto Dávila, Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela<br />Jaishankar K, International Journal of Cyber Criminology<br />Jancy Gupta, National Dairy Research Institute<br />JK Vijayakumar<br />Jonathan Tennant, Open Science MOOC, Germany<br />Julián Vaquerizo-Madrid, Unidad de Neurología Clínica Evolutiva, Spain<br />Kamal Hossain, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB), Bangladesh<br />Kasongo Ilunga Felix, Democratic Republic of Congo<br />Kavita Chaddha<br />Kojo Ahiakpa, Research Desk Consulting Ltd., Ghana<br />Krishna Chaitanya, Velaga, the Wikipedia Library<br />Kumaresan Chidambaranathan, New Zealand<br />Kunwar Singh, Banaras Hindu University<br />Luis Saravia, PERU<br />Mahendra Sahu, Gandhi Institution of Engineering & Technology,Gunupur<br />Maidhili S., Meenakshi College for Women<br />Manika Lamba, University of Delhi<br />Md. Nasir Uddin, BRAC University, Bangladesh<br />Md. Nazim Uddin, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh<br />Md. Nurul Islam, International Islamic University Chittagong, Bangladesh<br />Md. Shahajada Masud Anowarul Haque, BRAC University, Bangladesh<br />Mir Sakhawat Hossain, Kabi Nazrul Government College, Bangladesh<br />Munusamy Natarajan, CSIR-NISCAIR<br />Murtoza Kh Ali, Bangladesh<br />Subash Pillai, ICAR-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research<br />Nasar Ahmed Shah, Aligarh Muslim University<br />Nimesh Oza, Sardar Patel University<br />Niraj Chaudhary, United States<br />Poonam Bharti<br />Prerna Singh, Central University of Jammu<br />Rabia Bashir, Law and Parliamentary Affairs, Pakistan<br />Rajendran Murugan, Department of Education, University of Delhi<br />Rama Kant Shukla, Delhi Technological University<br />Raman Nair R, Centre for Informatics Research and Development<br />Rebat Kumar Dhakal, KUSOED Integrity Alliance, Nepal<br />Revocatus Kuluchumila, AMUCTA, Tanzania<br />M. Humayun Kabir, Tutul, National Health Library & Documentation Centre, Bangladesh<br />Sabuj Kumar, Chaudhuri, University of Calcutta<br />Sandipan Banerjee<br />Satwinder Bangar<br />Shahana Jahan, Bangladesh<br />Shamnad Basheer, SpicyIP<br />Shivendra Singh<br />Shreyashi Ray, NLU, Delhi<br />Sivakrishna Sivakoti<br />Soumen Kayal, Maharaja Manindra chandra College<br />Srinivasarao Muppidi, Sanketika Vidya Parishad Engineering College<br />Stephanie Gross, MSLIS from Pratt Institute, USA<br />Sujata Tetali, MACS-Agharkar Research Institute<br />Surjodeb Lulu Hono Basu<br />Susmita Das, Bangladesh Agricultural Research Council, Bangladesh<br />Susmita Chakraborty, University of Calcutta<br />Thilagavathi, Thillai Natarajan, Avinashilingam Institute for Home Science and Higher Education for Women<br />Umesh Kumar<br />Umme Habiba, Noakhali Science and Technology University, Bangladesh<br />Vinita, Jain, M D College of Arts, Science and Commerce<br />Virginia Inés Simón, Red Iberoamericana de Expertos sobre la Convención de los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad, Argentina<br />Vrushali Dandawate, AISSMS College of Engineering/DOAJ<br />Waqar Khan, Dhaka Shishu Hospital, Bangladesh<br />Wilbert Zvakafa, Chinhoyi University of Technology, Zimbabwe<br />Yasser Ahmed, South Valley University, Egypt<br />Yohann Thomas, Wikimedia India<br />Zakir Hossain, International Association of School Librarianship, International Schools Region, Switzerland<br />Dahmane Madjid, CERIST, Algeria<br />Nagarjuna G, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, TIFR<br />Sulyman Sodeeq Abdulakeem, Federal Polytechnic Offa, Nigeria<br />Leena Shah, DOAJ<br />Hamady Issaga Sy, Sénégal<br />Sanket Oswal, Wikimedia India<br />Chitralekha, University of Delhi<br />Chris Zielinski, University of Winchester, United Kingdom<br />Mourya Biswas, Prateek Media</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/delhi-declaration-on-open-access'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/delhi-declaration-on-open-access</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen Access2018-02-26T14:53:07ZNews ItemOn World Water Day - Open Data for Water Resources
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources
<b>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.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Project Blog: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/" target="_blank">Open Water Data
for Integrated Water Science</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Summary: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2017/12/31/OWD-Paper/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Paper - Datasets for Water Studies in India Blog - Full Paper: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/docs/open-water-data-paper.pdf" target="_blank">Read</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App: <a href="https://water-data-web-app.appspot.com/" target="_blank">View</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App - Tech Stack: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/tech/2017/12/08/OWD-Web-App-Tech-Stack/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<h4>Open Water Data Web App - Precipitation Data: <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2018/01/05/OWD-Web-App-Precipitation-Data/" target="_blank">Read</a> (External)</h4>
<hr />
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2017/12/31/OWD-Paper/" target="_blank">paper</a> 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 <a href="https://datameet-pune.github.io/open-water-data/precipitation/2018/01/05/OWD-Web-App-Precipitation-Data/" target="_blank">web app</a> 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 <a href="http://chg.geog.ucsb.edu/data/chirps/" target="_blank">CHIRPS</a>: a high resolution daily rainfall dataset for the whole of India.</p>
<p>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. <strong>We welcome ideas, queries, feedback, and partnerships - do contact us at <a href="mailto:pune@datameet.org">pune@datameet.org</a></strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/on-world-water-day-open-data-for-water-resources</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroOpen Water DataOpen DataOpen ScienceOpen Government DataEnvironmentFeaturedOpennessHomepage2019-01-28T14:41:51ZBlog EntryMozilla is funding a way to support Julia in Firefox
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/zd-net-july-8-2019-catalin-cimpanu-mozilla-is-funding-a-way-to-support-julia-in-firefox
<b>Mozilla is funding a project for bringing the Julia programming language to Firefox and the general browser environment.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The blog post by Catalin Cimpanu was <a class="external-link" href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-is-funding-a-way-to-support-julia-in-firefox/">published in ZD Net</a> on July 8, 2019.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The project received funding part of the Mozilla Research Grants for the first half of 2019, which the browser maker announced on Friday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April, <a href="https://mozilla-research.forms.fm/mozilla-research-grants-2019h1/forms/6510" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">when Mozilla opened this year's submissions period</a> for research grants, the organization said it was looking for a way to bring data science and scientific computing tools to the web.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It said it was specifically interested in receiving submissions about supporting R or Julia at the browser level. Both R and Julia are programming languages designed for high-performance numerical, statistical, and computational science.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mozilla engineers have worked in previous years to port data science tools at the browser level, as part of Project Iodide.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Previously, as part of this project, Mozilla engineers ported the Python interpreter to run in the browser using WebAssembly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This project, Pyodide, has demonstrated the practicality of running language interpreters in WebAssembly," Mozilla engineers said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April, Mozilla said it was willing to use a research grant to fund a team of developers to port either R or Julia to the browser via WebAssembly as well.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The end result <a href="https://iodide-project.github.io/docs/language_plugins/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">should be a Firefox plugin</a>, similar to how Pyodide works.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Valentin Churavy, an MIT Ph.D. student and a member of the official Julia team, has applied for a Mozilla research grant, which he subsequently received.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Julia programming language was created in 2009, publicly released in 2012, and has gained a huge following ever since. It has quickly <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/possible-python-rival-programming-language-julia-is-winning-over-developers/" target="_blank">climbed the ranks of the world's most popular languages</a> entering the Tiobe Top 50, has a huge following on GitHub, and was <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/is-julia-fastest-growing-new-programming-language-stats-chart-rapid-rise-in-2018/" target="_blank">one of 2018 biggest risers</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April, Mozilla engineers also offered a grand for <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/mozilla-offers-research-grant-for-a-way-to-embed-tor-inside-firefox/" target="_blank">porting Tor to work inside Firefox</a>, to power a Tor-powered Super Private Browsing (SPB) mode for Firefox.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While there was no grant for a project of sorts, Mozilla will be funding a research project that aims to study the performance and anonymity features of the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols on the Tor network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The full Mozilla research grants for H1 2019 are as follow:</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th style="text-align: left; ">Lead Researchers</th><th style="text-align: left; ">Institution</th><th style="text-align: left; ">Project Title</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://julia.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Valentin Churavy</a></td>
<td>MIT</td>
<td>Bringing Julia to the Browser</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Jessica Outlaw</td>
<td>Concordia University of Portland</td>
<td>Studying the Unique Social and Spatial affordances of Hubs by Mozilla for Remote Participation in Live Events</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://www.nehakumar.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Neha Kumar</a></td>
<td>Georgia Tech</td>
<td>Missing Data: Health on the Internet for Internet Health</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://personalization.ccs.neu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Piotr Sapiezynski, Alan Mislove, & Aleksandra Korolova</a></td>
<td>Northeastern University & University of Southern California</td>
<td>Understanding the impact of ad preference controls</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://cis-india.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sumandro Chattapadhyay</a></td>
<td>The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India</td>
<td>Making Voices Heard: Privacy, Inclusivity, and Accessibility of Voice Interfaces in India</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://weihang-wang.github.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Weihang Wang</a></td>
<td>State University of New York</td>
<td>Designing Access Control Interfaces for Wasmtime</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://escience.washington.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Bernease Herman</a></td>
<td>University of Washington</td>
<td>Toward generalizable methods for measuring bias in crowdsourced speech datasets and validation processes</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="http://haystack.csail.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">David Karger</a></td>
<td>MIT</td>
<td>Tipsy: A Decentralized Open Standard for a Microdonation-Supported Web</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://songlh.github.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Linhai Song</a></td>
<td>Pennsylvania State University</td>
<td>Benchmarking Generic Functions in Rust</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://www.ucd.ie/ics/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Leigh Clark</a></td>
<td>University College Dublin</td>
<td>Creating a trustworthy model for always-listening voice interfaces</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~zsw/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Steven Wu</a></td>
<td>University of Minnesota</td>
<td>DP-Fathom: Private, Accurate, and Communication-Efficient</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><a href="https://hatswitch.org/~nikita/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Nikita Borisov</a></td>
<td>University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign</td>
<td>Performance and Anonymity of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 in Tor</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/zd-net-july-8-2019-catalin-cimpanu-mozilla-is-funding-a-way-to-support-julia-in-firefox'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/zd-net-july-8-2019-catalin-cimpanu-mozilla-is-funding-a-way-to-support-julia-in-firefox</a>
</p>
No publisherCatalin CimpanuOpenness2019-07-10T01:33:52ZNews ItemIndia’s top science institution is trying hard to fix its “manel” problem
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/quartz-india-august-16-2019-india-s-top-science-institution-is-trying-hard-to-fix-its-manel-problem
<b>B Chagun Basha is a science, technology and innovation policy fellow at Bengaluru’s Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) Centre for Policy Research established by the department of science & technology (DST-CPR).</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The blog post was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://qz.com/india/1687242/no-manels-at-iisc-bengaluru-women-mandatory-in-panel-discussions/">Quartz India</a> on August 16, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted. <em>This piece was originally published on <a class="m_-1130724999584095261OWAAutoLink" href="https://connect.iisc.ac.in/2019/06/we-learned-the-hard-way-not-to-have-manels/" rel="noopener noreferrer">Connect</a> under the headline, “We Learned (The Hard Way) Not to Have Manels.”</em></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While organising an event at IISc, he and his colleagues realised they hadn’t paid much thought to gender inclusivity until it was explicitly pointed out to them that there were no women in their event. That sparked some introspection, as well as actions to ensure that this wasn’t repeated. In this interview, he talks about the incident and important lessons from it.</p>
<h3 class="india a1dbe">How did you first hear of the term manel?</h3>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">It was when I was organising my first event of an academic nature. Every year, DST-CPR marks International Open Access Week by planning activities for the entire week, and having a panel discussion is a major part of it. We bring in experts to sensitise people about topics related to open access and how we can incorporate it in our institute through a bottom-up approach.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe">In October 2017, when International Open Access Week came round, we collaborated with six other groups to organise it. We had a poster competition, a panel discussion, and a few other activities like engaging with the student community about open access and how they could play a role in promoting it.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">A week before the panel discussion was scheduled, we had confirmed the participation of all our speakers—five male speakers and one female speaker. The female speaker had not been included out of a conscious effort to ensure gender diversity—she happened to be on the list of names we came up with, we had written to all of them, and they had agreed to come. But a few days before the panel discussion, we received an email from her saying that she would not be able to join us.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe">We didn’t think it was a big deal. Instead of six participants we would have five, one of whom would be the moderator. Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) had already confirmed that he would be the moderator. He sent us an email asking for details of the panelists, so that he could communicate with them and plan and structure the discussion. But when we sent him the details, he immediately got back to us saying that he wouldn’t be able to participate in this panel discussion.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">I was a little shocked—you can replace a panelist at the last minute, but finding a new moderator to curate a discussion is harder as doing so requires in-depth knowledge of this space and familiarity with open access policies at different levels. I asked Sunil what had happened—why did he have to pull out? He said that CIS had a written policy that was followed strictly: members could not participate in “manels”—a word I was hearing for the very first time. I didn’t even catch it properly when we spoke on the phone. Then he explained to me that if there was a panel on which there were only men and no women panelists—which are called “manels”—then people from his organisation avoided them completely.</p>
<h3 class="india a1dbe">What happened next?</h3>
<blockquote class="pullquote">I realised that as an organiser of an event, I wasn’t even thinking about being inclusive.</blockquote>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">I realised that as an organiser of an event, I wasn’t even thinking about being inclusive. So we requested Sunil to suggest names of women speakers whom we could approach. I realise now that it was not a good thing to do—when somebody points out that there are no women on your panel, and for those reasons they are not going to participate, you should try harder to rectify this at your end, and not dump the responsibility for this on the person who pointed it out in the first place.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">We should have put in genuine effort from our end to learn more about other women in the field whom we could approach for the panel. But at the time Sunil generously agreed and gave us a list with 12 names. We contacted all of them: two people responded, one of whom—Padmini Ray Murray, who was a faculty member at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology—happened to be in Bengaluru and agreed to participate at short notice. We were really thankful for that.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">The panel discussion went off smoothly, and at the end we gave a vote of thanks, where we acknowledged our goof-up, thanked Sunil for bringing it to our notice, and we promised the audience sitting in Faculty Hall, which included the Director of NCBS and the Deputy Director of IISc, that we wouldn’t run any more manels. We said we would consciously include more women in all events we organised from then on—not just panel discussions but talks, workshops and so on. That’s more or less an official decision we took for CPR.</p>
<h3 class="india a1dbe">Did you feel like you were being put on the spot at the time?</h3>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">We would often ask our superiors to suggest names for events or scout for people on our own, but actively thinking about including people of all genders was something we never really did. Now it feels like something that is really important.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">And an interesting thing happened after the vote of thanks that year: other people who had been in the audience and worked in other institutes or other departments at IISc came up to talk to us during the tea break. Like us, previously they thought it wasn’t important to think about who was being invited as panelists, but they began to see it was important too.</p>
<h3 class="india a1dbe">Has that changed how you planned subsequent events?</h3>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">Two months after that panel discussion, we organised a workshop. On the final day of the workshop, we presented information on how many male and female participants applied, and how many of each we selected (women formed a little over 50% of those selected). That was our indirect way of letting people know that we took gender into consideration during our selection process.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">In October 2018, when International Open Access Week came around again, we organised a panel discussion as well as an event called the Global Equity Forum for librarians, because they play a key role in making open access a reality at the institutional level. We consciously included women for both events, and not just because they were women. We realised that if you put in a little effort, you can easily find competent people of all genders without having to select people only for representation’s sake.</p>
<h3 class="india a1dbe">What about the people you mentioned earlier, who came up after the panel to ask you about including more women—do you know if they ever followed up on it?</h3>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">Since the 2017 panel, others have made an effort to have equal numbers on men and women in panels too. It’s been like a chain reaction—some of those who attended our panel discussion took notice and kept it in mind when they organised events themselves. For now, though, ensuring gender diversity has depended on the efforts of the individual organisers. What happens when they leave and others take their place?</p>
<p class="india a1dbe">I think we need to put forth a policy at an IISc-wide level for events organised on campus so that we can ensure balanced representation of women—not just on stage, but among participants of events like seminars and workshops as well. Leaving it up to personal decisions means that it may not be a sustained process, and that’s why we need to work towards having it as a departmental policy or as an institutional policy. Of course we need to push for this as individuals, but we also need the leadership on board in order for this to materialise.</p>
<blockquote class="pullquote">Ensuring equal representation for men and women in public events may seem like a small issue, but it drives bigger issues.</blockquote>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">Ensuring equal representation for men and women in public events may seem like a small issue, but it drives bigger issues. Everybody is supportive of gender equality and inclusion of women at some abstract level, but if we really want that to happen, it has to start at small levels and at different stages. That’s a key thing we learned from organising the 2017 panel—that it had to start with us. Inclusion in panel discussions and events is just one of the stages at which it can happen.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">In an academic set-up, dialogue is one way of engaging with a larger audience. You also have events, exams, student participation, and many other such avenues at which it happens, right? We have to address inclusion at all levels. If we have a policy about gender inclusion in events on campus, it could pave the way for policies on gender inclusion in other areas like intake of students, picking members of faculty, picking members of decision-making committees, and so on.</p>
<p class="india a1dbe" style="text-align: justify; ">We have to start somewhere, and we can’t rely on easy excuses not to act. It’s a fundamental issue that really needs to be addressed—and maybe then it will become the norm, and open our eyes to the need for other kinds of inclusion as well.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/quartz-india-august-16-2019-india-s-top-science-institution-is-trying-hard-to-fix-its-manel-problem'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/quartz-india-august-16-2019-india-s-top-science-institution-is-trying-hard-to-fix-its-manel-problem</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminOpennessOpen Access2019-08-19T13:58:51ZNews ItemDesign and the Open Knowledge Movement
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement
<b>With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other. In this post, Saumyaa Naidu shares the learnings from the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4><a href="#1">Introduction</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#2">Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#3">Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#4">Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education</a></h4>
<h4><a href="#5">Conclusion</a></h4>
<hr />
<h2 id="1">Introduction</h2>
<p>Design has historically been functioning in a closed paradigm, both with regard to practice and education. The design process, resources, and products are largely proprietary and limit who can access them. On the other hand, increased use of digital technology offers the potential for greater access and knowledge sharing. In this setting, a dialogue on design and openness becomes essential. There is a need to build sensitivity among designers towards <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_knowledge">open knowledge</a> and open access practices. Such an exchange can not only allow for design resources and products to be available in the open domain, but also help designers build an extensive shared knowledge base.</p>
<p>With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikigraphists_Bootcamp_(2018_India)">Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018</a> with the <a href="https://wikimediafoundation.org/">Wikimedia Foundation</a> from 28th to 30th September, 2018 in New Delhi. The event was held at the School of Design at Ambedkar University Delhi. As part of the bootcamp, a panel discussion was held in order to bring together design practitioners, educators, open knowledge contributors, and design students to explore how design and open knowledge communities can engage with each other.</p>
<p>The discussion was preceded by an introduction to the open knowledge movement and its potential in creating access and inclusion, by <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Satdeep_Gill">Satdeep Gill</a>. Satdeep is a community outreach coordinator for India at the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also one of the founding members of <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_Wikimedians">Punjabi Wikimedians</a> User Group. Satdeep was the programme leader for the Wikiconference India in 2016. The introduction provided a brief history of copyrights and the beginning of the copyleft movement. It discussed creative commons licensing and the role of Wikipedia in the open knowledge movement.</p>
<p>The panel included <a href="http://www.aud.ac.in/faculty/permanent-faculty/detail/137">Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan</a>, <a href="http://www.matratype.com/">Pooja Saxena</a>, and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Shyamal">Shyamal</a>. Suchitra Balasubrahmanyan is the dean at the <a href="http://www.aud.ac.in/academic/schools/sd">School of Design in Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD)</a>. Her research has been on multiple areas such as history of craft and design, and design education in India. Her practice focuses on social communication design. Pooja Saxena is a typeface and graphic designer whose work centres on multi-script design. She has designed an Ol Chiki typeface for Santali language which is available for free and open use. Pooja also teaches typography at several design schools including <a href="https://pearlacademy.com/">Pearl Academy</a>, <a href="http://www.nid.edu/index.html">National Institute of Design</a>, and <a href="http://srishti.ac.in/">Srishti school of Art, Design, and Technology</a>. Shyamal is an independent researcher and an ornithologist. He has been contributing to Wikipedia for over fifteen years now. In addition to his contributions about the biodiversity of birds, he has also created several illustrations relating to the same. The panel was moderated by Saumyaa Naidu, a designer and researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).</p>
<p>The discussion was aimed at addressing three primary questions around design and the open knowledge movement; how academic materials in design inform unstructured or open knowledge spaces and in what ways do these unstructured spaces come back into design education?, what are the potential means of engagement with open knowledge in design practice?, and in what ways can it be applied in design education?<br /><br /></p>
<h2 id="2">Exchange between Design Academics and Open Knowledge</h2>
<p>The discussion began with an enquiry into the challenges faced in the design of knowledge production and the knowledge production of design. It was directed at understanding the various ways in which design education and academia interact with open knowledge. Prof. Suchitra responded by saying that it is still early days for such an interaction to take place as the discipline of design itself is very proprietary in its approach. The work created in different areas of design is often guarded. Locating the discussion at the School of Design in AUD, she suggested that the Social Design course, which looks at the social application of design, believes in socially produced knowledge and contributing to it. However, the university is constrained by the academic environment which does not facilitate the open exchange of knowledge. There is a culture of copyright and protection of work in academia, and heavy funding is required for journal subscriptions. There is an imbalanced gatekeeping of knowledge as countries like India, which have weaker currencies, cannot access this knowledge or contribute to it. The social design community, a small community yet, is interested in making this knowledge freely accessible, in community participation, in co-designing, and in challenge the idea of one ‘super-designer’ who gets all the credit.</p>
<p>Open knowledge spaces such as Wikipedia often make their way into classrooms when students use these resources for assignments. It was pointed out by Prof. Suchitra that there is a lack of regard among students for giving due attribution to material taken from such platforms. Social Sciences universities also consider Wikipedia as an unreliable source, and discourage its use. There is a need to build the culture of knowledge sharing, borrowing, and contribution. She believes that this should be initiated at the level of school education, and not just design schools, so it is internalised at an early stage. She also shared an epistemological concern regarding such a cultural shift in design as it is commonly believed that the knowledge designers produce belongs to them and their livelihoods are connected to it. Hence, open knowledge and open source are antithetical to the profession. This means that the profession itself has to be imagined differently. The social design programme, in this regard, is trying to ensure that when students create work based on interactions with a community, also go back and present it to the community. This is to say that the work produced cannot be exclusively owned by the designers.</p>
<p>The open knowledge movement in India is closely tied to accessibility of information in Indian languages. The availability of a design knowledge base in Indian languages was discussed in this context. Prof. Suchitra explained that most design education in India is in English and is borrowed from another cultural and geographical setting. Design is a discipline of making, and making has its own language. In that sense, the act and content of design transcends language. But, it is the pedagogy which is held by language. The act of making, which is ubiquitous, and is done naturally by everybody, gets held back when it comes to the transmission in different languages. There can be sanskritised words for design terminology, but the vocabulary of everyday use should be applied to represent this knowledge. The School of Design is looking for ways in which important and more provocative texts in design can be made available in other Indian languages. When students are exploring a career in design and they want to learn about it, the information about courses, programmes, and universities should also be available in their language.</p>
<p>The students at AUD recently demanded that education at the university be provided in multiple languages. Since AUD is funded by the Delhi state government, the students want the medium of instruction to include languages of the state (Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi) apart from English. However, in order to accomplish this, the university would require multilingual teachers. At a personal level, Prof. Suchitra feels that the medium of instruction cannot be monolingual, and that it is good to be multilingual. There is also the conflict that it doesn’t do justice to either languages, and there is no neat answer yet. She believes that technology provides some answers in the sense that students can access the material through translations in whichever language they prefer. Being located in Delhi, the university attracts students from all parts of the country, so it needs to be multilingual in different ways. Technology can intervene and provide a layer by which access can be given in the language of one’s choice. She inferred that this is not a question of one or two languages, but of languages everywhere.<br /><br /></p>
<h2 id="3">Potential Means of Engagement with Open Knowledge in Design Practice</h2>
<p>Presently, there is limited participation from design practitioners on open knowledge platforms. From the perspective of a design practitioner and educator, Pooja Saxena explained that apart from Wikipedia, designers use The Noun Project, which offers both free and paid ways to use icons. She mentioned how students also use this platform but it appears that they are not as interested in contributing to it. They are guarded about the work they create but are fine with using someone else’s work that is available for free. Pooja suggested a much needed change in the understanding that open knowledge simply means that it is open for use. It must be seen as a community which one needs to engage with in whichever capacity and give back to. Agreeing with Prof. Suchitra, Pooja also observed that students fail to give fair attribution when any work is available for free. There is a lack of training and communication around attribution among designers. Regarding open source softwares meant for image making and creating illustrations, Pooja said that despite her several attempts of using them, she has always gone back to proprietary softwares. She believes that there are not enough people contributing to making these open source applications better to work with. A middle path she recommended for designers is creating work in formats which can be edited across applications, so that the work created can be built upon in any application, and is not bound by a proprietary software.</p>
<p>As an experienced Wikipedian, Shyamal also stressed upon the idea of finding ways to productively give back to the open knowledge community. He talked about the opportunities that design students have in terms of creating quality images and graphics, and making them available for public use. An example of such an opportunity could be creating clipart or icons that can be used for roadside signages or other such public resources. Another possibility he proposed was publishing rough drafts or discarded work on platforms like Wikipedia, so it can be refined and used by others. It is not well known that aside from the textual part of Wikipedia, there exists a larger environment which includes projects like Wikidata, which is a semantic database, and Wikimedia Commons, which is meant for a variety of media such as images, video, audio, and even 3D models now. This offers a variety of options to designers to make their work available for open use. Another aspect that Shyamal brought attention to in this regard is to make the work available in a way that it can be easily found by others, by effectively using metadata and writing appropriate descriptions.</p>
<p>A relevant example of engagement of design with the open knowledge community was shared by Pooja through her type design project. This included designing a typeface family for the Ol Chiki script, which is used to write in the Santhali language. The project was initiated by Subhashish Panigrahi at CIS in order to set up the Santhali Wikipedia. But, at the time there were no unicode compliant fonts available for Ol Chiki. This was a clear example of how a design intervention in the form of a typeface could lead to knowledge being shared and possibly even created in the future. The project was then funded by the Access to Knowledge programme at CIS. Pooja described the process of designing the typeface. She mentioned that even though the Santhali language is spoken by over 6 million people, Ol Chiki is not a commonly used script. The script itself was invented less than a hundred years ago, which meant that there is little documentation available of the script to look at. The team then engaged with the community to understand how they would like the letters to look like, and whether the letters in the font were correct. This was done through comprehensive feedback forms to test the letters and ask specific questions around their form and placement. The exercise was repeated a number of times to get accurate letters.</p>
<p>Through this process, Pooja made a key observation on perfection. Designers are often trained to share or show their work only when they think it is perfect. But, in the case of the typeface, it was impossible to achieve something even close to being finished without showing it and seeking help from the community. The project also led to inspiring a design student from the National Institute of Design, who belongs to the Santhal community, to create letters in Ol Chiki script as part of the <a href="http://www.36daysoftype.com/">‘36 days of type’</a> challenge on Instagram. The typeface thus, can contribute towards such projects as well. Pooja concluded that the typeface being available for free can also lead to students making a version of it that serves their purpose better.</p>
<p>Further on open typefaces for Indian languages, Shyamal spoke about the several issues regarding the use of Indian languages, specific to Wikipedia and in general as well. He correlated the lack of academic disciplines in Indian languages with the lack of vocabulary of technical terms. Several people also oppose borrowing words from other languages. In an example of needing to translate the labels of an illustration of a four-stroke engine into an Indian language, the engineer would not know the terms in that language, and the language expert will not know enough about engineering. Shyamal suggested transliterating English words as a first step, so that somebody who doesn’t know English can understand what the word sounds like. Another technical concern is the use of open source fonts of Indian languages for better compatibility on Wikimedia Commons. The platform replaces proprietary fonts with equivalent open source ones during the process of uploading. This changes the typesetting in the illustration in terms of spacing between the letters and sentences, and the resulting design can end up looking different from the intended one. Hence, it is important to include identification and use of open source fonts as part of the learning process in design.</p>
<p>Shyamal further talked about the need to create more awareness about copyright. He explained that the fact that anything we create is automatically copyrighted is not really understood by most people. People posting images on Facebook and Instagram would allow others to use their work when asked, but would hesitate to give a written permission. It would be useful to license out the work. This lack of copyright awareness hinders the creation of a vast visual database on Wikimedia Commons. There is little visual information available online about objects, monuments, maps, places, etc. in India. The advantage of using systems like Wikipedia is that you can geotag places, you can semantically describe them so that people who speak other languages can find that content. The value of availability of such content online for an outsider is not well understood yet. As a practice, when learning something new, Shyamal himself tries to add it on Wikipedia or on related projects, so that it can be of use to anyone else looking for it as well.</p>
<p>On encouraging designers to contribute to open knowledge, Pooja advised that designers can contribute through side projects or self-initiated projects as they are not looking to make any money from them to begin with, and would be able to share the work for free. These side projects can take the form of resources or tools that other people can use to build something else. She also pointed out that it is not necessary that designers cannot get paid to do open work, and shared the example of the Ol Chiki typeface, which was paid for by a patron. There are also organisations that commission projects which are supposed to be available for free use because those organisations need that product to be available for free. Google fonts for example, commissions the typefaces to designers which are eventually available as free and open fonts. It is important for designers to be aware that such opportunities exist, and that they need to be sought.<br /><br /></p>
<h2 id="4">Applications of Open Knowledge in Design Education</h2>
<p>The discussion led to several suggestions on involving design students in the open knowledge movement. Pooja recommended that students can be encouraged to make their assignments available on Wikimedia Commons. Design students are often expected to work on projects that address problems that exist in the real world. In most cases, these projects remain with the students and not get implemented in the real world. If such projects were available on open platforms like Wikimedia Commons, they can be taken forward by others who are tackling the same concerns. It is also something that design students would benefit from because their work will be publicly available.</p>
<p>In order to address the disregard for attributions pointed out earlier, Prof. Suchitra stressed upon the need to build a culture among design students to attribute fairly. This would allow for acceptable acknowledgement to someone who has produced work and contributed it to the open domain. She added that this is being initiated in other design spaces such as the Decolonise Design group, which some design faculties are a part of. The group looks at ways of finding different cultural anchors for design. One such project is where design faculties have gotten together to share design assignments, in order to see what kind of assignments we set in the classroom for teaching various kinds of concepts in design. The faculties are trying to form an international platform where teaching methods can be shared and a bank of design assignments can be created. These methods and assignments are otherwise considered proprietary.</p>
<p>Prof. Suchitra also talked about the onus on public funded educational institutions to make their work available on open platforms, at least in projects which have a larger use. The Industrial Design Centre (IDC), Powai already has a portal on which design related educational material is available for anyone who is interested. They offer an online course in design which anyone can register for and attend. It is only for the certification at the end of the course, that one needs to pay to take an exam. Design courses otherwise tend to be quite expensive. She mentioned that the School of Design at AUD has been contemplating sharing the thesis work that students produce on <a href="https://www.academia.edu/">Academia</a>, a platform for academics to share research papers, where it can be downloaded for free. This allows for the work to be viewed by people outside the school, which is a significant step for young designers. Design as a profession fundamentally does not allow sharing, and this certainly needs to change. She gave the example of textiles, where the traditional artworks and motifs are picked up from different sources and placed on fabrics. Such reuse borders on unethical practice. Therefore, we need to identify the boundaries of open source. The ethical aspects of it need to be opened up and discussed, otherwise it can lead to asymmetrical knowledge practices. The attribution or acknowledgement that the work individually or culturally belongs to somebody, needs to be recognised.</p>
<p>On the learning by doing approach in design education, Pooja raised the concern that there is a lack of attention towards ‘learning by reading’. Design related reading materials are not available on open platforms and in different languages. She suggested that even if the readings are available in English, it is also useful for them to be available in a vocabulary that is more acceptable for someone for whom it is not their first language. Further, the ‘doing’ is also framed by a certain perspective, and often that perspective is quite closed. It does not take into account where the students is coming from. For example, a branding assignment for a product for new mothers does not consider how eighteen year old students would understand the product without any interaction with the users. It doesn’t ask why does it have to be branding to begin with. It also limits the objective to ‘selling something’ while there are other ways in which design can intervene. In the assignments where students engage with a community, there is often a clear asymmetry between the students and the people they are designing for. There is a vast gap in the knowledge and experience shared by the two. Consequently, students are forced to either assert themselves in this community or misrepresent themselves. This also takes away from students wanting to share their work on open platforms. Pooja recommended that they would be more willing to put the work out in the open when they are working with their own community because they can then see how it affects people in a much more direct way.<br /><br /></p>
<h2 id="5">Conclusion</h2>
<p>The discussion brought forward various intersections in design and open knowledge, and the possible ways in which the two can lend to each other. Broader interventions such as a cultural shift in design around sharing work and discussing its ethical aspects, availability of academic material in design on open platforms and in different Indian languages, sensitivity around fair attribution and copyrights among designers, and designers seeking out or self initiating projects that contribute to the open domain were discussed. In terms of specific steps, ideas including design practitioners creating works in formats which are editable on open applications, adding more visual content on platforms like Wikimedia Commons, creating and using more open typefaces in Indian languages, and students sharing their assignments on open platforms were considered. Other ways of engagement with design education could be through internships and workshops that demonstrate the need for open knowledge systems.</p>
<p>During the interaction with the audience, another key concern was brought up by Govind Sivan, a student at the School of Design at AUD. He spoke about the prevalent approach in design schools of giving primary importance to originality. Students work towards thinking of unique ideas and any similarity between their own and a classmate’s assignment is seen as a failure of creativity. Such an approach goes on to curb shared knowledge and collaborative working, and needs to be changed in order to make way for openness in design. Prof. Suchitra also advised that there is more value to design in thinking of it as a collaborative project.</p>
<p>Design is also gradually opening up its process to include the people being designed for through open research methods such as co-design and participatory design. All aspects of a design process such as need identification, data gathering, and the end product can be <a href="https://www.designsociety.org/publication/34842/Three+layers+of+openness+in+design%3A+Examining+the+open+paradigm+in+design+research">conceptualised</a> for openness. These directions can be explored by both designers and the open knowledge community for the creation of a greater and more accessible knowledge base.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement</a>
</p>
No publishersaumyaaAccess to KnowledgeFeaturedDesignOpennessEducationHomepage2019-04-01T12:13:00ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities for Indian Higher Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education
<b>The Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS (IISc) is hosting a one day Digital Humanities consultation on July 13, 2013 at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Note: Following is a draft text which will be updated soon.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade, transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. Consequently the very foundations of the systems of knowledge production and dissemination are being re-examined. This is due to the impact that the digital turn has had on already established systems, and to the exciting possibilities that it offers for radically transforming these systems. In tertiary education for instance, one of the ways in which the digital impact has made itself felt is to move the classroom online or to make resources freely available online, thereby providing access for new constituencies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For researchers, digital archiving and digital publishing has made possible the same widening of access, while also enabling innovative ways of reading traditional objects of inquiry through the use of computational methods. While these developments are not confined to a specific domain of knowledge, the term most often used to reference them has been ‘Digital Humanities’. The term has gained currency worldwide perhaps because of the seeming incongruity of the relationship between the conventional humanities disciplines and what is deemed a technological development. This is a relationship that has not only produced new approaches to old material, but perhaps — even more significantly — reconfigured the objects and domains of inquiry themselves, and re-tooled the modes by which we conduct our research.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The five host institutions have engaged with each other in different collaborative initiatives over the years. Most significant among them have been (a) the exploration of integration, inter-disciplinarity and dialogue between the natural sciences and the social sciences/humanities; and (b) the production and deployment of critical resources in Indian languages in the higher education sector. We seek to bring these interests together in the proposed consultation aimed at setting agendas for digital humanities in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Exploring the possible connections between the human sciences and the digital domain could throw up many productive directions for the higher education system. One of the biggest challenges facing the system in India today is the issue of access and the quality of that access. In the coming decade, Indian higher education is estimated to achieve a Gross Enrolment Ratio of at least 20% (from the existing 12%). This immense new inflow into the education system poses significant institutional and pedagogic challenges. With English emerging as the global language for knowledge production, there is pressure on the Indian higher education system to move towards English-based teaching and learning. Simultaneously, here is a cognitive issue: of effective comprehension. Students who are first-generation learners are finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate with the English-only curriculum that presents itself to many as an insurmountable hurdle.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A new set of possibilities could open up if one were to examine this issue from the perspective of the Indian languages. For over 150 years these languages have been used in all modern institutions and practices (from banking to statecraft) and have developed their own concept ecologies and rich traditions of public intellectual discourse. Currently these languages and practices are being thrust into the background by the globalization of higher education. Re-inserting them into our classrooms and institutional arrangements would be crucial from two perspectives: a) providing newer avenues for students to re-negotiate curricular content which is predominantly in English and b) infusing new source materials into social, political, economic and cultural research on India, thereby increasing the relevance and dynamism of Indian social sciences and humanities. Needless to say, technology will play a major role in this context. Not only will technology figure prominently in addressing the question of access, equity and outreach, it will also help in bringing hitherto inaccessible intellectual resources into easily available and distributable forms. Also crucial to the question of access is the scalability that digital technology offers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Through this interdisciplinary consultation, we hope to chart out the possible directions for digital humanities in India, which would include, among others, a strong engagement with Indian languages as well as a rethinking of how the sciences and the humanities could intersect. All of this is likely to hold paradigm-changing consequences for higher education: involving for example online learning, technologically enhanced learning, archival practices, new research methodologies, and the production of new and locally relevant knowledges.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite participants to make short presentations of 15 minutes each reflecting on the questions raised in this note, and bringing to the table issues raised by the initiatives in which they have taken part so far.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education'>http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpennessEvent2013-06-07T11:30:29ZEventSoftware patenting will harm industry, consumer
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/software-patenting-will-harm-industry-consumer
<b>Report by Deepa Kurup in The Hindu dated 5th October 2008 as follow-up to the national meeting on software patents. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.hindu.com/2008/10/05/stories/2008100559810400.htm">Original article on The Hindu website</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">BANGALORE: Living up to its status as the country’s Information Technology (IT) capital, Bangalore played host to a different kind of “software lobby” here on Saturday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unlike most lobbies, this one had no vested interests and no hard-line agenda. In a bid to raise awareness about software patenting and generate a debate among stakeholders, the Free Software community from across the country participated in a national-level meeting against software patents.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Public hearings</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This open meeting comes in the wake of the public hearings being conducted by the Indian Patent Office to discuss the recently formulated patent manual. The office has shelved all discussion on software patents and promised an exclusive meeting with stakeholders. Nearly 20 organisations and various stakeholders who participated in the hearing threw up issues ranging from patent laws and principles in general, to specific issues of the “software per se” clause in the patent manual. Submissions made by many stakeholders to the patent office were also discussed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The meeting was held to discuss the recent modification to the manual, which is being interpreted as a move to make “software in combination with hardware” patentable. As of now, software comes under the copyright law.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This move is significant because a similar ordinance was scrapped by the Parliament in 2005. The Free Software community feels that the clause panders to the powerful IT and multi-national companies lobby that has been rooting for this legislation.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Copyright</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Speaking at the meeting, Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat said that software was protected by copyright and additional protection was more harmful for the industry and the consumer as a whole.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Patent is a state-granted monopoly, but copyright protects the expression of an idea and a code is safe as long as one can prove that he has arrived at it independently,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As a sole representative of any government body, Joseph Mathew, Special IT advisor to the Government of Kerala, made a presentation of his government’s stand on software patents.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The manual should not have brought this up again, considering Parliament scrapped it in 2005. We hope it is a clerical error and the Kerala Government will consider writing to the Union Government and the patent office informing them of our opposition to this issue,” Mr. Mathew said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Small and medium enterprises which use Free Software such as Zyxware from Trivandrum, Deep Root Linux and Turtle Linux from Bangalore, among others made presentations at the meeting. Several research and advocacy organisations such as the Centre for Internet and Society and the Delhi Science Forum put forth various facets of this debate.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Lack of clarity</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The lack of clarity in the Patent Act results is being wrestled aggressively and effectively by corporate interests, patent attorneys and the patent office in favour of granting software patents. This meeting helped bring together the counter-opinions in this matter, and we will go ahead and participate in any meeting that will be called for by the authorities,” said Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/software-patenting-will-harm-industry-consumer'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/software-patenting-will-harm-industry-consumer</a>
</p>
No publisherpraneshOpenness2013-01-16T04:54:42ZNews ItemWiki donors
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-akhila-seetharaman-june-21-2013-wiki-donors
<b>Time Out finds out what Wikipedia’s doing to turn the info mammoth Kannada friendly</b>
<hr />
<p>The article by Akhila Seetharaman was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.timeoutbengaluru.net/bangalore-beat/features/wiki-donors">published in TimeOut Bengaluru</a> on June 21, 2013. T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja are quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Some Wikipedia numbers: Two hundred and eighty-six languages, 42 lakh articles in English. 2.6 crore articles totally. One lakh articles in Hindi, 50,000 in Telugu and Tamil each. Forty thousand in Marathi; 30,000 in Malayalam; 14,000 articles in Kannada. Number of Kannada Wikipedia contributors: 25. Kannadaspeaking population: 47 million. “That’s half a person working to build this public knowledge repository for every million Kannada speakers,” said Vishnu Vardhan, who directs the Access for Knowledge programme in India, a programme that is anchored by the Centre for Internet and Society. “While Hindi Wikipedia gets 60 lakhs page views per month, Kannada gets nine lakh eyeballs monthly.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vardhan and his team do outreach programmes, training college studentsin Karnataka on Wikipedia and encouraging them to contribute to its growing body of knowledge in Kannada. So far they’ve had 16 programmes and reached out to 2,500 people. Vardhan admits that there’s a mixed response. “It’s not a labour of love for everyone. Some people are excited to contribute, others feel it’s too much work.”<b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But he believes it’s important to get across the main message: that Wikipedia is a public knowledge infrastructure for the future. “In our minds libraries, books, newspapers, archives are knowledge repositories,” he said. “But the book is a relatively recent phenomenon, only about a hundred years old. And now everything is becoming the Internet. What is going to happen to our language or culture in the digital era?” Vardhan explains to people that this is the gap they could be filling by taking part in Indian language Wikipedia.<b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On the agenda for the coming year is growing the content in five Indian language Wikipedias, including Kannada. It’s a gargantuan task. Nobody gets paid to write on Wikipedia and there are technical challenges: you need browser support, Kannada fonts, and most keyboard layouts are in English. But as Vardhan says the Kannada font can be downloaded for free.<b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But free knowledge communities in each language have to overcome hurdles if there’s to be a valuable repository of knowledge for the public in Indian languages. “We are all netizens. We are all educated, metro people. We’re comfortable accessing the Internet but how many of us use it in our own language? Do we type in Kannada or write in Kannada? While access to knowledge happens in English there is still a large population that does its business in Kannada,” he said. <i>Visit <a target="_blank">kn.wikipedia.org.</a></i></p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Tech’s messages<br /> </b>UB Pavanaja was among the first eggheads to take Kannada content online. Time Out spoke to him about the city’s lingo</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Could you tell us about a little about yourself?</b> <br /> I worked as a scientist at Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai for 15 years before getting into the emerging field of computers and Indian languages. I started the first Kannada website, and the first Kannada online magazine. I also created the first Indian language version (Kannada) of Logo software, a popular programming language for children and advised the Government of Karnataka on standarising Kannada on computers. I now work with the Centre for Internet and Society as part of the Access to Knowledge team.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>How has Kannada changed in the past two decades?</b> <br /> There have been lots of changes. It is mostly Kanglish now, no more Kannada. Most people have replaced common Kannada words like “appa”, “amma”, “anna”, “akka”, “chikkappa”, “atte”, with dad, mom, bro, sis, uncle, aunty. Nobody uses Kannada numbers. Go to any shop and the shopkeeper will give you the price in English and not in Kannada. Even the display boards in shops are now in English. Common vegetables and fruits names are now displayed in English. I don’t know the names of common vegetables and fruits in English so I can’t rely on the boards for information. I either know the vegetable by looking at it or I don’t. If the price board is moved slightly, then I won’t know the price of the vegetable. For example, in Reliance Fresh, they write “coccinea” for our common vegetable which we know as “tondekaayi”. Let them write coccinea in English script. But why do they write that in Kannada script?<b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>How have information and communication technologies influenced Kannada language over the years? </b>About ten or 15 years ago when developments in IT were rapid, the implementation of Kannada in IT was not keeping pace with time. Hence people thought it was not possible to use Kannada in IT. But that has changed now. Whatever is possible with English in IT is now possible with Kannada also. But people lack awareness and willingness to adopt it. Wherever there is computerisation, it is automatically in English and not Kannada. For, example, the online booking of tickets by KSRTC is in English only. Technically it is now possible to develop a data-driven website in Kannada. But KSRTC is not willing to do so.<b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Any Kannada lingo that didn’t exist two decades?</b> <br /> There are many. Some samples: “message maadu”, “delete maadu”, “missed call kodu”, “update maadu”, “copy maadu”. Most of them are derived from using technology.<b> </b></p>
<b>What have been the biggest influences on the Kannada language in recent times?</b> <br /> Mobile phones, smart phones, FM radio, TV channels, and movies.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-akhila-seetharaman-june-21-2013-wiki-donors'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-akhila-seetharaman-june-21-2013-wiki-donors</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2013-07-01T04:19:13ZNews ItemKannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan (Coverage in Vijaya Karnataka)
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/vijaya-karnataka-june-5-2013-report-of-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-in-hasan
<b>Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted a workshop in Hasan on June 4, 2013. Vijaya Karnataka published a report of the workshop on June 5, 2013.</b>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/VijayaKarnataka.png" alt="Vijaya Karnataka" class="image-inline" title="Vijaya Karnataka" /></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Above is a report of the workshop in Vijaya Karnataka. The workshop was conducted by Dr. U.B.Pavanja on June 4, 2013.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/vijaya-karnataka-june-5-2013-report-of-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-in-hasan'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/vijaya-karnataka-june-5-2013-report-of-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-in-hasan</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpennessWikipediaAccess to KnowledgeWikimedia2013-07-02T07:22:57ZNews ItemKannada Wikipedia Orientation Workshop at IISc, Bengaluru
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/kannada-wikipedia-orientation-workshop-at-iisc-bengaluru
<b></b>
<p>A Kannada Wikipedia orientation workshop was held at the Entrepreneurship Centre, SID, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru on 26 November, 2017. The day long event was aimed at adding content to Kannada Wikimedia projects on topics such as ecology, environment, wildlife and sciences of Karnataka. The event was organised by Gubbi Labs in conjunction with CIS-A2K. Gubbi Labs is a research collective and social collective run by environmental scientists. The event was attended was attended by 8 participants of which one member was female.</p>
<p>The participants created six articles and expanded one article. The impact of this workshop was the fact that participants were made aware of the importance of open access data. It helped initiate another similar workshop in Mysuru. Upon sharing the idea for projects like Wiki Loves Butterfly Idea, a participant was interested in starting a project titled 'Wiki Loves Spiders'. We are hoping to take this project forward on Kannada Wikipedia.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/kannada-wikipedia-orientation-workshop-at-iisc-bengaluru'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/kannada-wikipedia-orientation-workshop-at-iisc-bengaluru</a>
</p>
No publisherGopalakrishna ACIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaOpennessKannada Wikipedia2017-12-19T16:16:29ZBlog EntryMarathi Wikipedia - Vishwakosh Workshop for Science writers in IUCAA, Pune
http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune
<b></b>
<p>A day-long workshop was organised for science writers at [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-University_Centre_for_Astronomy_and_Astrophysics Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics], Pune on 7 October, 2017. Eminent astrophysicist-mathematician couple
<span class="" id="text-1">
<a class="link-wiki-add" title="Click to add a new page" href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune/@@wickedadd?Title=en:Jayant Narlikar|Jayant&section=text">
en:Jayant Narlikar|Jayant<sup>[+]</sup></a>
</span>
and
<span class="" id="text-2">
<a class="link-wiki-add" title="Click to add a new page" href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune/@@wickedadd?Title=en:Mangala Narlikar|Mangala Narlikar&section=text">
en:Mangala Narlikar|Mangala Narlikar<sup>[+]</sup></a>
</span>
, and renowned ecologist
<span class="" id="text-3">
<a class="link-wiki-add" title="Click to add a new page" href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune/@@wickedadd?Title=en:Madhav Gadgil|Madhav Gadgil&section=text">
en:Madhav Gadgil|Madhav Gadgil<sup>[+]</sup></a>
</span>
were among the dignitaries present at the event.</p>
<p>The workshop was planned in three sessions. Presentations and discussions were conducted in first session, while second session was focused on actual editing demonstrations on Wikipedia. In the same session the new websites based on different subjects developed by Marathi Vishwakosh were presented. The process of content contribution in text, images, audio and video forms was explained in this session. The third session was to explore networking with Dyanmandals formed by
<span class="" id="text-4">
<a class="link-wiki-add" title="Click to add a new page" href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune/@@wickedadd?Title=:en:Marathi Vishwakosh|Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal&section=text">
:en:Marathi Vishwakosh|Marathi Vishwakosh Nirmiti Mandal<sup>[+]</sup></a>
</span>
. Insisting the expertise of invited authors to contribute the articles in their own chosen fields in a well-structured format, this session will not only train the authors in content generation but also make them understand the expectations of laymen and common readers.</p>
<p>The mete page of the event is <a class="external-link" href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Marathi_Wikipedia_-_Vishwakosh_Workshop_for_Science_writers_in_IUCAA,_Pune">here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune'>http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-vishwakosh-workshop-for-science-writers-in-iucaa-pune</a>
</p>
No publishermanasaraoCIS-A2KAccess to KnowledgeWikimediaWikipediaMarathi WikipediaOpenness2017-12-20T02:42:39ZBlog EntryOpen DataCamp - 2013
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-camp-2013
<b>A two day unconference for people working with data from various sectors to come together and share their projects and idea is being organized by Open Data Camp on March 2 and 3, 2013 at Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle in Bangalore. </b>
<hr />
<p>Read the original <a class="external-link" href="http://odc.datameet.org/odcblr2013/#about">published by Open Data Camp</a>. Sunil Abraham is a panelist.</p>
<hr />
<h2>Sessions</h2>
<h3>Day 1</h3>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>9:00am - 10:00am</td>
<td>Registration <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:00am - 10:15am</td>
<td><b>Introduction to OpenDataCamp</b><br />Team DataMeet <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:15am - 11.00am</td>
<td><b>Visualizing Politics</b><br />By S Anand</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11.00pm - 11.15pm</td>
<td>Tea <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11:15am - 12.15am <br /></td>
<td><b>Why Open Data is Good for Gov and Citizens alike</b><br />Panel: Alka Mishra (NIC Data.Gov.In), Meera K (CitizenMatters) and Shekhar Krishan, PhD Student, (STS at MIT) Moderated by - Nisha Thompson</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12:15pm - 01.00pm <br /></td>
<td>Ignite talks. 6 of them 5 minutes each.<br /><ol>
<li>OpenBangalore by Thejesh GN</li>
<li>The School of Data is open for admissions By Maya Indira Ganesh</li>
<li>Open Mapping for the Development of a Maoist-affected district in Orissa By Kuldip Gyaneswar</li>
<li>Aggregate and Visualize your data with Ushahidi in 15 minutes By Praveen Selvasekaran</li>
<li>DIY Weather Station By Samuel Rajkumar </li>
</ol></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>01:00pm - 02.00pm <br /></td>
<td>Lunch Break</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>Room 034</td>
<td>Room 032</td>
<td>Room 117</td>
<td>Room 118</td>
<td>Room 119</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:00pm - 2:40pm</td>
<td><b>Public Problem Solving using Data: Lessons from the Daksh Survey</b>.<br />By Meera K and Rajesh Kasturirangan</td>
<td><b>SSLC data Infographics - Experiences</b><br />By Sajjad Anwar</td>
<td><b>Examining Data Practices: the case of Cyberabad's Publicly Accesseble Crime Map</b><br />By Siddharth Hande, Fellow, Hyderabad Urban Lab<br />Anant Maringanti, Executive Director, Hyderabad Urban Lab</td>
<td><b>Leveraging UIDAI data for public benefit</b><br />Tulika Khunger</td>
<td><b>Analyzing Voice Data of Community Based Organizations</b><br />By Piyush Aggarwal</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:40pm - 3:20pm <br /></td>
<td><b>Cont: Public Problem Solving using Data: Lessons from the Daksh Survey</b>.<br />By Meera K and Rajesh Kasturirangan</td>
<td><b>From Data to Evidence: How Activists Use Data in their Campaigns</b><br />By Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective</td>
<td><b>Quality of Gov Data</b><br />By Amrtha Kasturi Rangan</td>
<td><b>Open Financial Data: Following the World Bank's money</b><br />By Ankur Nagar</td>
<td><b>OpenData for Non-Profits!</b><br />By Adethya Sudarsanan</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>3:20pm - 4:00pm</td>
<td><b>Telling Stories with Data</b><br />By Amit Kapoor</td>
<td><b>Know Your Climate: Going Open with Climate </b>Data - Part 2<br />Pavan Srinath</td>
<td><b>Adopt Open Governance</b><br />By Sridhar Pabbisetty</td>
<td><b>Big Data and Hadoop in Indian Context</b><br />By Mohan Kumar</td>
<td><b>Participatory community mapping as a tool for cumulative impact assessments</b><br />By Shashank Srinivasan</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4.00pm - 4.30pm <br /></td>
<td colspan="5" style="text-align: center; ">Tea <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:30pm - 5:30pm <br /></td>
<td colspan="5"><b>Panel Discussion: What has Open Data got to with UIDAI?</b><br />Panelists - Sunil Abraham, Anivar Aravind and Anant Maringanti. <br />Moderated by - Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>5:30pm - 6:00pm <br /></td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Day 2</h3>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>9:00am - 10:00am</td>
<td colspan="4">Registration <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:00am - 10:15am</td>
<td colspan="4"><b>Welcome</b><br />Team DataMeet <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><br /></td>
<td>Room 034</td>
<td>Room 032</td>
<td>Room 117</td>
<td>Hall</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:15am - 11:15am</td>
<td><b>Data and Maps</b><br />Kaustubh Srikanth and Sajjad Anwar. <br /><a href="https://github.com/geohacker/data-and-maps/blob/master/README.md">Details</a></td>
<td><b>A gentle introduction to data cleaning from Tactical Tech's course on the School of Data</b><br />By Allan Stanley and Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective. <br /></td>
<td><b>An Introduction to Apache </b>Hadoop<br />By Mrinal Wadhwa</td>
<td>Blocked for Hackathon</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11:15am - 11:30am <br /></td>
<td colspan="4" style="text-align: center; ">Tea</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>11:30pm - 01:00pm</td>
<td><b>Cont: Data and Maps</b><br />Kaustubh Srikanth and Sajjad Anwar<br /><a href="https://github.com/geohacker/data-and-maps/blob/master/README.md">Details</a></td>
<td><b>Cont: A gentle introduction to data cleaning from Tactical Tech's course on the School of Data</b><br /> By Allan Stanley and Maya Indira Ganesh, Tactical Technology Collective.</td>
<td><b>Cont: An Introduction to Apache Hadoop</b><br /> By Mrinal Wadhwa</td>
<td>Blocked for Hackathon</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>01:00pm - 02.00pm <br /></td>
<td colspan="4" style="text-align: center; ">Lunch Break</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:00pm - 4:00pm</td>
<td>Workshop-1</td>
<td><b>Designing a Story. How To: Look At Data and Tell A Story</b><br />By Tejas Pande <br /></td>
<td>Workshop-3</td>
<td>Blocked for Hackathon</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4.00pm - 4.30pm</td>
<td colspan="4" style="text-align: center; ">Feedback and Tea <br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:30pm - 6:00pm <br /></td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Unscheduled talks</td>
<td>Blocked for Hackathon</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>Contact</b> Nisha Thompson (nisha.thompson@gmail.com)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-camp-2013'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-camp-2013</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpenness2013-02-28T11:08:14ZNews ItemKolkata Wiki Community Meetup
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-kolkata
<b>Recently Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge Programme members T. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi met wikipedians in Kolkata. The event was co-organized by the Access to Knowledge team from the Centre for Internet and Society and the Wikipedian community of Kolkata.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikimedia community in the city of joy gathered near Salt lake during Recently <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society</a>'s <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge Programme</a> team's visit. Four Wikipedians from Kolkata, Wikimedia Foundation's mobile Developer <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Yuvipanda">Yuvaraj Pandian</a> and OPW intern <a class="external-link" href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Sucheta_Ghoshal">Sucheta Ghoshal</a> joined A2K's <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Visdaviva">Vishnu Vardhan</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Psubhashish">Subhashish Panigrahi</a> for this meetup. Vishnu addressed the wikipedians and gave a brief introduction about the programme's objectives and plans. Bengali Wikipedians <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jayantanth">Jayanta Nath</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:BengaliHindu">Kalyan Sarkar</a> shared the success stories and activities in Bengali Wikipedia community. They also discussed about the challenges Indian Bengali wikipedians are facing. Wikipedians discussed few of the technical aspects of Bengali Wikipedia over lunch. Vishnu and Subhashish discussed about the opportunities that could be explored to bring more good quality content relevant to West Bengal and Bengali language over lunch.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-kolkata'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-kolkata</a>
</p>
No publishersubhaOpennessWikipediaWikimedia2013-10-30T10:51:57ZNews ItemWestern Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop
<b>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.</b>
<h2>Schedule</h2>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">09:00 – 09:20</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Registration of participants</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">09:20 – 09:30</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Welcome / Introduction</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">09:30 – 11:15</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Plenary talks - Technology behind biodiversity informatics (3 talks)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">11:15 – 11:30</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Tea break</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">11:30 – 12:30</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Plenary talks - Scientific commons and policy (2 talks)</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">12:30 – 13:00</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Discussion</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">13:00 – 14:00</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span"> Lunch break</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">14:00 – 16:00</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Biodiversity portals in India - Presentations by different teams/panel discussion</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">16:00 – 16:15</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Tea break</span></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">16:15 – 17:00</span></td>
<td><span class="Apple-style-span">Discussions and networking</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2>Spheres of the Workshop:</h2>
<h3>Plenary I: Technology behind biodiversity informatics - 0930 - 1115 hrs</h3>
<div>
<div><strong>Development of Information System, Open Data standards, Archive and Geospatial solutions, Visualization in Bhuvan - Arul Raj</strong>, National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div><strong>Exploring the semantic web for species pages - M. Sravanthi</strong>, Western Ghats Portal - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div><strong>Challenges on the emerging discipline of Biodiversity Informatics - Donald Hobern</strong>, Atlas of Living Australia - 30mins + 10 mins discussion</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Focus</strong>:</div>
<div>
<div>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:</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<ul><li> the evolution of the discipline of biodiversity informatics and its current status</li><li>the development of standards in Indian context</li><li>the technologies for biodiversity informatics</li><li>the challenges in biodiversity informatics<br /><br /></li></ul>
<h3><strong>Plenary II: Scientific commons and policy - 1130 - 1300 hrs</strong></h3>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div><strong>Commons in the context of Biodiversity Information - Danish Sheikh</strong>, Alternative Law Forum - 20 mins + 10 mins</div>
</div>
<div>
<div><strong>Open data in the scientific realm - Sunil Abraham</strong>, Centre for Internet and Society - 20 mins + 10 mins</div>
</div>
<div>Discussion on Scientific commons and Policy - 30 mins</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Focus</strong>:<br />
<div>The objective of the session is to understand the commons principle and its implications for scientific research. The session will focus on:</div>
</div>
<div>
<ul><li>the experience of developing a creative commons policy in Indian scenario and the resulting impacts for scientific collaboration, open data and open access</li><li>policy and social implications of open data sharing</li></ul>
<div> </div>
</div>
<h3>Plenary III - Biodiversity portals in India - 1400 - 1700 hrs</h3>
<div><strong>Moderation</strong>: R. Prabhakar/ MD Madhusudhan<br /><strong>Panelists</strong>: (Introductory note by each of the panelists - 10 minutes each)</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Suhel Quader</strong>, Season Watch (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.seasonwatch.in">www.seasonwatch.in</a>), Migrant Watch (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.migrantwatch.in">www.migrantwatch.in</a>)</div>
<div><strong>Sanjay Molur</strong>, Pterocount (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.pterocount.org/">www.pterocount.org/</a>)</div>
<div><strong>K.N.Ganeshaiah</strong> - Indian Bioresource Information Network (www.ibin.co.in)</div>
<div><strong>Ramesh BR</strong> - Western Ghats Portal (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.thewesternghats.in/">www.thewesternghats.in/</a>)</div>
<div><strong>Shwetank Verma</strong>, Biodiversity of India, formerly Project Brahma (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.biodiversityofindia.org">http://www.biodiversityofindia.org</a>)</div>
<div><strong>Krishnamegh Kunte</strong>, ifoundbutterflies <a class="external-link" href="http://ifoundbutterflies.org/">(http://ifoundbutterflies.org/</a>)<br /><strong>Vijay Barve</strong>, DiversityIndia (<a class="external-link" href="http://diversityindia.org/">http://diversityindia.org/</a>)<br /><strong>Deepak Menon</strong>, India Water Portal (<a class="external-link" href="http://www.indiawaterportal.org/">http://www.indiawaterportal.org/</a>)<br /><strong>Chitra Ravi</strong>, India Biodiversity Portal (<a class="external-link" href="http://indiabiodiversity.org/">http://indiabiodiversity.org/</a>)<br /><strong>Mr D.K Ved</strong>, Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (<a class="external-link" href="http://envis.frlht.org">http://envis.frlht.org</a>)</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Focus</strong>:<br />
<div>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</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>
<ul><li>key features available on their portals</li><li>the experience of building the portal</li><li>the key lessons learnt</li><li>future plans</li></ul>
</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div><strong>Summary of the Day</strong>: R Prabhakar - Call for synergy/collaboration/Thank you!!</div>
<div> </div>
<h2>Concept Note</h2>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Download the agenda <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/wgp-agenda.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Western Ghats Portal Workshop in Bangalore">here</a> [PDF, 124 kb]</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaOpen DataOpenness2011-11-08T05:01:14ZNews Item