The Centre for Internet and Society
http://editors.cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 271 to 285.
Digital Humanities in India?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india
<b>An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the first among seven sections.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sections</h2>
<p>01. <strong>Digital Humanities in India?</strong></p>
<p>02. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities">A Question of Digital Humanities</a></p>
<p>03. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/reading-from-a-distance-data-as-text">Reading from a Distance – Data as Text</a></p>
<p>04. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities">The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities</a></p>
<p>05. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment">Living in the Archival Moment</a></p>
<p>06. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice">New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice</a></p>
<p>07. <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india-concluding-thoughts">Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts</a></p>
<hr />
<h2>Background</h2>
<p>It has only been a couple of years since I began hearing the term Digital Humanities (henceforth, DH) being uttered quite prominently, though mostly in academic circles. For the uninitiated, it almost sounds like an oxymoron. After all, for most practical purposes the digital and humanities have always been seen almost as contradictory terms, existing in distinct silos. A couple of workshops and conferences, one national-level consultation, three new centres, and two academic courses later the term still needs a definition in India, if not also in other parts of the world. But what was by then, and even now, is interesting is the emergence of pockets of work in India either claiming to be DH or even remotely related to it, and the interest in the term, either as one full of a seemingly diverse, innovative, and generative potential for interdisciplinary work in academia and practice, or as something that is just a reinvention of old questions that have been the focus of humanistic enquiry for several decades now.</p>
<p>The enquiry for this mapping began with the term itself, as a 'found' name for which I needed to excavate some meaning, context and location in India at the present moment. A consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education organised in Bangalore in July 2013 <strong>[1]</strong> and a proposed short course in ‘Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics’ <strong>[2]</strong> at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, were some of the early prominent instances of the use of the term. I later learnt from one of the people interviewed for this study that DH was already discussed in academic workshops as early as 2010 <strong>[3]</strong>. The general interest in the term has steadily picked up in the last couple of years however, albeit in specific pockets of the country, and it would be safe to say that it has been approached in markedly different ways by several institutions.</p>
<p>The source of the term itself is the history and body of literature around humanities computing in the UK and US, which essentially explores the use of computational methods in humanities research and practice. Roberto A. Busa (2010) describes it as “… precisely the automation of every possible analysis of human expression (therefore, it is exquisitely a "humanistic" activity), in the widest sense of the word, from music to the theater, from design and painting to phonetics, but whose nucleus remains the discourse of written texts”. However, locating such a history in India seems not only to be a difficult project, but largely a futile one. It seemed irrelevant to import a concept or discourse that in itself was (and still is to some extent) relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context, and then try to locate it here. Instead, what I chose to do was to take a few steps back - firstly to outline a couple of questions/conflicts that seemed to be troubling about this concept to begin with:</p>
<ol>
<li>Are ‘digital’ and ‘humanities’ really two contradictory terms that are being bridged together? Is this a reiteration of the ‘two cultures’ (Snow 1990) debate?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the changes in the object(s) of enquiry in humanities disciplines due to the advent of the internet and digital technologies?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What methods are to be used to study and work with digital objects? How are these affecting the traditional methods of the humanities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is DH a fringe academic phenomena, and can it be related to academic disciplines only? With several groups of practitioners engaging with questions and methods akin to DH outside universities, how do we define its institutional boundaries?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What are the new skills and tools emerging with, and in turn defining, DH practices in India?</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>An immediate context for the growth of DH has been the steady debate around a ‘crisis’ of the disciplines, the humanities in particular, and how DH in a strange paradox, seemed to be both the phenomenon posing this question and offering an answer to it. Particularly in the Anglo-American context, while there has been a sustained decline in funding for the arts, especially post the global recession in the late 1990s, the Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) and other disciplines in natural sciences still seem to be on a steady footing. The ‘crisis’ here exists here at several levels - budgetary cuts across universities for liberal arts and humanities programmes, a steep fall in gainful employment for graduates (whose numbers are much more than the jobs available in the market, the adjunct system that has become popular in the US, which has resulted in reduced full-time employment and poor compensation for faculty, and in general a lack of opportunities and resources for research in the arts and humanities. The problem however, of which these are only the symptoms, lies much deeper, at the heart of what is seen as the lack of interest due to the diminishing practical value of the humanities, which further makes them seem most dispensable in a moment of economic crisis. Martha Nussbaum calls this a ‘silent crisis’, spurred by the growth of a profit-driven model of education, which has led to an increased focus on science and technology programmes, and emphasized the fostering of certain specific skills in these domains much to the detriment of arts and humanities programmes at every level of formal education, thus also doing away with “cultivated capacities of critical thinking and reflection, which are crucial in keeping democracies alive and wide awake.”</p>
<p>Gary Gutting on the other hand sees this definition of crisis in terms of numbers itself as misleading, but proposes that this decline also as a result of a cultural and economic system that is inhospitable to the humanities in general, and the ‘cultural middle class’ in particular. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>Our economic system works well for those who find meaning in economic competition and the material rewards it brings. To a lesser but still significant extent, our system provides meaningful work in service professions (like health and social work) for those fulfilled by helping people in great need. But for those with humanistic and artistic life interests, our economic system has almost nothing to offer. Or rather, it has a great deal to offer but only for a privileged elite (the cultural parallel to our economic upper class) who have had the ability and luck to reach the highest levels of humanistic achievement. If you have (in Pierre Bourdieu’s useful term) the “cultural capital” to gain a tenured professorship at a university, play regularly in a major symphony orchestra or write mega bestsellers, you can earn an excellent living doing what you love. Short of that, you must pursue your passion on the side. (Gutting 2013)</blockquote>
<p>Paul Jay and Gerald Graff locate the problem within the notion of the humanities as being inherently averse to a market-driven, utilitarian form of education, which emphasises only credentials, thus rendering the field esoteric and lacking when it comes to solving problems in the ‘real world’. Instead they favour the approach of humanities students developing diverse skill sets, in addition to traditional skills of their disciplines, and being open to engage with opportunities in the larger marketplace outside of academy as well. As the essay states:</p>
<blockquote>We believe it is time to stop the ritualized lamentation over the crisis in the humanities and get on with the task of making them relevant in the 21st century. Such lamentation only reveals the inability of many humanists to break free of a 19th-century vision of education that sees the humanities as an escape from the world of business and science. As Cathy Davidson has forcefully argued in her new book, Now You See It, this outmoded way of thinking about the humanities as a realm of high-minded cultivation and pleasure in which students contemplate the meaning of life is a relic of the industrial revolution with its crude dualism of lofty spiritual art vs. mechanized smoking factories, a way of thinking that will serve students poorly in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. (Jay and Duff 2002)</blockquote>
<p>While many of the traditional humanities scholars may still look at this as the result of a certain techno capitalistic impulse - wherein a new research regime based on knowledge creation to fulfil corporate interests emerges – it is prudent to examine how and why fields like the digital humanities have now emerged around the time of such a crisis, as they seemingly fit well within this nebulous space, and what are their implications for the humanities, education and research at large.</p>
<p>In the India, the context is a rather chequered one – with most conversations around the internet and digital technologies located within the domain of the development of Information and Communication technologies for Development (ICT4D), in sectors ranging from education to governance. The introduction to the digital has been in multifarious ways for countries in the global south, largely through rhetoric about its potential to address and even resolve social and economic problems, so much so that, as several of the people interviewed in this study also mentioned, now anything digital automatically translates to ‘good’ and ‘beneficial’. Addressing the digital divide has been a mandate of all stakeholders, whether the state and policy-makers, private organisations, NGOs or academia. With around 300 million internet users and counting, India has the second largest internet user base in the world. However, the conditions and quality of access to the internet and other digital technologies, and who is using these and for what purposes continue to remain a bone of contention. The ambitious Digital India initiative of the current government is the latest in a slew of measures undertaken to address some of these concerns in the last several years, and it proposes to do so by tackling three key areas – digital infrastructure, governance and services on demand, and empowerment of citizens through increased digital literacy <strong>[4]</strong>. As such it seeks to resolve some of the challenges of last mile connectivity that have forever been an issue with many ICT4D initiatives, particularly with countries in the Global South. The advent of a techno-democracy or a model of governance that successfully integrates technology within a framework of rights and social development seems to be larger vision of these proposed initiatives.</p>
<p>The ICT-fication of education has been a major objective and challenge within this larger vision, specifically with respect to the problem of access, and more importantly quality of access which stands out as pertinent, again a problem attributed to the lack of last mile connectivity. In 2009, the MHRD launched the ambitious National Mission in Education and Information and Communication Technologies (NMEICT) programme <strong>[5]</strong>, which along with the National Commission for Higher Education and Research (NCHER) Bill <strong>[6]</strong> and the recommendations of the Yashpal Committee report <strong>[7]</strong>, was expected to address some long-standing concerns in making higher education more accessible and hospitable to students, particularly those from underprivileged backgrounds. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2011) argues that the last-mile problem is a more of a conceptual or cultural problem than merely a technological one. This is illustrated in the manner of implementation of several projects under the NMEICT, particularly in the imagination, as Rajadhyaksha says, of technology as neutral and therefore capable of addressing issues of democratisation within higher education.</p>
<p>Following the NMEICT, several initiatives such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) <strong>[8]</strong> programme, and the use of low-cost devices such as the Aakash tablets <strong>[9]</strong> were also field tested to get a better understanding of how digital technologies could be integrated seamlessly into classroom instruction. The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) <strong>[10]</strong> and Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET) <strong>[11]</strong>, and more recently the National Knowledge Network (NKN) <strong>[12]</strong> are some of the more established efforts in distance education and open courseware. Digitisation initiatives were also launched on a large scale in the last decade, some notable ones being National Mission for Manuscripts <strong>[13]</strong>, Digital Library of India <strong>[14]</strong>, and National Library of India <strong>[15]</strong>, among many others. There is also a growing number of closed/commercial archives, some examples being the South Asia Archive <strong>[16]</strong> and Asia Art Archive <strong>[17]</strong>. Digitisation, while being taken up in the interest of preservation and record, also brought with it a number of challenges, particularly with respect to the manner in which the projects were implemented. Whether with regard to preservation of the original material, problems with copyright or defining metadata standards, digitisation has never been an easy process. The Google Books library project is an example of this, where many books were damaged and had to be discarded in the process of digitisation, and the project itself came under criticism for several copyright violations, errors produced due to conversion of scanned texts using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and incorrect or unavailable metadata.</p>
<p>The move towards digitisation also provided the much needed impetus for archival practice to make a transition to the digital space, this has been an inevitable but rather fraught endeavour to begin with, as some of the observations made in the later chapters will illustrate. The emergence of independent, private online archives, often seen as a fallout of the hegemony of state-funded archives is an important development of this time. An influx of funding from government and private donors, has led to a lot of work in media and communication technologies getting concentrated in so-called ‘alternative’ spaces outside the university. The growth of these in between spaces has been an interesting phenomenon, particularly with respect to the possibilities offered for different kinds of research and other creative practices that are often unable to find a space within the confines of a university or other large, established knowledge institutions.</p>
<p>In the last decade or so, DH seems to have become one of the most highly funded areas in humanities research and practice. While this has seemingly helped to either save and/or reinvent some the humanities programmes, a lot of traditional humanists also view the field and the term with scepticism – as a threat to more traditional forms of humanities pedagogy and practice. Whether such a context exists in India and is still a matter of question, and hinges largely on how we understand the digital itself - as an object, concept or space. For that seems to be where the questions about the field, its emergence and its epistemological concerns lie.</p>
<p>This report, therefore, takes a slightly broader look, somewhat like a scoping exercise to see what some present concerns are and what could be the possibilities of DH in India. The areas of focus are few – the notion of crisis, and disciplines, the archive and so forth which form the crux of the debate in India. It also looks at changes that have come about, and are imminent with the ‘digital turn’, from the perspective of selected disciplines, and practices of knowledge-making. More importantly, it tries to extrapolate, from the common issues and conflicts traced across several conversations, larger questions of a conflict of authority that disciplines in the humanities have come to undergo, and whether the digital has amplified of tried to resolve the same. The conflict is tied to questions of ownership/authorship and authenticity that emerge with new collaborative modes of knowledge production, and the politics of circulation. It is reflected in the shift from more traditional spaces of knowledge-making to newer methods, objects, figures and processes in the online world, which seem to at one level replace older ones. This perceived threat of irrelevance or obsolescence is one of the manifestations of this conflict of authority. The Wikipedia is one example of this conflict, wherein the authenticity and authority of its content and recognition as scholarship has been intensely debated owing to, among other things, the fact that it cannot be attributed to any single author. In the ways in which the digital now mediates such activities, what has become the space and understanding of the digital in our lives, in the ways we consume and produce information and knowledge, and increasingly become uneven stakeholders in a dynamic knowledge economy, are some of the questions explored therein.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Methodology</h2>
<p>With few 'digital humanists' (a term many DH scholars in India have consciously chosen to stay away from) and DH centres around, and the discourse being far from stable in India, the best way to explore this supposedly new phenomenon then seemed to be to understand some of the immediate problems and questions with the notion of the ‘digital’ itself. This approach was not just the result of constraints of the immediate context, but also turned out to be a productive methodological gesture, as it widened the scope of this mapping exercise to include several proto/perhaps-DH initiatives that have come up around the same time, or been in existence for a while and have been trying to work around similar questions. The mapping did not begin with an assumption of a field called DH as being extant in India, and therefore as an examination of its challenges and possibilities, but rather to understand how DH-like practices have evolved and converged at the moment under what appears to be like a place-holder term, and the implications of this for research and learning. Being located in India, it also provided a good vantage point to reflect on some of the literature and discourse around the term being produced in the Anglo-American context.
The consultation on Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education held in July 2013 was helpful in bringing together a number of people and key questions of what was then understood as something of a field. It is largely from the discussions at this consultation that this report approaches the term and what it may offer for humanities and related interdisciplinary research in India; somewhere it also hopes to serve as a point of departure. A major concern then was the lack of a proper definition of the field, and its instability, which continued to be a recurrent topic in my discussions with people as part of this exercise. However, the merits of embarking upon an exercise to ‘define DH in India’ were highly contentious, so the mapping took a more descriptive route, and did a discursive analysis of work in DH and allied fields and what people were saying about it in India. What I found were a range of views, some informed by practice and scholarship, others based on conjecture and some purely non-committal. As one of the people interviewed for this mapping pointed out, there is something provisional about which, if I may add, also inhibits us from saying anything definitive about it, just yet.</p>
<p>Given that the lack of a definition of the field remained one of the main issues, I went into conducting the mapping with a working definition/assumption that DH ‘is an interdisciplinary area of research, practice and pedagogy that looks at the interaction of digital tools, methods and spaces with core concerns of humanistic enquiry’. This definition was developed based on a review of existing literature in the Anglo-American context on DH, and deliberately made expansive enough to include within its fold, the different kinds of practices that had already chosen to adopt the term, and others which seemed to be inclined towards similar theoretical and practical concerns. Another useful definition, from the Digital Humanities Quarterly useful was the following:</p>
<blockquote>Digital humanities is a diverse and still emerging field that encompasses the practice of humanities research in and through information technology, and the exploration of how the humanities may evolve through their engagement with technology, media, and computational methods. (Digital Humanities Quarterly 2010)</blockquote>
<p>Deliberating on the interaction between humanities and technology, Susan Schreibman, in one the earliest books on DH describes the 'field' as follows:</p>
<blockquote>The digital humanities, then, and their interdisciplinary core found in the field of humanities computing, have a long and dynamic history best illustrated by examination of the locations at which specific disciplinary practices intersect with computation. (Schreibman et al 2004)</blockquote>
<p>One of the popular and most quoted definitions, however, is an early one that appeared in the Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 (Institute for the Future of the Book 2009). This describes DH as <em>an array of convergent practices</em>, and is also reproduced in the book <em>Digital Humanities</em> (Burdick et al 2012):</p>
<blockquote>Digital Humanities refers to new modes of scholarship and institutional units for collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publication. Digital Humanities is less a unified field than an array of convergent practices that explore a universe in which print is no longer the primary medium in which knowledge is produced and disseminated. (Ibid., 122)</blockquote>
<p>The notion that DH is a “less a unified field than an array of convergent practices” seems to be the most useful way to describe the observations and more so the conditions that led to this mapping exercise, which also seeks to outline some kind of a trajectory of practices that converge at this contemporary moment to engender new meanings of and around the digital, rather than produce a conceptual history of the term in the Indian context or even imagine an extant field of some sort. This notion of a convergence, as stated in the last definition, although not apparent or expressed by anyone in India, seems to be the best possible way to describe the manner in which certain practices and a discourse has grown around the intersection of humanities and digital technologies in India. This rather organic growth of DH projects, practices and coursework in the absence of a meta-theory that would drive its epistemological concerns is an important conceptual question for the field itself, and a challenge for the study. Thus while the broader conversation around DH spans everything from instructional technology, new media and art practices, integrated science education to cultural analytics, the core concerns often remain the same, that of the intersection of previously separate domains of knowledge that are now coming together, and the crucial role played by the internet and digital technologies in bringing them together.</p>
<p>Further, three immediate experiences in engaging with digital technologies and questions of knowledge production in India shaped the intellectual concerns of this study. The first of these is the series of monographs produced as part of the ‘Histories of Internets in India’ project at the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in CIS, during 2008-2011. A key point foregrounded in these monographs was the critical need to approach the internet, as a plural technology, available in and actualised through different forms, practices, and experiences. The second one was the collaborative project on the quality of access to higher education in undergraduate educational institutions at the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore.The project was conducted in nine undergraduate institutions across three states in India, and included interaction with students and teachers through workshops and campus projects.The experience of working with students – who ranged from those who could barely use a computer to students proficient with the latest software, multimedia tools and internet applications – led to many insightful learnings about the teaching-learning environment, and prevalence of digital technologies and the internet in these spaces. The third one, of course, is the consultation on DH held in Bangalore, which provided an immediate set of questions and a network of people to begin the mapping with.</p>
<p>In this study, the fieldwork consisted of in-depth and semi-structured interviews with key people involved in the DH-like initiatives in India, and allied areas such as media, archives, art, and higher education. The sample size being small, the conversations were by no means exhaustive, but they were insightful in terms of the present nature of practice and the questions that they further pointed towards. The interviews were largely open-ended conversations focussing on, where possible, questions about DH: its emergence, theory, practice and pedagogy, but emphasising the notion of the ‘digital’ and is diverse perception and formulations. With respondents who were not from an academic space or not involved with DH directly, the questions were more related to the nature of changes that the digital has brought about in their practice, specifically the shifts in content and method. The crisis of disciplines and the move away from more traditional concerns of humanistic enquiry were also discussed. Issues of access, exclusivity and the move towards collaborative spaces of knowledge production and the democratic potential of the internet and digital technologies also came up quite prominently as points of discussion.</p>
<p>The fieldwork tried to cover not just a range of people from different disciplines and areas of practice, but also institutions: Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri and Purbasha Auddy, (School of Cultural Texts and Records and Dept. of English), Dr. Moinak Biswas and Dr. Madhuja Mukherjee (Media lab and Dept. of Film Studies); Dr. Abhijit Roy (School of Communication and Culture) at Jadavpur University, Kolkata; Dr. Souvik Mukherjee (Dept. of English) and Dr. Milinda Banerjee (Dept. of History) at Presidency University, Kolkata; Abhijit Bhattacharya (Media Archives) at Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata; Dr. Ravi Sundaram (the Sarai Programme) at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr. Indira Chowdhury and Dr. Padmini Ray-Murray (Centre for Public History) at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore; Dr. C. S Lakshmi at the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women, Mumbai; Shaina Anand, Namita Malhotra, Lawrence Liang, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Lutgert and Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who have all worked with CAMP, Mumbai and are part of the team behind Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma; Vikram Vincent at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and S.V. Srinivas, Azim Premji University, who was previously associated with the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. The individuals and institutions mentioned here have been engaged with these concerns within their respective fields of research and practice. Three institutions - Jadavpur University, Presidency University and the Centre for Public History – have actively adopted the term DH for some of the work they have been doing, whereas the remaining have been working with digital technologies as part of research, pedagogy, and practice. The report presents some part of these conversations and in doing so provides a snapshot of the operational context of the term ‘DH’ in India as well. The attempt was to understand the nature of existing and possible institutional investment in the term, as well as digital technologies (beyond tools, platforms and processes) and their stake in taking these questions further.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> This one-day event was organized by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) programme at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, in collaboration with the Access to Knowledge (A2K) Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, and other institutions. See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education" target="_blank">http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/">https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/</a></p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf">http://www.tezu.ernet.in/notices/ResearchMethodology.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/">http://www.digitalindia.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nmeict.ac.in/">http://www.nmeict.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See <a href="http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf">http://www.prsindia.org/uploads/media/Higher%20education/Legislative%20Brief%20-%20Higher%20Education%20and%20Research%20Bill.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf">http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf</a></p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="http://nptel.ac.in/">http://nptel.ac.in/</a></p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578">http://gadgets.ndtv.com/tablets/news/government-for-providing-aakash-tablet-at-rs-1500-329578</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.ignou.ac.in/">http://www.ignou.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/">http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> See: <a href="http://nkn.in/">http://nkn.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.namami.org/">http://www.namami.org/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.dli.ernet.in/">http://www.dli.ernet.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/">http://www.nationallibrary.gov.in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.southasiaarchive.com/">http://www.southasiaarchive.com/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> See: <a href="http://www.aaa.org.hk/">http://www.aaa.org.hk/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Burdick, Anne, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital_Humanities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2012, <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities">https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities</a>.</p>
<p>Digital Humanities Quarterly, "About DHQ," 2010, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/about/about.html</a></p>
<p>Gutting, Gary. "The Real Humanities Crisis," The New York Times, November 30, 2013, accessed July 14, 2015. <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/
">http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/30/the-real-humanities-crisis/</a>.</p>
<p>Institute for the Future of the Book, "The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0," 2009, <a href="http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/">http://manifesto.humanities.ucla.edu/2009/05/29/the-digital-humanities-manifesto-20/</a></p>
<p>Jay, Paul, and Gerald Duff, "The Fear of Being Useful," Inside Higher Ed. January 5. 2012. Accessed September 22, 2015. <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities">https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/05/essay-new-approach-defend-value-humanities</a>.</p>
<p>Schreibman, Susan, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth, "The Digital Humanities and Humanities Computing: An Introduction," A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, <a href="http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/">http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/</a>.</p>
<p>Snow, C.P. "The Two Cultures," Leonardo, Vol. 23, No. 2/3, New Foundations: Classroom Lessons in Art/Science/Technology for the 1990s. 1990. Pp. 169-173.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-in-india</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital KnowledgeMapping Digital Humanities in IndiaResearchFeaturedDigital HumanitiesResearchers at Work2016-06-30T05:05:29ZBlog EntryCIS Featured in 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' Report
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report
<b>This report, authored by Vivian Lewis, Lisa Spiro, Xuemao Wang, and Jon E. Cawthorne, sheds light on the expertise required to support a robust and sustainable digital scholarship (DS) program. It focuses first on defining and describing the key domain knowledge, skills, competencies, and mindsets at some of the world’s most prominent digital scholarship programs. It then identifies the main strategies used to build this expertise, both formally and informally. The work is set in a global context, examining leading digital scholarship organizations in China, India, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The report team visited and spoke to us last year, as part of the study. Here are the Executive Summary and link to the final report.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Access the 'Building Expertise to Support Digital Scholarship: A Global Perspective' report <a href="http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub168" target="_blank">here</a>.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Executive Summary</h2>
<p>As new production, researchers scholarship analysis, pursue using digital or digital publishing scholarship or computational and dissemination (the creation, techniques), of they are often challenged to develop new skill sets. What skills, competencies, knowledge, and mindsets should digital scholars possess? How are such attributes—which we group under the term expertise—best cultivated? Does the shape of expertise vary around the world? Such questions are being asked by institutions establishing or reshaping digital scholarship organizations (DSOs), instructors developing educational and training programs in digital scholarship, experienced and aspiring digital scholars defining what expertise they need to acquire, and researchers exploring the global nature of digital scholarship.</p>
<p>Through our pilot study, we sought to answer these questions with the broader aims of identifying the workforce-related factors important to the success of digital scholarship, helping training and educational programs define key goals, and contributing to the conversation about the global dimensions of digital scholarship. We focused on “best in class” DSOs, highlighting the human dimensions behind their success in areas such as research output, winning grants, international reputation, and innovative teaching or training programs. We conducted interviews with a range of people involved with leading DSOs, including directors, research staff, faculty, librarians, graduate students, and university administrators. We conducted site visits with all but one of the 16 institutions
participating in our study, which enabled us to get a richer sense of the facilities, organizational context, and local culture. While most of our interviews focused on digital humanities, we also included several digital social science organizations to identify areas of commonality and contrast. We explored a variety of organizational
structures, including research centers and institutes, an academic department, labs, a network, a nonprofit organization, and a company; these organizations were sponsored by academic schools, libraries, and information technology departments. To understand the global dimensions of digital scholarship, we examined organizations from Mexico, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Since digital scholarship projects often require specific technical skills (such as expertise in text analysis or geographic information systems [GIS]), it was difficult to generalize about what particular skill sets organizations should offer; in many ways that depends on the goals and focus of the organization. In addition, different skill sets were expected depending on one’s position and degree of experience. However, our interviews revealed in particular the importance of collaborative competencies, reflecting the ways in which digital scholarship typically takes place in teams dependent on diverse expertise. Since digital scholarship often involves
developing new methods, tools, and theoretical approaches, successful digital scholars usually exhibit creativity, curiosity, and an enthusiasm for learning, which we term learning mindsets. Some level of general domain knowledge is useful so that team members can understand the research questions they are pursuing, while researchers draw upon methodological competencies (such as data science and GIS) and technical skills (such as database design and programming) to carry out their research. Finally, managerial skills—particularly project management—are needed to ensure that projects are completed.</p>
<p>While self-education and learning by doing are the predominant ways that digital scholars have traditionally acquired expertise, they also appreciate being part of a community of practice, so that they can turn to colleagues for help solving a problem and learning something new. Many organizations host workshops and visiting speakers and enable faculty and staff to attend conferences, although it can be challenging for staff to secure travel funding. A couple of organizations provide dedicated research time to staff, so that they can experiment, stay abreast of the state of the art, and contribute their own research. Along with formal support for professional development, we noted the importance of a “learning culture” in fostering continuous learning. Organizations most successful at
building expertise among faculty, students, and staff tended to share characteristics such as <em>an open and collaborative interdisciplinary culture</em> in which each team member contributes expertise and is respected for it; <em>global engagement</em>, which includes participating in multi-institutional research projects; an <em>entrepreneurial culture</em> in which experimentation is valued; and a <em>focus on teaching and learning</em> as well as research. We noted variation in the kind of <em>facilities</em> these organizations occupied; collaborative space seemed to be more important than top-notch hardware.</p>
<p>Since we were able to visit only a small number of organizations in each country or region included in the study, we don’t feel comfortable making broad generalizations about the state of digital scholarship around the world. However, we did note some common factors that influenced the shape of digital scholarship expertise. These
factors included <em>a tradition of digital scholarship</em>, as more established organizations could both build on existing structures and could be limited by them; <em>funding</em>; the degree of <em>involvement of the institution’s library</em>; and variations in <em>academic career structures</em>, such as paths to promotion and the recognition of alternative academic careers.</p>
<p>Digital scholarship organizations face a number of challenges, particularly in securing adequate funding for their work. We want to draw particular attention to the challenge of recruitment and retention. Typically, DSOs cannot compete with the private sector in offering high salaries or extensive opportunities for advancement; rather, they provide more flexible environments and an academic or intellectual atmosphere in which staff are encouraged to experiment and learn. Unfortunately, some staff at many organizations are hired on temporary contracts because of limited funding, so they often leave for more stable positions. We also noted a tension
between research and service at some organizations, wherein these organizations viewed producing new knowledge as central to their mission but may also be expected to provide services to local researchers or to maintain existing projects. At a few organizations, we observed status differences between faculty and staff, particularly in the ability to be principal investigators on grants or to receive travel funding. Researchers whose first language is not English must often choose between reaching a smaller audience with work published in their native language and devoting significant time to translating their work into English.</p>
<p>We provide an extensive list of recommendations aimed at digital scholars, leaders of DSOs, universities and host organizations, funders, and the broader digital scholarship community. To highlight some of the most salient: We recommend that digital scholars take responsibility for their own learning, nurture their own curiosity, and actively pursue learning opportunities, including by participating in communities of practice and team projects.
We advise the leaders of DSOs to encourage both structured and unstructured opportunities for learning by including dedicated staff research time in job descriptions, enabling staff to train and mentor, and hosting workshops, outside speakers, and other events. Host institutions such as universities should create more stable staff positions with paths to promotion and facilitate more stable funding for DSOs, while funders should support global digital scholarship exchanges. As for the digital scholarship community, we recommend heightening awareness of digital scholarship around the world through conference programs, funding initiatives, publications, and communities of practice, and promoting greater linguistic diversity. We hope that this report helps raise awareness of the range of expertise required for digital scholarship, the importance of a learning culture and active communities of practice in nurturing it, the challenges digital scholarship staff often face in finding stable careers, and the diversity of models for digital scholarship around the world.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/cis-featured-in-building-expertise-to-support-digital-scholarship-report</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppDigital ScholarshipResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Humanities2015-10-16T07:43:18ZBlog EntryInternet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India: Call for Sessions (Extended to Nov 22)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call
<b>With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). This first conference will focus on the theme of 'Studying Internet in India.' The word 'study' here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation. We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 22, 2015. Final sessions will be selected during December and announced by December 31, 2015. Below are the details about the conference series, as well instructions for proposing a session for the conference.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions document: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions/at_download/file">Download (PDF)</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Call for Sessions poster: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-irc-2016-studying-internet-in-india-call-for-sessions-poster/at_download/file">Download (PNG)</a></strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Researchers’ Conference</h2>
<p>The last decades have seen a growing entanglement of our daily lives with the internet, not only as modes of communication but also as shared socio-politico-cultural spaces, and as objects of study. The emergence of new artifacts, conditions, and sites of power/knowledge with the prevalence of digital modes of communication, consumptions, production, distribution, and appropriation have expectedly attracted academic and non-academic explorers across disciplines, professions, and interests. Researchers across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, and boundaries.</p>
<p>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is very excited to invite you to take part in the first of a series of annual conferences for researchers (academic or otherwise) studying internet in India. These conferences will be called the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), with the abbreviation reminding us of an early protocol for text-based communication over internet. The first edition will be organised around the theme of ‘studying internet in India.’ The word study here is a shorthand for a range of tasks, from documentation and theory-building, to measurement and representation.</p>
<p>This conference series is founded on the following interests:</p>
<ul><li>Creating discussion spaces for researchers studying internet in India and in other comparable regions.</li>
<li>Foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India.</li>
<li>Accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India.</li>
<li>Exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) forms of objects of power/knowledge.</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying Internet in India</h2>
<p>The inaugural conference will be held in Delhi (<strong>to be confirmed</strong>) on February 25-27, 2015. It will comprise of discussion and workshop sessions taking place during the first two days, and a writing sprint and a final round table taking place during the third day.</p>
<p>The conference will specifically focus on the following questions:</p>
<ul><li>How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?</li>
<li>How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?</li>
<li>What tools and methods are made available by arts, humanities, social science, and technical disciplines to study internet in India; how and where do they fail to meet the purpose; what revisions and fresh tool building are becoming necessary; and how should the usage of such tools and methods be taught?</li>
<li>Given the global techno-economic contours of the internet, and the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the same in India, how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?</li></ul>
<p> </p>
<h2>Sessions</h2>
<p>The conference will not be organised around papers but sessions. Each session will be one and half hour long. Potential participants may propose sessions that largely engage with one of the questions listed above.</p>
<p>Each proposed session must have at least two, and preferably three, co-leaders, who will drive the session, and prepare a session document after the conference. The proposed session can either involve a discussion, or a workshop.</p>
<p>In a discussion session, the co-leaders may present their works (not necessarily of the academic kind), or invite others to present their works, on a specific theme, which will be followed by a discussion, as structured by the co-leaders.</p>
<p>In a workshop session, the co-leaders will engage the participants to undertake individual or collaborative work in response to a series of questions, challenges, or provocations offered by the co-leaders at the beginning of the session. The proposed work may involve writing, searching, copying, building, etc., but <strong>not</strong> speaking.</p>
<p>Both the kinds of sessions are open to presentations and collaborations in the textual format or in other formats, including but not limited to code-based works and multimedia installations.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Writing Sprint</h2>
<p>At the writing sprint, on the third day morning, all the participants will collaboratively put together the first draft of a handbook on tools and methods of studying Internet in India. It will be created as an online, open access, multilingual, and editable (wiki-like) book, and will be meant for extensive usage and augmentation by students, researchers, and others.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Final Round Table</h2>
<p>This will take place after the lunch on the third day to wrap-up the conversations (and propose new initiatives, hopefully) emerging during the previous days of the conference, to make plans for follow-up works (including the first IRC Reader), and to speculate about the shape of the next year’s conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>IRC Reader</h2>
<p>The IRC Reader will be produced as documentation of the conversations and activities at the conference. The Reader, obviously, will have the same theme as the conference, and will largely comprise of the session documentation (not necessarily textual) prepared by the co-leaders of the session concerned. Once all the session documentation is shared by the co-leaders and is temporarily published online, all the participants will be invited to share their comments, which will all be part of the final Reader of the conference.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Proposing a Session</h2>
<p>To propose a session, each team of two/three co-leaders will have to submit the following documents:</p>
<ul><li>The name of the session: It should be created as a <strong>hashtag</strong>, as in #BlackLivesMatter, or #RefugeesWelcome.</li>
<li>A plan of the proposed session that should clarify its context, the key questions/challenges/provocations for the session, and how they connect to any one of the four questions listed above. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>If it is a discussion session: Mention what will be presented at the session, and who will present it. Share the abstracts of the papers to be presented (if any). Each abstract should not be longer than 300 words.</li>
<li>If it is a workshop session: Mention what you expect the participants to do during the session, and how the co-leaders will support them through the work. Write no more than one page.</li>
<li>Three readings, or objects, or software that you expect the participants to know about before taking part in the session.</li>
<li>CVs of all the co-leaders of the session.</li></ul>
<p>We understand that finding co-leaders for a session you have in mind might be difficult in certain cases. One possible way for you to find co-leaders is by sharing your session idea on the <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers" target="_blank">researchers@cis-india.org</a> mailing list. Alternatively, you may keep an eye on the list to see what potential topics are being discussed. If you are facing any difficulty subscribing to the mailing list, please write to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p>All session proposals must be submitted by <strong>Sunday, November 22</strong> (extended), 2015, via email sent to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Selection of Sessions</h2>
<p>All proposed sessions, along with related documents, will be published online by <strong>November 30</strong>. All co-leaders of proposed sessions will be invited to vote for 8 sessions before <strong>December 15</strong>. The sessions with maximum votes will be selected for the conference, and the list of such sessions will be published on <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Venue, Accommodation, and Travel</h2>
<p>The conference is most likely to take place in Delhi on <strong>February 25-27, 2016</strong>. The place, dates, and venue will be confirmed by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p>The conference organiser(s) will cover all costs related to accommodation and hospitality during the conference.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, we are not sure if we will be able to pay for travel expenses of the participants. We will confirm this by <strong>December 31</strong>, 2015.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Researcher's ConferenceFeaturedLearningIRC16Researchers at Work2015-11-15T07:48:17ZBlog Entry Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015
<b>We are very excited to be contribute to a join submission with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises." Please go to the submission page and support our project. The text of the proposal is available below. It was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and I. The 'Where's My Data' banner is created by Nisha using icons from the Noun Project.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Please support our project by visiting and 'applauding' it on the Knight News Challenge website: <a href="https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data">https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/data/entries/where-s-my-data</a>. You will have to log in to the website though, apologies for that.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Where's My Data? Search, Demand, and Collect Data</h2>
<h3>In one sentence, describe your idea as simply as possible.</h3>
<p>An application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_WheresMyData.png/image_preview" alt="KNC 2015 - Where's My Data" class="image-inline image-inline" title="KNC 2015 - Where's My Data" /></p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Full Description</h3>
<p>The proposed application aims to solve two key problems in accessing reliable data faced by citizens, journalists, and researchers. The first problem is knowing where a required data set can be found, and the second problem is collecting the required data set if it does not exist in the first place.</p>
<p>Many individual initiatives have been developed to collect specific data. For example, Powercuts (http://powercuts.in/) was a Ushahidi installation to crowd-source data using Twitter, Kiirti (http://www.kiirti.org/) was used to map complaints about auto drivers, IChangeMyCity (http://www.ichangemycity.com/) is a platform that collects general complaints from around Bangalore. However, these apps were either short lived because they could not sustain their one premise or they do not give insight into what people want to know and what data is important to them. Also, they often did not open up this data to be used by others, beyond visualisations offered on the sites.</p>
<p>Citizens have many questions regarding their urban surroundings - how much water is coming to the neighbourhood daily, where are the waste pick up trucks, what is the status of a road repairing process, etc, the answers require data that either is difficult to get or doesn't answer their query in the way they want. Journalists and researchers are also interested in collecting and analysing these same data sets. A one off platform for one issue won't properly represent the demand for information in modern day (data starved) India.</p>
<p>For example, a local residents’ group wanted to impress on their elected rep the seriousness of the incidence of a disease, as the local government was not taking concrete steps to manage the emerging epidemic. In the absence of official data on suspected cases of illness, this application could help them to reach out through e-mails and social media networks to do a quick survey on how many residents or their family members have got affected.</p>
<p>The application will not only make it easier to undertake such crowd-sourcing efforts, but also to share the data back and make it open for usage by others, including journalists and researchers.</p>
<p>We are already building an Urban Open Data Platform for Bengaluru, India. The application will allow searching this portal and any other such portal, especially if any is developed by the municipality. It will also pipe the crowd-sourced data to this Urban Open Data Platform.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_CitizenMatters.jpg/image_preview" alt="KNC 2015 - Citizen Matters" class="image-inline image-inline" title="KNC 2015 - Citizen Matters" /></p>
<p> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_OpenBangalore.png/image_preview" alt="KNC 2015 - Open Bangalore" class="image-inline" title="KNC 2015 - Open Bangalore" /></p>
<p>This tool will reduce duplication of data gathering, gives data a longer shelf life and acts as a source of public data that feeds into a city-wide urban Open Data Portal under development by a consortium that we are part of.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>How will the Application Work?</h3>
<ol><li>The application will allow the user to search for data across the data catalogues connected to the application.</li>
<li>If the data is not found, the user can post details about the required data, which other users in her/his networks can see and comment on. They can either point the person towards an existing data set, or support the need to collect the data being demanded.</li>
<li>When the user finds out that the data set s/he needs does not exist, the application will allow her/him to start a crowd-sourcing exercise, using various channels such as e-mails, social media posts, web-based questionnaires, etc.</li>
<li>For each of these channels, a separate plug-in will be developed so as to open up the software development process. For this project, we will focus on developing plug-ins for two channels: 1) questionnaires integrated with the <a href="http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/">Citizen Matters</a> website, and 2) use tweets to collect replies using a unique hashtag.</li>
<li>User can share the crowd-sourcing request within her/his own social networks, or use one of the groups (say, the Citizen Matters group focusing on local journalism, or the <a href="http://datameet.org/">DataMeet</a> group focusing on open data enthusiasts in the city) to share their calls for data collection.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<h3>Briefly Describe the Need that You're Trying to Address</h3>
<p>A common cry in Indian cities is the lack of datasets required to understand issues, either at local or at national scales. This tool will be the place to voice demands, ask others about potential sources, or an easy way to create data sourcing activities.This will enable journalists, advocacy organisations, and researchers to search for data and help others to find the data they are looking for. It also records demands for non-existing data and helps take initiatives to collect such data.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>What Progress have You Made so Far?</h3>
<p>The team is already working on an Urban Open Data Platform, that will host public data, and a data catalog. We have already executed a few crowd-sourcing projects, and helped develop tools for journalists and researchers interested in civic issues.A data source search tool has been in development in the form of Open Data JSON <<a href="https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json">https://github.com/datameet/opendata.json</a>>. A Bangalore focused data catalog has been in use for awhile as well and provides a base of data to use for people’s search <<a href="http://openbangalore.org">http://openbangalore.org</a>>.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>What would be a Successful Outcome for Your Project?</h3>
<p>Success for this project means having a better understanding of what information is needed most by people and what data is required. We will gain detailed evidence regarding what kind of data people want. This entails a collection of questions, who is asking and from where, and what data gaps exist. The number of crowdsourcing projects initiated shows the intensity of the need, and how comfortable citizens are asking for data and proactively starting a data collection project.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Please List your Team Members and their Relevant Experience/Skills</h3>
<p>Meera K, Oorvani Foundation, a media group who will provide editorial support to curate data, dissemination of data or queries, and audience reach. Nisha Thompson and Thejesh GN, from DataMeet, open data community, who will provide the technology and community aspects of the tool. Sumandro Chattapadhyay of the Centre for Internet and Society, will help planning the project and linking the effort with other Indian and global initiatives in open data and development.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroCityOpen DataPracticeCrowdsourcingResearchers at Work2015-10-05T15:00:16ZBlog EntrySeptember 2015 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2015-bulletin
<b></b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are happy to share with you the ninth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (September 2015). It has been a significant month for public debates on the digital future of governance, citizenship, and economy in India, led by conversations around the draft National Encryption Policy, the Aadhaar number as a basis for provision of welfare services, the investigation of Google for potential abuse of market dominance by the Competition Commission of India, and the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions released by the Indian Patents Office. We were busy engaging with these issues, and more.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director</p>
<blockquote><b><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-call">Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 - Studying Internet in India</a></b><br /> With great excitement, we are announcing the beginning of an annual conference series titled Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC), the first edition of which is to take place in Delhi during February 25-27, 2016 (yet to be confirmed). We invite you to propose sessions for the conference by Sunday, November 15, 2015.</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<hr />
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Highlights</h2>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>CIS sent an <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015">Open Letter</a> to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his US visit, requesting him to urge USA to ratify the Marrakesh Treaty.</li>
<li>During the month, NVDA team organized training programmes for the visually impaired at <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/espeak-training-in-hindi-language-1">Kullu</a>, <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-5-day-tot-for-training-in-use-of-espeak-kannada-with-nvda">Bangalore</a> and <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-the-training-in-the-use-of-espeak-hindi-with-nvda">Ranchi</a>.</li>
<li>Nehaa Chaudhari in a <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pervasive-technologies-working-document-series-research-questions-and-a-literature-review-on-actor-network-theory">blog post</a> laid out a series of research questions, potentially seeking to apply actor-network theory as a research methodology.</li>
<li>Recently, the Indian Patents Office released the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions (“2015 Guidelines/ Guidelines”) in an attempt to clarify examination of software related patents in India. Anubha Sinha <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-the-guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions-cris">analysed the 2015 Guidelines</a>. Read on to understand how the new guidelines will potentially lead to an increase in software patenting activity by expanding the scope of patentable subject matter – in negation of the legislative intent of section 3(k) of the Indian Patents Act, 1970.</li>
<li>As a part of its content donation initiative, <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-brings-nadustunna-charithra-magazine-under-by-cc-by-sa-licence">CIS has brought Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence</a>. CIS-A2K has received 74 issues as of now from the Telugu Jaati foundation.</li>
<li>Sunil Abraham’s article titled Hits and Misses with the Draft Encryption Policy was published in <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-26-09-2015-sunil-abraham-hits-and-misses-with-draft-encryption-policy">The Wire</a> on September 26, 2015.</li>
<li>Vidushi Marda in a blog post titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-flow-in-unique-identification-scheme-of-india">Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India</a> analysed the data flow within the UID scheme and highlighted the vulnerabilities at each stage.</li>
<li>Vanya Rakesh in a blog post titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/human-dna-profiling-bill-2012-vs-2015">Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill</a> has analysed the Human DNA Profiling Bill introduced in 2012 with the provisions of the 2015 Bill.</li>
<li>CIS sought information from ICANN on their revenue streams by sending them a second request under their Documentary Information Disclosure Policy. This request and their response have been <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/didp-request-12-revenues">described in a blog post</a> by Aditya Garg.</li>
<li>CIS has <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015">submitted a joint proposal</a> with DataMeet and Oorvani for the Knight News Challenge 2015. We are proposing the development of "an application for users to search for locally-relevant data, discuss missing data, demand data, explore and respond to data demands by others, and start data crowd-sourcing exercises."</li>
<li>CIS made its submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations to ICANN's CCWG-Accountability.</li>
<li>Pranesh Prakash, on behalf of CIS, <a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov">submitted comments</a> to the Department of Telecom Panel’s report on net neutrality via MyGov. Prakash states that the report displays a far better understanding of the underlying issues than the TRAI consultation paper did, and is overall a good effort at balancing the different sides.</li>
<li>Shyam Ponappa’s monthly column titled More on Those Dropped Calls was <a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-september-3-2015-shyam-ponappa-more-on-those-dropped-calls">published by Business Standard</a>.</li>
</ul>
</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">NVDA and eSpeak</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Monthly Updates</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li>September 2015 Report (Suman Dogra; September 30, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Reports</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-the-training-in-the-use-of-espeak-hindi-with-nvda">Training in the use of eSpeak Hindi with NVDA</a> (Organized by CIS and Lakshay for the Differently Abled; September 29 – 30, 2015; Ranchi). The event was conducted online by Dr. Homiyar over skype, with local support from Mritunjay Kumar and Zainab.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-5-day-tot-for-training-in-use-of-espeak-kannada-with-nvda">5 day TOT for Training in Use of eSpeak Kannada with NVDA</a> (Organized by CIS, Mithra Jyoti, Enable India and NFB, Bangalore; September 21 – 25, 2015; Bangalore).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/espeak-training-in-hindi-language-1">eSpeak Training in Hindi Language</a> (Organized by CIS and National Association for the Blind; Kullu; September 3 – 4, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/training-in-espeak-marathi">Training in eSpeak Marathi</a> (Organized by CIS; Atmadepam Society; August 22 – 23, 2015). <i>The report was published in the month of September.</i></li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Pervasive Technologies</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/pervasive-technologies-working-document-series-research-questions-and-a-literature-review-on-actor-network-theory">Pervasive Technologies: Working Document Series - Research Questions and a Literature Review on the Actor-Network Theory</a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; September 5, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/faq-cis-proposal-for-compulsory-licensing-of-critical-mobile-technologies">FAQ: CIS Proposal for Compulsory Licensing of Critical Mobile Technologies</a> (Rohini Lakshané; September 25, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Other (Copyright and Patent)</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-on-the-guidelines-for-examination-of-computer-related-inventions-cris">Comments on the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions</a> (CRIs) (Anubha Sinha; September 21, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-letter-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-during-your-visit-to-the-united-states-of-america-in-september-2015">Open Letter to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on His Visit to the United States of America in September 2015</a> (Pranesh Prakash and Nehaa Chaudhari; September 23, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li>National Conference: WTO, FTAs and Investment Treaties: Implications for development policy space (Organized by Focus on the Global South, Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Madhyam, MSF Access Campaign, National Working Group on Patent Laws and WTO (NWGPL), Public Services International (PSI) – South Asia, South Solidarity Initiative – ActionAid, Third Word Network (TWN), and Forum against FTAs; September 22 – 23, 2015; Institute for Studies in Industrial Development, New Delhi). Nehaa Chaudhari made a presentation on <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/copyright-access-to-knowledge-in-fta.pdf">Copyright: Access to Knowledge in Free Trade Agreements?</a></li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/ipex-2015">IPEX 2015</a> (Organized by Confederation of Indian Industry, APTDC and TDPC; September 25 - 26, 2015; Chennai). Rohini Lakshané attended the event. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/live-law-apoorva-mandhani-september-23-2015-open-letter-from-cis-to-pm-modi-on-intellectual-property-rights-issues-on-his-visit-to-us">Open letter from CIS to PM Modi on Intellectual Property Rights issues on his Visit to US</a> (Apoorva Mandhani; LiveLaw; September 23, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-brings-nadustunna-charithra-magazine-under-by-cc-by-sa-licence">CIS brings Nadustunna Charithra magazine under CC BY SA licence</a> (Tanveer Hasan; September 2, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/education-okfn-subhashish-panigrahi-september-25-2015-ocr-and-oer-update">OCR and OER – update</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; Open Education Working Group; September 25, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikimedia-foundation-blog-as-odia-wikipedia-turns-13-what-happens-next">As Odia Wikipedia turns 13, what happens next?</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015). This was originally <a href="https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/08/21/odia-wikipedia-celebrates-13/">published on the Wikimedia Blog</a> on August 21. The post was shared on Wikipedia's official <a href="https://www.facebook.com/wikipedia/posts/10153481749053346">Facebook page</a>, and on Twitter handles [<a href="https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/635838494187913216">1</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/635838494200438784">2</a>].</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/googles-optical-character-recognition-software-now-works-with-all-south-asian-languages">Google's Optical Character Recognition Software Now Works with All South Asian Languages</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 26, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/open-source-september-3-2015-subhashish-panigrahi-wikimedia-contributor-shares-his-linux-story">Wikimedia contributor shares his Linux story</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; September 27, 2015). <i>This article is part of a series called </i><a href="https://opensource.com/tags/my-linux-story"><i>My Linux Story</i></a><i>. To participate and share your Linux story, contact us at: </i><a href="mailto:open@opensource.com"><i>open@opensource.com</i></a><i>. Read the original published by </i><a href="https://opensource.com/life/15/9/my-linux-story-subhashish-panigrahi"><i>Opensource.com</i></a><i> on September 3, 2015.</i></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Events Co-organized</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/events/rare-telugu-religious-and-historical-work-preserved-at-annamacharya-library-to-come-on-wikisource">Annamaya Library edit-a-thon</a> (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada).</li>
<li><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_workshop_on_digitization_and_archiving,_Jadavpur_University">International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving</a> (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 – 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS gave its inputs to the following:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/odisha-sun-times-september-28-2015-ruby-nanda-unable-to-read-odia-on-your-android-device">Unable to read Odia on your android device? Don’t fret!</a> (Ruby Nanda; Odisha Sun Times; September 28, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness">Openness</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The advent of the Internet has radically redefined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Open Data</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li>As one of the general stewards of the process, CIS was invited to take part in the final drafting meeting of the International Open Data Charter held before Con Datos 2015 in Santiago, Chile, but we could not take part in it. Apart from organising two public consultations on the draft Charter in Bengaluru and Delhi, we also submitted our <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/international-open-data-charter-comments-by-cis">detailed comments</a> on the document. The final version of the <a href="http://opendatacharter.net/" target="_blank">Charter document has been launched</a> at the United Nation General Assembly meeting, on September 27.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Free Software</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/software-freedom-pledge-2015">Software Freedom Pledge</a> (Pranesh Prakash; September 25, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Privacy</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Article</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-26-09-2015-sunil-abraham-hits-and-misses-with-draft-encryption-policy">Hits and Misses With the Draft Encryption Policy</a> (Sunil Abraham; The Wire; September 26, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-flow-in-unique-identification-scheme-of-india">Data Flow in the Unique Identification Scheme of India</a> (Vidushi Marda; September 3, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/human-dna-profiling-bill-2012-vs-2015">Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 v/s 2015 Bill</a> (Vanya Rakesh; September 6, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/open-governance-and-privacy-in-a-post-snowden-world-webinar">Open Governance and Privacy in a Post-Snowden World: Webinar</a> (Vanya Rakesh; September 26, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-changing-landscape-of-ict-governance-and-practice-convergence-and-big-data">The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data</a> (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 – 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the <a href="http://www.cprsouth.org/2015/02/call-for-applications-2015-young-scholar-awards/">Young Scholar Award 2015</a> to attend the <i>Young Scholar Workshop</i> followed by main <a href="http://www.cprsouth.org/"><i>CPRSouth2015 conference</i> (Communication Policy Research South) conference</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-submission-on-ccwg-accountability-2nd-draft-proposal-on-work-stream-1-recommendations">CIS Submission on CCWG-Accountability 2nd Draft Proposal on Work Stream 1 Recommendations</a> (Pranesh Prakash; September 13, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/didp-request-11-netmundial-principles">DIDP Request #11: NETmundial Principles</a> (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/didp-request-12-revenues">DIDP Request #12: Revenues</a> (Aditya Garg; September 14, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/peering-behind-the-veil-of-icann2019s-didp">Peering behind the veil of ICANN’s DIDP</a> (Padmini Baruah; September 21, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/asian-regional-consultation-on-the-wsis-10-review">Asian Regional Consultation on the WSIS+10 Review</a> (Organized by The Internet Democracy Project, Bytes for All, APNIC, the Association for Progressive Communications, ISOC, Global Partners Digital and ICT Watch; September 3 – 5, 2015). Jyoti Panday attended the event.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">IGF</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The tenth annual IGF meeting will be held in João Pessoa, Brazil, on November 10 - 13, 2015. IGF's MAG has decided to retain the title “Evolution of Internet Governance: Empowering Sustainable Development” as the overarching theme. Sunil Abraham will be a panelist for the following workshops:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/understanding-and-mitigating-online-hate-speech-and-youth-radicalisation">Understanding and Mitigating Online Hate Speech and Youth Radicalisation</a> (Organized by Council of Europe, Oxford University, OHCHR, Google and ISOC; November 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/transnational-due-process-a-case-study-in-multi-stakeholder-cooperation">Transnational Due Process: A Case Study in Multi-stakeholder Cooperation</a> (Organized by the United Nations; November 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber Security</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><b> </b><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/bangalore-chapter-meet-of-dsci-september-26-2015">Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI</a> (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham gave a talk at this event.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Miscellaneous</h3>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sustainable-smart-cities-india-conference-2015-bangalore">Sustainable Smart Cities India Conference 2015, Bangalore</a> (Vanya Rakesh; September 21, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a></h2>
<p>CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/comments-on-dot-panel-report-via-mygov">Comments on the DoT Panel Report via MyGov</a> (Pranesh Prakash; September 26, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Op-ed</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-september-3-2015-shyam-ponappa-more-on-those-dropped-calls">More on those Dropped Calls</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; September 2, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; September 3, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work</a></h2>
<p>The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/wheres-my-data-submission-for-knight-news-challenge-2015">Where's My Data? Submission for Knight News Challenge 2015</a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; September 30, 2015). <i>The text of the proposal was prepared by Nisha Thompson of DataMeet, Meera K of Oorvani, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</i></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination">The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination</a> (Divij Joshi; September 9, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar">The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar</a> (Sailen Routray; September 21, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-september-1-2015-parshathy-nath-does-this-click-with-you">Does this click with you?</a> (Parshathy J. Nath; The Hindu; September 1, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-september-3-2015-surabhi-agarwal-govt-tie-up-with-global-police-interpol-to-fight-child-pornography">Government may tieup with global police, Interpol to fight child pornography</a> (Surabhi Agarwal; September 3, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-september-3-2015-harjeet-inder-singh-sahi-hiding-behind-rules-on-naming-sites-it-banned-govt-reveals-fears">Hiding behind rules on naming sites it banned, govt reveals fears</a> (Harjeet Inder Singh Sahi; September 3, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-nikhil-varma-september-9-2015-outrage-before-sharing">Outrage before sharing</a> (Nikhil Verma; The Hindu; September 9, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-week-september-20-2015-shweta-t-nanda-faking-a-stand">Faking a stand</a> (Shweta T. Nanda; The Week; September 20, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/outlook-september-21-2015-arindam-mukherjee-some-key-words-are-missing">Some Key Words Are Missing</a> (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; September 21, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-september-22-2015-atul-kabra-open-sesame">Open sesame</a> (The Hindu; September 22, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-moulishree-srivastava-september-22-2015-india-encryption-policy-draft-faces-backlash">India encryption policy draft faces backlash</a> (Moulishree Srivastava; September 22, 2015)</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/first-post-naina-khedekar-september-23-2015-online-outcry-forces-government-to-withdraw-draft-encryption-policy">Online outcry forces government to withdraw draft encryption policy</a> (Naina Khedekar; First Post; September 23, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/dna-september-23-2015-amrita-madhukalya-encryption-policy-would-have-affected-emails-operating-systems-wifi">Encryption policy would have affected emails, operating systems, WiFi</a> (Amrita Madhukalya; DNA; September 23, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-september-23-2015-govt-presses-undo-button-on-draft-encryption-policy">Govt presses 'undo' button on draft encryption policy</a> (Business Standard; September 23; 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/today-september-24-2015-huge-outcry-forces-india-backtrack-social-media-data-proposal">Huge outcry forces India to backtrack on social media data proposal</a> (Today; September 24, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wsj-september-24-2015-newley-purnell-resty-woro-uniar-facebook-free-internet-access-program-in-developing-countries-provokes-backlash">Facebook’s Free Internet Access Program in Developing Countries Provokes Backlash</a> (Newley Purnell and Resty Woro Uniar; The Wall Street Journal; September 24, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-september-26-2015-ahead-of-hosting-modi-facebook-rebrands-internet-dot-org-as-free-basics">Ahead of hosting Modi, Facebook rebrands internet.org as Free Basics</a> (Business Standard; September 26, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/asian-age-september-27-2015-s-raghotham-and-mayukh-mukherjee-by-weakening-our-security-govt-is-putting-us-at-risk-of-espionage">‘By weakening our security, govt is putting us at risk of espionage’</a> (S. Raghotham and Mayukh Mukherjee; Asian Age; September 27, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/9ad9be9b09a49c7-9aa9be98199a9b69b0993-9ac9c79b69bf-9b89cd99f9c79b69a89c7-9ab9cd9b09bf-9939af9bc9be987-9ab9be987-99a9be9b29c1-9b99ac9c7">ভারতে পাঁচশোরও বেশি স্টেশনে ফ্রি ওয়াই-ফাই চালু হবে</a> (BBC; September 28, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-register-september-29-2015-kieren-mccurthy-do-you-agree-with-our-fee-hike">Do you agree with our fee hike? Press 1 to answer Yes; or 2 for Yes</a> (Kieren McCarthy; The Register; September 29, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-australian-amanda-hodge-september-29-2015-indian-pm-narendra-modi-digital-dream-gets-bad-reception">Indian PM Narendra Modi’s digital dream gets bad reception</a> (Amanda Hodge; September 29, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-maya-sharma-september-29-2015-what-bengaluru-thinks-of-big-tech-announcements-in-silicon-valley">What Bengaluru Thinks of the Big Tech Announcements in Silicon Valley</a> (Maya Sharma; NDTV; September 29, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>CIS - Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Facebook:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - Mailing List: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, at <a href="mailto:tanveer@cis-india.org">tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2015-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2015-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchers at Work2015-11-25T01:55:25ZPageThe Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar
<b>This post by Sailen Routray is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sailen is a researcher, writer, editor and translator who lives and works in Bhubaneswar. In this essay, he takes a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experiences of running and using internet cafes, experiences that lie at the interstices of (digital) objects and spaces, that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Cybercafé in Bhubaneswar: A Very Personal Introduction</h2>
<p>Till about ten years back perhaps, mustard-yellow coloured STD booths were as common a part of the Indian urban ecosystem as the common crow. But, as of the middle of 2015, the apparently ever ubiquitous STD booth seems to have gone the way of the sparrow, not yet extinct, but rare enough to evoke a visceral pang of nostalgia whenever one comes across a straggling specimen. But nostalgia is perhaps the wrong word to describe the emotion of ‘missing’ a STD booth in a city like Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p>The emotion that such urban change evokes in one is perhaps better described by the Odia word moha-maya (which is a combination of two words – maya and moha) which can connote everything from pity to longing to irrational attachment that causes pain. For this writer, more than the STD booth, what causes the most serious pang of moha-maya are the rapidly disappearing cybercafes, although the latter have not quite evaporated so completely as the STD booth.</p>
<p>This might not sound like too much of a loss for those on the right side of thirty. But to some of us (belonging to what Palash Krishna Mehrotra categorised as ‘The Butterfly Generation’ in the eponymous book) inching towards our first hiccups of an early middle age, this will be just another wry reminder of mortality; all things will fade away, including yours truly.</p>
<p>I do not remember the first day I accessed the internet. Perhaps the experience was not very startling; I like many others in my generation, I lie between the two Indian extremes to technological innovations – the blind fascination welded with incompetence that characterises so much of the generation of the midnight’s children, and the blind acceptance of all technological innovations by the generation born in the 1990s and 2000s. I, for example, also do not remember the first time I used a telephone. But I do remember for sure, that it was at our Sailashree Vihar home (in Bhubaneswar), to which we shifted in October 1992; because, one remembers for sure that one did not have a telephone connection before then.</p>
<p>Similarly, I remember where I accessed the internet for the first time, although the details of that first interface escape me now. It was a place called PAN-NET (or was it PLANNET? I can’t be sure; my memory, unfortunately, is like a bamboo sieve; it holds things, but not too much and not for very long) on the edge of the IMFA park in Shahid Nagar. Within a year of this, at least three cybercafés had opened shop near my house in Sailashree Vihar in the Chandrasekharpur area in North Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Semi-Public Internet</h2>
<p>Thus, my first experience of accessing the internet, like the majority of Indians of my generation perhaps, was at a ‘public’ place, a cybercafé. What happened as a result, was that the idea of accessing the internet, and not only its usage, as a communal exercise, got embedded deeply inside one’s mind; one saw the internet as a public utility and its usage as public/semi-public acts.</p>
<p>Sasikanta Bose (name changed), a student of philosophy, feels in a similar way. He learnt to use computers and the internet in cybercafés in the Jagamohan Nagar area, near his college in Bhubaneswar. As a regular writer for webzines earlier, he could not have functioned without these. Although now he accesses the internet through a cable connection and a laptop at home, he still uses cybercafés for taking printouts and for scanning. Over the last few years, Facebook is an additional reason for him to be on the World Wide Web, and he is more comfortable accessing Facebook at home, rather than in a cybercafé. But his primary reason for accessing the net remains to access webzines and reading material on the internet, and he feels this is done much more efficiently at a cybercafé since there is an immediate monetary pressure to get the most returns on the money that one is spending. The cybercafé that he uses the most is EXCEL in Sailashree Vihar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Case of ‘EXCEL’</h2>
<p>EXCEL is a cybercafé established in the year 2001. Mr. Susant Kumar Behera and Mr. Sukant Kumar Behera (two brothers) are the proprietors. It is located on the ground floor of a house in the sixth phase of Sailashree Vihar. It must be mentioned here in passing that Sailashree Vihar is a strange new locality in Bhubaneswar initially planned and constructed by the Odisha State Housing Board; strange, like a lot of other things that came into being in the 1980s. It has only two ‘phases’, phase six and phase seven; I do not think even the Housing Board knows where the other five phases have meandered off to.</p>
<p>EXCEL is located on a service road parallel to the main arterial road of Sailashree Vihar that divides the sixth and the seventh phases. When Excel opened, it was opened primarily as a communication center with the cybercafé and the STD-PCO booth as the mainstays of the family concern. The STD booth reached its peak in 2004 and was almost dead by 2006-2007; the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone effectively killed the PCO business. A coin-operated system was operational till very recently; it was discontinued in 2013. With the death of the PCO booth, EXCEL moved into the mobile voucher business for pre-paid mobiles; but with only two percent commission being offered by most service providers, this is a high-turnover but low-profit business for the shop, and has not been able to replace the revenues and profits of the PCO business.</p>
<p>Mr. Susant Behera (Bunu bhai to most of his customers and to me as well; and he also happens to be a close friend of one my closest schoolmate’s family friend), says that when they started the cybercafé business, they were very anxious to be a ‘different’ kind of player. Most cybercafés in Bhubaneswar, then offered primarily the illicit joys of pornography as their primary attraction. This was reflected in the very design of the cybercafés; most cybercafés were designed in the form of small cabins with often curtains on their small doors, and the computer screens faced the wall. Therefore, when EXCEL opened shop, I remember it being a refreshingly new kind of cybercafé. All the monitors were placed on reverse ‘U’ shaped tables with the backs of the monitors facing the wall, and the monitor screens facing out towards everyone; there was thus, no privacy. But this completely removed the sleaze that was then associated with cybercafés and the internet, and made the cybercafé popular with new social groups using the internet, such as single young women. EXCEL was and still remains popular with young women as a node for accessing the internet.</p>
<p>Now EXCEL is a very different kind of space from the time I remember it from my college days (1999-2002). It was, even then, popular with the young. But now it is much more of a safe hang-out place for college going young adults and those who have newly joined the work force, with fast moving snacks items such as puffs (called ‘patties’ in Bhubaneswar) and rolls, and ice cream being sold at the shop. It is much more of tuck shop now, with national and international brands of packaged food such as Haldiram and Nestle fighting for rack space. This transformation started in 2003 itself, two years into the opening the business; but whereas earlier EXCEL was primarily a PCO booth and cybercafé where one could get something to eat, it is primary a tuck shop these days. The shop also functions as a travel agent now, and books all kinds of bus, train and flight tickets.</p>
<p>The cybercafé still remains important for this family business and contributes around 20% of its total profits; but this is down from an all-time high of 50-60% in 2006-07 and from 30% when the business started in 2001. In the last ten years, the capacity of the café has come down by ten computers, and now it operates with only six systems; till 2010, the café had 20 systems, and by 2012, the number had decreased to 14. A large part of the revenue is now from the ancillary services provided by the cybercafé, such as scanning and printing; data does not drive the business any longer. Even the six systems now operational in EXCEL stay unused for some parts of the day; it operates at full capacity only in the evenings. During the day, often half of the systems lie idle and unused. But the cybercafé in EXCEL has other roles in the family business; it often provides an entry into other services such as ticketing that are offered; often a customer who steps into the shop to take printouts in the cybercafé, ends up buying a recharge voucher for her pre-paid mobile connection, or picks up a family pack of ice-cream for her home.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Imagining a World without Cybercafés</h2>
<p>Ajay Kumar Puhan (28, from Jajpur district), who works at EXCEL, feels that cybercafés in their present form will survive only for another three to four years. After that period of time they just might survive as glorified ‘printout and scanning’ cafes. He has worked for around nine years at Excel, across the last ten years, since he was 18 years old. Now he is simultaneously studying and is in the final stages of finishing his diploma in mechanical engineering. According to him, the customer profile has drastically changed over the last ten years; only those who cannot and/or do not access the internet through mobile devices come to the cybercafé for their browsing needs. Students also drive demand for the café with their needs for filling up forms. He feels that the situation is very similar in his village as well, with almost everyone who can afford a smart phone has one with an internet pack.</p>
<p>This decline in the cybercafé component of the family business in EXCEL is reflective of a larger churning in the business. Ten years back there were around ten cybercafés in the greater Sailashree Vihar area. Now only three survive, of which EXCEL is one. Elsewhere in Bhubaneswar, the story is a similar one; often cybercafés have added additional services such as photocopiers or have transformed into gaming stations to survive as businesses. This change has been driven by fundamental transformations in the ways in which the internet is accessed in the country and in the city. Mobile phones have become the dominant device for accessing the internet in Bhubaneswar (and in India), and this has had significant effects on cybercafés in the city. The gentrification of many parts of the city and the consequently increasing rents for commercial property, and increases in wages of attendants at the cafes, are the other reasons why cybercafés are increasingly going the way of PCO-STD booths in the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Now, the Semi-Private Internet</h2>
<p>Rahul (name changed) uses EXCEL very infrequently. But when he was a student in a big engineering college four years back, he used to sometimes go to the bunch of cyber cafes dotting the area surrounding his college in South-west Bhubaneswar. His visits were infrequent; he would go to a cyber café for some project related work, to quickly check his Facebook account, or to get his fix of porn. Even when internet was available at home, the cybercafés offered a sense of freedom because of the anonymity of the interface.</p>
<p>There was very little regulation of the cybercafés a few years back, and one could get a cabin and access the net without any identity proof. One could have anonymous chats, browse for pornography and watch it in the semi-privacy of a cubicle, or get one’s dose of social networking sites (sometimes registered in a fake name) without the usual fears when one does these from one’s private connecting devices.</p>
<p>But his accessing the internet through the cybercafés was more often than not a very hesitant activity. Quite a few times there would be people making out in the next cabin; more often than not, these would be seniors or batch-mates from his college. In those days cybercafés were infamous for being places where girls and boys, often college students, with no other place to hang out in, would indulge in some heavy duty necking and petting. The owners of the cafes were aware of what was happening. But they would not interfere, as that would mean turning away customers. Raul did not have a problem with people making out in a cabin that shared the same partition as his cubicle; but, he would feel odd and get a nagging feeling as if he was intruding.</p>
<p>For Rahul. The semi-publicity of the cyber-café was manifested by its obverse – semi-privacy. He sometimes misses the hothouse atmosphere of the cybercafés of yore, when you could slice the sexual charge in their atmosphere with a scythe, and reap private moments in ‘public’ places. He has not searched for a cybercafé with any urgency in a long time, because he does not need them for his project work; and his smart phone answers his social networking needs. But he feels a certain moha-maya for the semi-privacies of the internet that existed outside the fully private smartphone and the laptop.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Moha in sankrit means everything from infatuation, delusion, lack of discrimination, ignorance and falling into error, that are captured in the Odia word as well. The word maya also captures all these meanings in both English and Odia. And moha is a vice, for both Shankara and Buddha. It is a vice for Odia saints such as Achyutananda Das and Arakkhita Das as well, spanning the whole pre-modern experience from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Moha-maya is a feeling, a condition that one has to overcome to arrive at true knowledge – knowledge that simultaneously provides insights into the self and the world. Hence, to be free from moha-maya one needs to stay in the moment; any moha-maya for the past therefore, is supposed to be spiritually debilitating. Therefore, the Odia relationship with the past is a complicated one. One has to honour tradition; yet, one has to be free of moha-maya of the particular, peculiar, material manifestations of the tradition, of the past. This applies as much to dead relatives, as to disappearing socio-technological forms such as the STD booth and the cyber-cafes.</p>
<p>With the attack on the cybercafé continuing in all these various fronts, it is highly unlikely that it will survive into the third decade of the twenty-first century. But like other attacks on communally shared, semi-public/semi-private social spaces, these attacks of ‘inevitable’ forces of technology and market need to be resisted. But there are no easy answers as to how to go about doing it. As for me, even though I have a laptop and a couple of data cards (one personal, and the other official) through which I access the internet, even when I do not have the need to scan or print, I pay a routine weekly visit to the neighbourhood cybercafé. Token gesture, I know; but when one is fighting forces that are infinitely larger than oneself, one perhaps has to resort to all kinds instruments of resistance, including the token, ‘weapons of the weak’. One cannot eliminate death, but one can definitely prolong life. Especially, when the final moha-maya is for life itself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar</a>
</p>
No publisherSailen RoutrayCityInternet StudiesRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-21T05:36:18ZBlog EntryThe Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination
<b>This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law
School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].</p>
<p>The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial <em>obiter</em> (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Internet and the Role of the Courts</h2>
<p>The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].</p>
<p>The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the <em>de facto</em> policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].</p>
<p>The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no <em>a priori</em>, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.</p>
<p>Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.</p>
<p>As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in <em>WWE v Reshma</em> [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions</h2>
<p>The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].</p>
<p>Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of <em>Yahoo v Akash Arora</em> first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as <em>“a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.”</em> The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: <em>“The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.”</em> In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the <em>Rediff</em> case, where the Bombay High Court opined that <em>“Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell”</em> [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Private Actors and Public Interest</h2>
<p>The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].</p>
<p>In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the <em>inability</em> of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:</p>
<blockquote>The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.</blockquote>
<p>Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.</p>
<p>In <em>Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd</em> [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.</p>
<p>Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In <em>RK Productions</em> [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as <em>“vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.”</em> Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that <em>“Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.”</em> In <em>Myspace</em>, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.</p>
<p>An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.</p>
<p>However, the recent case of <em>Shreya Singhal v Union of India</em> [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet</h2>
<p>In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that <em>“the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”</em>, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].</p>
<p>Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.</p>
<p>For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.</p>
<p>There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at <a href="http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html">http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at <a>http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Source: <a href="http://manupatra.com/">http://manupatra.com/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] See: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/">http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/</a>; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.</p>
<p>[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf">https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).</p>
<p>[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.</p>
<p>[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).</p>
<p>[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).</p>
<p>[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).</p>
<p>[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.</p>
<p>[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).</p>
<p>[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.</p>
<p>[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.</p>
<p>[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”</p>
<p>[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.</p>
<p>[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.</p>
<p>[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.</p>
<p>[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)</p>
<p>[22] Id.</p>
<p>[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).</p>
<p>[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)</p>
<p>[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.</p>
<p>[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).</p>
<p>[27] Id.</p>
<p>[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham</a>; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).</p>
<p>[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.</p>
<p>[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)</p>
<p>[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).</p>
<p>[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability</a>.</p>
<p>[33] See: <a href="http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/">http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/</a>.</p>
<p>[34] See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination</a>.</p>
<p>[35] See: <a href="https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/">https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination</a>
</p>
No publisherDivij JoshiInternet StudiesInternet LawJudiciaryRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-09T05:26:50ZBlog EntryAugust 2015 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2015-bulletin
<b></b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We are happy to share with you the eighth issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (August 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h2 style="text-align: justify;">Highlights</h2>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Researchers at Work programme has published a book titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader"><em>Digital Activism in Asia Reader</em></a> exploring in detail digital activism in Asia. The Reader was edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.</li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li>The <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review">pre-publication drafts of two sections</a> written by Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the third volume (2000-2010) of the <em>Asia Internet History</em> series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon have been posted for open-review process.</li>
<li>As part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series, RAW published blog entries on <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet">Governing Speech on the Internet</a> and <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling">Mock-Calling - Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual</a>. </li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li style="text-align: justify;">NVDA team <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/training-in-e-speak-hindi">conducted a workshop</a> at Jeevan Jyoti School for the Blind, Varanasi from August 26 to 28, 2015. Eighty five students and 13 teachers took part in the training programme. NVDA team had conducted another <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-in-espeak-marathi">workshop</a> earlier in Nashik. The workshop was conducted in June. A batch of 17 Special Educators and teachers of the blind attended the workshop.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Maggie Huang, Arpita Sengupta and Paavni Anand as part of the Pervasive Technologies project <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comparative-transparency-review-of-collective-management-organisations-in-india-uk-usa"> co-authored a research paper </a> that seeks to compare the publicly available information on the websites of music collective management organizations ("CMOs") operating within India, the United States, and the United Kingdom.</li>
<li style="text-align: left;">
Amulya Purushothama, Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga in a blog entry have delved into the question of
what the mandate of the <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/national-ipr-policy-series-what-have-sectoral-innovation-councils-been-doing-on-ipr">Sectoral Innovation Council</a> is, what its activities are, and what vision for IPR development in India has it put forth. An RTI Application has been filed by CIS to attain information on these issues.</li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li style="text-align: justify;"> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mhrd-ipr-chair-series-introduction">In a blog post</a>, Amulya Purushothama announced our new MHRD IPR Chair Series and has charted the sequence of events, starting from the establishment of MHRD IPR Chairs, to discussions surrounding their purpose and functioning, to concerns surrounding the lack of information about the IPR Chairs, the first round of RTIs that CIS had filed in regard to this and the responses it solicited. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"> Subhashish Panigrahi <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kisorachandrananachampu-on-odia-wikisource">interviewed Prateek Pattanaik</a>. Prateek has not just digitized as many as 54 Odia-language poetry dating early 18th century but has also annotated, both poetic and prosaic translation in his blogs "Sri Jagannatha" and "Utkal Sangeet". He has also published a complete book "Kisora chandranana champu" on Odia Wikisource. A recent entrant into the Odia Wikimedia community, Prateek is also the youngest Odia Wikimedian.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Rohan George and Elonnai Hickok in a blog post <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/are-we-throwing-our-data-protection-regimes-under-the-bus">analyzed consent, big data and data protection</a> that examines in detail why the principle of consent is providing us increasingly less of an aegis in protecting our data.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda and Vanya Rakesh on behalf of CIS submitted a <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-comments-and-recommendations-to-human-dna-profiling-bill-2015">clause-by-clause comments</a> on the Human DNA Profiling Bill that was circulated by the Department of Biotechnology on June 9, 2015.</li>
<li>Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Tarun Krishnakumar co-authored an article titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-privacy-transparency-and-technology">Security: Privacy, Transparency and Technology</a>. The article was published by Observer Research Foundation, Digital Debates 2015: CyFy Journal Volume 2.</li>
<li>Elonnai Hickok in a blog post titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/review-of-policy-debate-around-big-data-and-internet-of-things"> A Review of the Policy Debate around Big Data and Internet of Things </a>has done an analysis as to how regulators and experts across jurisdictions are reacting to Big Data and Internet of Things.</li>
<li>The Supreme Court of India has deemed it fit to refer the question of the very existence of a fundamental right to privacy to a Constitution Bench to finally decide the matter, and define the contours of such right if it does exist. Vipul Kharbanda analyses this in a <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/right-to-privacy-in-peril">blog entry</a>. </li>
<li>Experts and regulators across jurisdictions are examining the impact of Big Data practices on traditional data protection standards and principles. This will be a useful and pertinent exercise for India to undertake as the government and the private and public sectors begin to incorporate and rely on the use of Big Data in decision making processes and organizational operations. Elonnai Hickok has <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-information-technology-rules-2011">provided an initial evaluation of how Big Data could impact India's current data protection standards</a>. </li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li> Elonnai Hickok <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comparison-of-the-human-dna-profiling-bill-2012-with-cis-recommendations-sub-committee-recommendations-expert-committee-recommendations-and-the-human-dna-profiling-bill-2015">has provided a comparison of Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 vs. the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2015</a>, CIS's main recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill, Sub-Committee Recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill, and the Expert Committee Recommendations vs. the 2015 Bill. </li>
<li> CIS <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-submission-to-unga-wsis-review">submitted its comments</a> to the non-paper on the UNGA Overall Review of the Implementation of the WSIS outcomes, evaluating the progress made and challenges ahead.</li>
<li>In a policy brief, Vipul Kharbanda <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/policy-paper-on-surveillance-in-india">has analyzed the different laws regulating surveillance at the state and central level in India and calls out ways in which the provisions are unharmonized</a>. The brief then provides recommendations for the harmonization of surveillance law in India. </li>
<li>Hardnews interviewed Sunil Abraham about the future of the internet in India. The <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hardnewsmedia-august-10-2015-abeer-kapoor-net-neutrality-india-is-a-keybattle-ground">article was published in their August edition</a>.</li></ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li> Shyam Ponappa in an <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-august-6-2015-shyam-ponappa-those-dropped-calls"> Op-ed published by Business Standard </a> has given an analysis on the reasons of the number of dropped calls on our mobile phones. </li></ul>
</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing a project on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>. The project on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India got over and the compilation has been printed.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">NVDA and eSpeak</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Monthly Updates</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/august-2015-nvda-report.pdf">August 2015 Report</a> (Suman Dogra; July 31, 2015). </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Event Reports</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-in-espeak-marathi">Training in eSpeak Marathi</a> (Organized by NVDA team; National Association for the Blind; Nashik; June 22 - 23, 2015). <em>The workshop was held in the month of June but the report got published later in August.</em> </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/training-in-e-speak-hindi">Training in eSpeak Hindi</a> (Organized by NVDA team; Jeevan Jyoti School for the Blind; Varanasi; August 26 - 28, 2015). </li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Pervasive Technologies</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/patent-landscaping-in-the-indian-mobile-device-market"><strong> </strong>Methodology: Patent Landscaping in the Indian Mobile Device Market </a> (Rohini Lakshané; November 10, 2014). <em>This blog post published last year has been recently updated</em>. </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comparative-transparency-review-of-collective-management-organisations-in-india-uk-usa"> Comparative Transparency Review of Collective Management Organisations in India, United Kingdom and the United States </a> (Maggie Huang, Arpita Sengupta and Paavni Anand; August 1, 2015). </li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Other (Copyright and Patent)</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cci-participation-at-the-upcoming-3rd-international-conference-on-ipr-and-competition" class="external-link">CCI Participation at the Upcoming 3rd International Conference on IPR and Competition</a> (Amulya Purushothama; August 5, 2015). CIS wrote to the Competition Commission of India Chairman on August 5, 2015 about participation at a conference organised by Ericsson and concerns regarding conflict of interest. We also had several other NGOs sign on to the letter. </li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mhrd-ipr-chair-series-introduction">MHRD IPR Chair Series: Introduction</a> (Amulya Purushothama; August 10, 2015). Aditya Garg assisted in research and writing. </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/national-ipr-policy-series-what-have-sectoral-innovation-councils-been-doing-on-ipr"> National IPR Policy Series: What Have the Sectoral Innovation Councils Been Doing on IPR </a> (Nehaa Chaudhari and Varun Baliga; August 13, 2015). Amulya Purushothama assisted with research and writing. </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Media Coverage</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/times-of-india-rema-nagarajan-august-6-2015-competition-commission-of-india-chairman-participation-in-assocham-conference-raises-conflict-of-interests">Competition Commission of India chariman's participation in Assocham conference raises conflict of interests</a> (Rema Nagarajan; The Times of India; August 6, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/news/business-standard-august-6-2015-dilasha-seth-and-deepak-patel-assocham-event-sparks-row-over-conflict-of-interest-by-cci">Assocham event sparks row over conflict of interest by CCI</a> (Dilasha Seth and Deepak Patel; Business Standard; August 6, 2015).</li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Wikipedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entry</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/kisorachandrananachampu-on-odia-wikisource"><strong> </strong>Odia Wikisource has a new Wikisourcer, and he is the youngest in the Odia Wikimedia community! </a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; August 21, 2015). </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Events Co-organized</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/events/rare-telugu-religious-and-historical-work-preserved-at-annamacharya-library-to-come-on-wikisource"><strong> </strong>Annamaya Library edit-a-thon </a> (Organized by CIS-A2K and Telugu Wikipedia Community; August 6, 2015; Andhra Loyola College; Vijaywada). </li>
<li> <a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_workshop_on_digitization_and_archiving,_Jadavpur_University"> International Workshop on Digitization and Archiving </a> (Organized by CIS-A2K and Wikipedia Community; August 19 - 21, 2015). Rahmanuddin Shaik was one of the trainers. </li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">FOSS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Participation in Events</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/events/workshop-on-digital-collaborations-in-tamil-language-tamil-virtual-university-chennai">Workshop on digital collaborations in Tamil-language, Tamil Virtual Chennai</a> (Organized by Tamil Virtual University, Anna University Campus, Chennai; August 8 - 9, 2015). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja atttended this event. </li>
<li><a href="http://pn.ispirt.in/event/open-innovation-entrepreneurship-and-our-digital-future/">Open Innovation, entrepreneurship, and our digital future </a> (Organized by iSpirit; Bangalore; August 13, 2015). Rohini Lakshané attended the event. Rohini wrote a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/we-need-to-proactively-ensure-that-people-cant-file-representatives-of-the-creativity-of-a-foss-community"> report on this </a> . </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Media Coverage</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">CIS gave its inputs to the following:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/telugu-wiki-edit-a-thon-at-alc">Telugu Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at ALC</a> (Eenadu; August 6, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/telugu-wiki-editathon-alc">Telugu Wiki Edit-a-thon in ALC</a> (Eenadu; August 6, 2015)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.thehansindia.com/posts/index/2015-08-07/Rare-Telugu-religious-and-historical-work-preserved-at-Annamacharya-library-to-come-on-Wikisource-168454">Rare Telugu religious and historical work preserved at Annamacharya library to come on Wikisource! </a> (The Hans India; August 7, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/mangalorean-dotcom-august-13-2015"> ಗ್ರಾಮೀಣ ಪ್ರದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿಯಿಂದ ದೇಶದ ಆರ್ಥಿಕ ಪ್ರಗತಿ ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗುತ್ತದೆ. </a> (Mangalorean.com; August 13, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/karavali-karnataka-august-14-2015"> ವಿಕಿಪಿಡಿಯ ಮುಕ್ತವಾಗಿ ಬಳಸಿ: ಡಾ.ಪವನಜ </a> (Karavali Karnataka; August 14, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/sahil-online-august-14-2015"> ಬೆಳ್ತಂಗಡಿ:ಎಲ್ಲಾ ಕಾಲಕ್ಕೂ ಲಭ್ಯ ಇರುವ ಸ್ವತಂತ್ರ ಹಾಗೂ ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯಾ-ಪವನಜ </a> (SahilOnline; August 14, 2015). </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-august-23-2015-talamaddale-on-august-23">Talamaddale on August 23</a> (Hindu; August 16, 2015).</li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Privacy</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Article</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-privacy-transparency-and-technology">Security: Privacy, Transparency and Technology</a> (Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Tarun Krishnakumar; Observer Research Foundation, <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/security-privacy-transparency-technology.pdf">Digital Debates 2015: CyFy Journal Volume 2</a> ; August 19, 2015). </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Submission</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-comments-and-recommendations-to-human-dna-profiling-bill-2015"><strong> </strong>CIS Comments and Recommendations to the Human DNA Profiling Bill, June 2015 </a> (Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda and Vanya Rakesh; August 27, 2015). </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/policy-paper-on-surveillance-in-india">Policy Paper on Surveillance in India</a> (Vipul Kharbanda; August 3, 2015). </li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comparison-of-the-human-dna-profiling-bill-2012-with-cis-recommendations-sub-committee-recommendations-expert-committee-recommendations-and-the-human-dna-profiling-bill-2015"> Comparison of the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 with: CIS recommendations, Sub-Committee Recommendations, Expert Committee Recommendations, and the Human DNA Profiling Bill 2015 </a> (Elonnai Hickok; August 10, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/right-to-privacy-in-peril">Right to Privacy in Peril</a> (Vipul Kharbanda; August 13, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/responsible-data-forum"> Responsible Data Forum: Discussion on the Risks and Mitigations of releasing Data </a> (Vanya Rakesh; August 26, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/are-we-throwing-our-data-protection-regimes-under-the-bus"> Are we Throwing our Data Protection Regimes under the Bus? </a> (Elonnai Hickok and Rohan George; August 29, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/supreme-court-order-is-a-good-start-but-is-seeding-necessary"> Supreme Court Order is a Good Start, but is Seeding Necessary? </a> (Elonnai Hickok and Rohan George; August 29, 2015). </li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Big Data</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-information-technology-rules-2011"><strong> </strong>Big Data and the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules 2011 </a> (Elonnai Hickok; August 11, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/review-of-policy-debate-around-big-data-and-internet-of-things"> A Review of the Policy Debate around Big Data and Internet of Things </a> (Elonnai Hickok; August 17, 2015). </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Participation in Event</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-changing-landscape-of-ict-governance-and-practice-convergence-and-big-data"><strong> </strong>The Changing Landscape of ICT Governance and Practice - Convergence and Big Data </a> (Co-organized by Innovation Center for Big Data and Digital Convergence, Yuan Ze University, Taiwan; August 24 - 25, 2015). Sharat Chandra Ram was granted the <a href="http://www.cprsouth.org/2015/02/call-for-applications-2015-young-scholar-awards/">Young Scholar Award 2015</a> to attend the<em>Young Scholar Workshop</em> followed by main <a href="http://www.cprsouth.org/"><em>CPRSouth2015 conference</em> (Communication Policy Research South) conference</a>. </li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Submission</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-submission-to-unga-wsis-review">CIS submission to the UNGA WSIS+10 Review</a> (Jyoti Panday; August 9, 2015), </li></ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Cyber Security</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Upcoming Event</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/bangalore-chapter-meet-of-dsci-september-26-2015">Bangalore Chapter Meet of DSCI</a> (Co-organized by DSCI and CIS; September 26, 2015). Melissa Hathaway, Commissioner, Global Commission for Internet Governance and Sunil Abraham will be speaking at this event. </li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Op-ed</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-august-6-2015-shyam-ponappa-those-dropped-calls">Those Dropped Calls</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; August 5, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; August 6, 2015). </li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Books</strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader">Digital Activism in Asia Reader</a> (edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun; August 8, 2015).</li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Books Chapters</strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-open-review">Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Open Review </a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; Asia Internet History Vol. 3, edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon). Comments are invited.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review">Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Open Review </a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; Asia Internet History Vol. 3, edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon). Comments are invited.</li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Accepted Paper Abstract</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/studying-the-emerging-database-state-in-india-accepted-abstract"><strong> </strong>Studying the Emerging Database State in India: Notes for Critical Data Studies </a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; August 2, 2015). <em>The paper has been provisionally accepted</em>. </li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<strong> </strong>
<li><strong> </strong><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling">Mock-Calling - Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual</a> (Sreedeep; August 6, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet"> Governing Speech on the Internet: From the Free Marketplace Policy to a Controlled 'Public Sphere' </a> (Smarika Kumar; August 28, 2015). </li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-kanika-datta-august-1-2015-why-the-dna-bill-is-open-to-misuse-sunil-abraham">Why the DNA Bill is open to misuse: Sunil Abraham</a> (Kanika Datta; Business Standard; August 1, 2015) </li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-august-2-2015-karthikeyan-hemalatha-porn-ban">Porn ban: People will soon learn to circumvent ISPs and govt orders, expert says </a> (Karthikeyan Hemalatha; The Times of India; August 2, 2015). </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/idg-news-service-august-2-2015-indian-govt-orders-isps-to-block-857-porn-websites">Indian government orders ISPs to block 857 porn websites</a> (John Ribeiro; IDG News and PC World; August 2, 2015)</li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bbc-news-august-3-2015-india-blocks-access-to-857-porn-sites"> India blocks access to 857 porn sites </a> (BBC; August 3, 2015). </li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-james-crabtree-august-3-2015-india-launches-crackdown-on-online-porn"> India launches crackdown on online porn </a> (James Crabtree; Financial Times; August 3, 2015). </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-august-3-2015-siladitya-ray-proxies-and-vpns">Proxies and VPNs: Why govt can't ban porn websites?</a> (Siladitya Ray; August 3, 2015; Hindustan Times)</li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-august-4-2015-anahita-mukherji-nanny-state-rules-porn-bad-for-you"> Nanny state rules porn bad for you </a> (Anahita Mukherji; The Times of India; August 4, 2015). </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-august-4-2015-ban-on-pornography-temporary-says-government">Ban on pornography temporary, says government</a> (Business Standard; August 4, 2015)</li>
<li> <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-australian-news-august-5-2015-amanda-hodge-porn-block-in-india-sparks-outrage"> Porn block in India sparks outrage </a> (Australian; August 5, 2015). </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wall-street-journal-august-5-2015-sean-mclain-indian-porn-ban-is-partially-lifted-but-sites-remain-blocked">Indian Porn Ban is Partially Lifted But Sites Remain Blocked</a> (Sean Mclain; Wall Street Journal; August 5, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/open-magazine-august-7-2015-ullekh-np-genetic-profiling">Genetic Profiling: Is it all in the DNA?</a> (Ullekh N.P.; The Open Magazine; August 7, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/desi-blitz-august-7-2015-nazhat-khan-india-partially-lifts-porn-ban">India partially lifts Porn Ban?</a> (Nazhat Khan; DESI blitz; August 7, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hardnewsmedia-august-10-2015-abeer-kapoor-net-neutrality-india-is-a-keybattle-ground">Net Neutrality: India is a Key Battleground</a> (Abeer Kapoor; Hardnews; August 10, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-august-20-2015-aloke-tikku-stats-from-2014-reveal-horror-of-scrapped-section-66-a-of-it-act">Stats from 2014 reveal horror of scrapped section 66A of IT Act</a> (Aloke Tikku; Hindustan Times; August 20, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-times-of-india-sandhya-soman-august-23-2015-the-seedy-underbelly-of-revenge-porn">The seedy underbelly of revenge porn</a> (Sandhya Soman; The Times of India; August 23, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-businessline-august-28-p-anima-the-new-tattler-in-town">The new tattler in town</a> (P. Anima; Hindu Businessline; August 28, 2015).</li></ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify;">
<li>CIS - Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Facebook:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - Mailing List: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li></ul>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><br />► Support Us</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">► Request for Collaboration:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:sumandro@cis-india.org">sumandro@cis-india.org</a> (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, at <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:tanveer@cis-india.org">tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><em>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects. </em></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2015-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2015-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchers at Work2015-10-27T00:25:02ZPageGoverning Speech on the Internet: From the Free Marketplace Policy to a Controlled 'Public Sphere'
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet
<b>This post by Smarika Kumar is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Smarika is a consultant with Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. She is interested in issues concerning law and technology. In this essay, Smarika explores how through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The internet is widely thought to be unprecedented and radically different from the media which preceded it. Interestingly, the internet has been unlike other media, in that it does not have a history of being monopolised by governments. True, certain States have tried to regulate the internet in a manner which allows them to exercise an increased control over it, some others have a greater control over the internet root given the history of development of the internet, but nevertheless no one State can be said to “own” the internet in any jurisdiction, in the manner of telephone or broadcast monopolies. Internet as it stands now, at its essence, is a largely private of networks connecting privately-owned, and occasionally publicly-funded platforms.</p>
<p>This feature of the internet poses an interesting problem when one tries to think about speech. In law and policymaking, an important question remains: Should internet be treated as the marketplace of privately managed avenues for speech, or should speech on the internet be treated within the bigger concept of the public sphere? Moreover, how are law and policy in India currently disposed towards speech on the internet? In the present essay, I hope to discuss some of these issues by looking at the judgement in <em>Shreya Singhal v. Union of India</em> [1], which was pronounced by the Supreme Court of India in March 2015. The judgement is most widely recognised as a culmination of several challenges to Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 which criminalised a wide range of speech on the internet on the grounds of very broad terms like “grossly offensive”, “causing annoyance” and “inconvenience, danger, and obstruction.” Section 66A was challenged along with Sections 69A and 79 of the Act, which lay down the rules for blocking of content on the internet, and for intermediary liability and responsibility to take down internet content, respectively. This challenge was made on grounds of being in violation of the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression and Right to Equality guaranteed by the Constitution of India among others. However, while the judgement struck down Section 66A as unconstitutional, it upheld the constitutionality of the State-directed Internet blocking Rules as well as Intermediary Liability Guidelines. This may pose a paradox if one accounts for the fact that at the heart of it, all—Section 66A, Section 69A and Section 79, were actually legislations regulating speech. Then why strike one down and uphold others? To seek an answer in the present essay, I broadly look at the philosophical origins of regulation of speech on the internet. Two theories in philosophy—John Stuart Mill’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Jurgen Habermas’ Public Sphere have been very influential in liberal democratic traditions and jurisdictions in thinking about the governance of speech. Scholarly work concerning media law in other jurisdictions has also elaborated on how each of these theories can be implicitly used differently in judicial interpretations to serve different ends [2]. In this, the Marketplace of Ideas approach tends to treat speech and platforms for speech as part of the competition within a market context, whereby different kinds of ideas or speech compete with each other to find an avenue for expression. The Public Sphere approach on the other hand, treats different kinds of speech as part of a larger democratic concept of discussion and speech, whereby the aspiration is for representation of diverse kinds and sources of speech, rather than competition between them.</p>
<p>With the utilisation of these different underlying philosophical assumptions, legal implications can be so vastly different. And when that happens, it becomes essential to trace the process of how these philosophical approaches themselves work in legal argumentation. For these reasons, it becomes critical to probe the thinking in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement to understand which philosophical attitude to speech it actually inheres: the Marketplace of Ideas conception, or the Public Sphere approach? I argue in this essay that while traces of both the Marketplace of Ideas and the Public Sphere approach are present in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, neither of these philosophies actually govern the rationale of the judgement. An analysis of <em>Shreya Singhal</em> along with the judgement in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> (1995) [3] which it refers to, shows that it is in fact, a third philosophy, rooted in the impulse of colonial control, which gives <em>Shreya Singhal</em> its philosophical consistency.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Marketplace of Ideas in <em>Shreya Singhal</em></h2>
The judgement in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> actually employs the idea of the marketplace in its approach to discuss the implications of Section 66A. It begins by referring to the 2010 Supreme Court judgement of <em>S. Khushboo v. Kanniamal and Anr</em> [4] which had spoken about the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and how employing it is essential to safeguard “unpopular speech” under the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression in the Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. The Court marks out this reference to the marketplace of ideas, tracing this concept back to the 1919 American judgement of <em>Abrams v. United States</em> [5]. The Supreme Court states, talking about the Khushboo case:
<p> </p>
<blockquote>This last judgement is important in that it refers to the “market place of ideas” concept that has permeated American Law. This was put in the felicitous words of Justice Holmes in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, 250 US 616 (1919), thus: “But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” (para 11)</blockquote>
<p>The Supreme Court judgement goes onto trace the history of Marketplace of Ideas in American jurisprudence, and understand its place within the Indian Constitution. The Court holds:</p>
<blockquote>This leads us to a discussion of what is the content of the expression “freedom of speech and expression”. There are three concepts which are fundamental in understanding the reach of this most basic of human rights. The first is discussion, the second is advocacy, and the third is incitement. Mere discussion or even advocacy of a particular cause howsoever unpopular is at the heart of Article 19(1)(a). It is only when such discussion or advocacy reaches the level of incitement that Article 19(2) kicks in. (para 13)</blockquote>
<p>The Marketplace of Ideas then becomes the philosophical tenet which pivots the judgement around its unique jurisprudential concept: the distinction between discussion, advocacy and incitement. This conception of the marketplace holds that State interference in speech on the internet has to be kept off as long as the condition of such speech being incitement is not fulfilled. In a way, this is a hands-off approach to the governance of speech which is solidified in the Court’s declaration of the unconstitutionality of Section 66A. The Court refers to the American judgement of Reno, Attorney General of <em>United States v. American Civil Liberties Union</em> [6] to bring this logic to speech on the internet as well. Citing the district court judgement in this case, it holds:</p>
<blockquote>[I]t is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country – and indeed the world – as yet seen. The plaintiffs in these actions correctly describe the ‘democratizing’ effects of Internet communication: individual citizens of limited means can speak to a worldwide audience on issues of concern to them. Federalists and Anti-federalists may debate the structure of their government nightly, but these debates occur in newsgroups or chat rooms rather than in pamphlets. Modern-day Luthers still post their theses, but to electronic bulletins boards rather than the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche. More mundane (but from a constitutional perspective, equally important) dialogue occurs between aspiring artists, or French cooks, or dog lovers, or fly fishermen. 929 F. Supp. At 881. (at page 425) (para 60)</blockquote>
<p><em>Shreya Singhal</em>’s striking down of 66A then becomes founded in the idea that the State need not interfere in what kind of speech is made in the marketplace of the internet, as long as such speech does not amount to incitement. In a particular sphere of speech which is “not incitement” then, the logic of the Marketplace of Ideas approach seems to work in the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Recognition of the Limitations of the Marketplace of Ideas and a Move towards Public Sphere</h2>
<p>One would then surmise that the use of the Marketplace of Ideas approach is what makes <em>Shreya Singhal</em> such a pro-freedom of speech pronouncement. But interestingly, the judgement also cites the matter of <em>The Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal and Anr</em> [3] which has been remarkable for outlining the limitations of the marketplace in the governance and production of a diversity of opinions and sources in speech. The <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> case was brought forth before the Supreme Court in 1995, after the liberalisation regime in media, to challenge the constitutionality of preventing a private broadcaster to use Indian airwaves in order to exclusively broadcast a cricket match.</p>
<p>The Court, while holding that there was no such exclusive right inhering in a private broadcaster since airwaves had to be allocated and used in public interest, also held that the limitations on a private broadcaster’s right to broadcast also could not extend beyond Article 19(2). In doing so, the Court recognises that the marketplace in a free and competitive system may not always be sufficient enough to make use of the media to generate and represent speech which is in the democratic public interest of discussion and advocacy. <em>Shreya Singhal</em> cites this portion of the judgement in support of its own rationale of striking down Section 66A. It holds:</p>
<blockquote>The right to use the airwaves and the content of the programmes, therefore, needs regulation for balancing it and as well as to prevent monopoly of information and views relayed, which is a potential danger flowing from the concentration of the right to broadcast/telecast in the hands either of a central agency or of few private affluent broadcasters. That is why the need to have a central agency representative of all sections of the society free from control both of the Government and the dominant influential sections of the society. This is not disputed. But to contend that on that account the restrictions to be imposed on the right under Article 19(1)(a) should be in addition to those permissible under Article 19(2) and dictated by the use of public resources in the best interests of the society at large, is to misconceive both the content of the freedom of speech and expression and the problems posed by the element of public property in, and the alleged scarcity of, the frequencies as well as by the wider reach of the media. (para 29)</blockquote>
<p>The recognition in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> that unregulated, the marketplace can lead to “a monopoly of information and views relayed” flowing from the hands of “either a central agency or a few private affluent broadcasters” points to the limitation of the Marketplace of Ideas approach itself. Such recognition culminated into a more participation-focused idea of what it means to live in a democracy: the idea of a Public Sphere where regulation and governance of media is done in order to expand participation of different kinds of ideas and people within public speech. The Court again cites <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> in this regard to state:</p>
<blockquote>When, however, there are surplus or unlimited resources and the public interests so demand or in any case do not prevent telecasting, the validity of the argument based on limitation of resources disappears. It is true that to own a frequency for the purposes of broadcasting is a costly affair and even when there are surplus or unlimited frequencies, only the affluent few will own them and will be in a position to use it to subserve their own interest by manipulating news and views. That also poses a danger to the freedom of speech and expression of the have-nots by denying them the truthful information on all sides of an issue which is so necessary to form a sound view on any subject. (para 29)</blockquote>
<p>In background of this, it could be said that the Marketplace of Ideas, while it forms an important part of the backbone in the striking down of Section 66A, it is not all there is to it. The idea of participation in a Public Sphere is recognised as well, and to an extent it is the barrier to participation in this Public Sphere, which enables the declaration of Section 66A as unconstitutional.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Public Sphere or the Marketplace? : (N)either, but a Dynamics of Control</h2>
<p>Much of the discourse around <em>Shreya Singhal</em>’s discussion on Sections 69A and 79, has seen it as divorced from the discussion around Section 66A. The discussion on Section 69A and 79 in the judegment has been seen as regressive, or ambiguous, while the portion of the judgement dealing with Section 66A has been largely been pronounced progressive and liberal. It has also been argued that the discussion on Section 66A in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> departs from a myriad previous judgements and their approach towards the governance of free speech [7]. I would like to argue on the contrary, that there is in fact, a deep continuity in the judgement on various provisions, as well as with prior judgements on speech, as far as the approach which is taken towards the governance of speech generally, and speech on the internet, specifically, is concerned.</p>
<p>To understand this continuity, it is of critical importance to note how the approaches of Public Sphere and the Marketplace of Ideas are contrasted in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, and by reference in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> as well—while the former is used to justify regulation for participation of a larger public in reception of information from the media, and the latter to keep off excessive interference by the Government. Moreover, the judgement also seems to conflate the Marketplace of Ideas and the Public Sphere conceptions of speech governance when it states:</p>
<blockquote>It is clear, therefore, that the petitioners are correct in saying that the public’s right to know is directly affected by Section 66A. Information of all kinds is roped in – such information may have scientific, literary or artistic value, it may refer to current events, it may be obscene or seditious. That such information may cause annoyance or inconvenience to some is how the offence is made out. It is clear that the right of the people to know – the market place of ideas – which the internet provides to persons of all kinds is what attracts Section 66A. (para 20)</blockquote>
<p>One notes in the abovementioned extract that the right to know is seen to emerge from the Marketplace of Ideas rather than through participation in the Public Sphere. In light of these observations, one can then ask the question: What is really at the philosophical heart of <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement when it can employ both these approaches? One can argue that the focus of the judgement is to balance these two approaches for the governance of speech. But what is the aim of such an attempt to “balance”? Where is it really leading to? The answer may lie in analysing the rest of <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, including its pronouncements on Executive Rules under Section 69A and Section 79, both of which while being regressive, were upheld as constitutional.</p>
<p>The issue under Section 69A concerned the constitutional validity of the Blocking Rules of the internet, while that under Section 79 concerned the liability of intermediaries on the internet. What is interesting is that the Court in its analysis of Rules under both these sections does not go into the grounds which have been prescribed for the blocking of websites, or for pinning intermediary liability. Commenting on the Rules under Section 69A, the judgement holds:</p>
<blockquote>Merely because certain additional safeguards such as those found in Section 95 and 96 CrPC are not available does not make the Rules constitutionally infirm. We are of the view that the Rules are not constitutionally infirm in any manner. (para 111)</blockquote>
<p>Additionally it places emphasis on the premise the satisfaction of the Central Government that it is necessary to block a website, is a valuable assumption to proceed with the blocking of such website within the tenet of Article 19(2). It holds:</p>
<blockquote>It will be noticed that Section 69A unlike Section 66A is a narrowly drawn provision with several safeguards. First and foremost, blocking can only be resorted to where the Central Government is satisfied that it is necessary so to do. (para 109)</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, for the Rules under Section 79, the Court strikes down the premise that private censorship of internet content based on the judgement of intermediaries is constitutionally permissible. (see para 117) However, it upholds constitutionality of removal of content by an intermediary upon knowledge of a court order to this effect, as well as knowledge of notification by the appropriate government. It states:</p>
<blockquote>Section 79(3)(b) has to be read down to mean that the intermediary upon receiving actual knowledge that a court order has been passed asking it to expeditiously remove or disable access to certain material must then fail to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material. This is for the reason that otherwise it would be very difficult for intermediaries like Google, Facebook etc. to act when millions of requests are made and the intermediary is then to judge as to which of such requests are legitimate and which are not. We have been informed that in other countries worldwide this view has gained acceptance, Argentina being in the forefront. Also, the Court order and/or the notification by the appropriate Government or its agency must strictly conform to the subject matters laid down in Article 19(2). (para 117)</blockquote>
<p>In this manner while the power of speech regulation is taken away from private intermediaries existing in the Marketplace of Ideas, it is restored within the organs of the State—the Judiciary and the Executive. This may not necessarily be repressive, as long as these powers of regulations are used to actually expand the Public Sphere, rather than limiting or controlling it. But the architecture of the regulations under both Sections 69A, and 79 suggest that they have been designed for control, rather than promoting discussion in the Public Sphere, as is evident from the strong censorship models they employ.</p>
<p>Such type of speech regulation aimed at creating a State-controlled “Public Sphere” has a long history: It has been additionally opined that the First Amendment to the Constitution which expanded the grounds under Article 19(2) embodies this colonial continuity within the Constitution framework itself [8]. Eminent lawyer, Rajeev Dhavan has analysed the colonial history of laws governing speech in India to observe continuity from the administration then, to the post-independence orientation of speech laws, to point out that an inherent distrust of the media has always existed in the legal structure, be it before or after the Indian Constitution. He traces such form of legal structure to a desire to control, rather than enable the “public” rooted in the context of colonial rather than democratic pressures [9].</p>
<p>This trend also links back to what happens in the case of <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> which is cited in support of the striking down of Section 66A in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>. In <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, while there is a recognition of the limitations of Marketplace of Ideas in how it can concentrate participation in democratic discussions only to the hands of those with adequate purchasing power,9 it also fails to amend this through a process of greater participation and representation of diverse public on media. What it broadly does instead is conflate the public to the State, holding that it is only through State-administered public broadcasting that greater participation and representation of diverse public on media can happen. Accordingly, Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy in his judgement states:</p>
<blockquote>Public good lies in ensuring plurality of opinions, views and ideas and that would scarcely be served by private broadcasters, who would be and who are bound to be actuated by profit motive. There is a far greater likelihood of these private broadcasters indulging in misinformation, disinformation and manipulation of news and views than the government-controlled media, which is at least subject to public and parliamentary scrutiny. (para 181, emphasis added)</blockquote>
<p>Such architecture of Government regulation in the governance of speech, visible both in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, and by extension in the 66A discussion in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, but also in the Sections 69A and 79 discussion in the latter judgement, aspires not at expanding and creating a Habermasian Public Sphere of unlimited lively discussion, but rather, a pre-defined, controlled sphere of the “public” which behaves in congruence with the interests of the State. While on the surface it may seem to recognise the limits of the Marketplace of Ideas approach in speech governance and aim for reform of the same, in the bigger scheme of things, the criticism of the marketplace is really directed towards putting more control of public speech in the hands of the State machinery [9].</p>
<p>In such a background of the control trend, even a judgement like <em>Shreya Singhal</em> with such a progressive outcome, appears like a flash in the pan. It might allow for some seemingly liberal advancements in free speech, but it does so only within the larger structure of control mechanisms created for speech ingrained within a pre-independence, undemocratic form of governance which was disrespectful of an independent Public Sphere. The question which then needs to be asked is this: While judgements like <em>Shreya Singhal</em> strike down the really repressive, do they actually bring about a structural change in legal assumptions about public speech? Or is the same colonial desire of control which is permeating the most progressive pronouncements of our jurisdiction? Is it moving towards a participatory, diverse and independent Public Sphere, or something which appears close enough to free discussion, but really is carefully monitored to produced “socially relevant” content, whereby what is relevant is defined through a complicated State apparatus? As our speech laws move to the Internet Age, these are some questions we must ask if the hope for the law is to enable involved, democratic citizenry, rather than a colonial-flavoured Internet public.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf">http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Stein, Laura. 2006. <em>Speech rights in America: The First Amendment, Democracy, and the Media</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>[3] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/539407/">http://indiankanoon.org/doc/539407/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1327342/">http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1327342/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] 250 US 616 (1919).</p>
<p>[6] 521 U.S. 844 (1997).</p>
<p>[7] Bhatia, Gautam. 2015. At the Heart of the Landmark 66A Ruling: The Crucial Distinction between Advocacy and Incitement. Scroll. March 25. Accessed from <a href="http://scroll.in/article/716034/at-the-heart-of-the-landmark-66a-ruling-the-crucial-distinction-between-advocacy-and-incitement">http://scroll.in/article/716034/at-the-heart-of-the-landmark-66a-ruling-the-crucial-distinction-between-advocacy-and-incitement</a>.</p>
<p>[8] See: Liang, Lawrence. 2011. Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech. InfoChange. Accessed from <a href="http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/freedom-of-expression/reasonable-restrictions-and-unreasonable-speech.html">http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/freedom-of-expression/reasonable-restrictions-and-unreasonable-speech.html</a>. Also see: Acharya, Bhairav. 2015. Free Speech Policy in India: Community, Custom, Censorship, and the Future of Internet Regulation. May 06. Accessed from <a href="http://notacoda.net/2015/05/06/free-speech-policy-in-india-community-custom-censorship-and-the-future-of-internet-regulation/">http://notacoda.net/2015/05/06/free-speech-policy-in-india-community-custom-censorship-and-the-future-of-internet-regulation/</a>.</p>
<p>[9] Dhavan, Rajeev. 2009. Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society. In Aravind Rajagopal (ed.), <em>The Indian Public Sphere</em>. Oxford University Press. Pp. 92-93.</p>
<p>[10] See the discussion in the previous section of this essay.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherSmarika KumarFreedom of Speech and ExpressionJudiciaryRAW Blog69ACensorshipSection 66AResearchers at Work2015-08-28T05:57:55ZBlog EntryCivil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Open Review
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review
<b>This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in India - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. </b>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3" target="_blank">https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3</a>.</strong></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Early Days</h2>
<p>The overarching context of development interventions and rights-based approaches have shaped the space of civil society organizations working on the topics of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and Internet governance in India. Early members of this space came from diverse backgrounds. Satish Babu was working with the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies (SIFFS) in mid-1990s, when he set up a public mailing list called 'FishNet,' connected to Internet via the IndiaLink email network, (then) run by India Social Institute to inter-connect development practitioners in India. He went on to become the President of Computer Society of India during 2012-2013; and co-founded Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment (SPACE) in 2003, where he served as the Executive Secretary during 2003-2010 [Wikipedia 2015]. Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director of IT for Change and one of the key actors from Indian civil society organizations to take part in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process, had previously worked extensively on topics related to public health and women's rights [ITfC b], which deeply shaped the perspectives she and IT for Change have brought into the Internet governance sphere, globally as well as nationally [Gurumurthy 2001]. Arun Mehta initiated a mailing list titled 'India-GII' in 2002 to discuss 'India's bumpy progress on the global infohighway' [India-GII 2005]. This list played a critical role in curating an early community of non-governmental actors interested in the topics of telecommunication policy, spectrum licensing, Internet governance, and consumer and communication rights. As Frederick Noronha documents, the mailing list culture grew slowly in India during the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, they had a great impact in organizing early online communities, sometimes grouped around a topical focus, sometimes functioning as a bridge among family members living abroad, and sometimes curating place-specific groups [Noronha 2002].</p>
<p>The inaugural conference of the Free Software Foundation of India [FSFI] in Thiruvananthapuram, on 20 July 2001, galvanized the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) community in India. The conference was titled 'Freedom First,' and Richard Stallman was invited as the chief guest. It was a vital gathering of actors from civil society organizations, software businesses, academia, and media, as well as the Secretary of the Department of Information Technology, Government of Kerala (the state where the conference was held). The conference laid the basis for sustained collaborations between the free software community, civil society organizations, emerging software firms in the state, and the Government of Kerala for the years to come. Two early initiatives that brought together free software developers and state government agencies were the Kerala Trasportation Project and the IT@School project, which not only were awarded to firms promoting use of FLOSS in electronic governance project, but facilitated a wider public dialogue regarding the need think critically about the making of information society in India [Kumar 2007]. The inter-connected communities and overlapping practices of the FLOSS groups, civil society organizations involved in ICT for Development initiatives, telecommunication policy analysts and advocates, and legal-administrative concerns regarding life in the information society – from digital security and privacy, to freedom of online expressions, to transparency in electronic governance infrastructures – have, hence, continued to shape the civil society space in India studying, discussing, responding, and co-shaping policies and practices around governance of Internet in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Key Organizations</h2>
<p>IT for Change was established in 2000, in Bengaluru, as a non-governmental organization that 'works for the innovative and effective use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to promote socio-economic change in the global South, from an equity, social justice and gender equality point of view' [ITfC]. It has since made important contributions in the field of ICTs for Development, especially in integrating earlier communication rights practices organised around old media forms with newer possibilities of production and distribution of electronic content using digital media and Internet [ITfC e], and in that of Internet governance, especially through their participation in the WSIS and Internet Governance Forum (IGF) processes and by co-shaping the global Souther discourse of the subject [ITfC d]. It has also done significant works in the area of women's rights in the information society, and have been a core partner in a multi-country feminist action research project on using digital media to enhance the citizenship rights and experiences of marginalized women in India, Brazil, and South Africa [ITfC c]. IT for Change has co-led the formation of Just Net Coalition in February 2014 [JNC].</p>
<p>Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) was founded by Osama Manzar, in New Delhi in 2002, with a 'deep understanding that marginalised communities living in socio-economic backwardness and information poverty can be empowered to improve their lives almost on their own, simply by providing them access to information and knowledge using digital tools' [DEF c]. DEF has contributed to setting up Community Information Resource Centres across 19 states and 53 districts in India, with computers, printers, scanners, and Internet connectivity [DEF]. DEF organises one of the biggest competitions in Asia to identify, foreground, and honour significant contributions in the area of ICT for Development [DEF d]. This annual competition series, titled 'Manthan Award' (Translation: 'manthan' means 'churning' in Sanskrit), started in 2004. It has alllowed DEF to create a detailed database of ICT for Development activities and actors in the South Asia and Asia Pacific region. Since 2011, DEF has started working with Association for Progressive Communications on a project titled 'Internet Rights' to take forward the agenda of 'internet access for all' in India [DEF b].</p>
<p>The Society for Knowledge Commons was formed in New Delhi 2007 by 'scientists, technologists, researchers, and activists to leverage the tremendous potential of the ‘collaborative innovation’ model for knowledge generation that has lead to the growth of the Free and Open Source Software community (FOSS) around the world' [Society for Knowledge Commons]. It has championed integration of FOSS into public sector operations in India – from electronic governance systems to use of softwares in educational institutes – and has made continuous interventions on Internet governance issues from the perspective of the critical importance of shared knowledge properties and practices for a more democratic information society. It is a part of the Free Software Movement of India [FSMI], an alliance of Indian organizations involved in advocating awareness and usage of FOSS, as well as a founding member of the Just Net Coalition [JNC].</p>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) was established in Bengaluru in 2008 with a research and advocacy focus on topics of accessibility of digital content for differently-abled persons, FOSS and policies on intellectual property rights, open knowledge and Indic Wikipedia projects, digital security and privacy, freedom of expression and Internet governance, and socio-cultural and historical studies of Internet in India [CIS]. In one of the key early projects, CIS contributed to the making of web accessibility policy for government websites in India, which was being drafted by the Department of Information Technology, Government of India [CIS 2008]. In the following years it took part in the Internet Governance Forum summits; submitted responses and suggestions to various policies being introduced by the government, especially the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, National Identification Authority of India (NIA) Bill, 2010, and the Approach Paper for a Legislation on Privacy, 2010; produced a report on the state of open government data in India [Prakash 2011b], and undertook an extensive study on the experiences of the young people in Asia with Internet, digital media, and social change [Shah 2011].</p>
<p>Software Freedom Law Centre has undertaken research and advocacy interventions, since 2011, in the topics digital privacy, software patents, and cyber-surveillance [SFLC]. The Internet Democracy Project, an initiative of Point of View, has organised online and offline discussions, participated in global summits, and produced reports on the topics of freedom of expression, cyber security and human rights, and global Internet governance architecture since 2012 [IDP].</p>
<p>The first Internet Society chapter to be established in India was in Delhi. The chapter began in 2002, but went through a period of no activity before being revived in 2008 [Delhi]. The Chennai chapter started in 2007 [Chennai], the Kolkata one in 2009 [Kolkata], and the Bengaluru chapter came into existence in 2010 [Bangalore]. Asia Internet Symposium have been organised in India twice: 1) the Kolkata one, held on on 1 December 2014, focused on 'Internet and Human Rights: Empowering the Users,' and 2) the Chennai symposium, held on 2 December 2014, discussed 'India in the Open and Global Internet.' The newest Internet Society chapter in India is in the process of formation in Trivandrum [Trivandrum], led by the efforts of Satish Babu (mentioned above).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Global and National Events</h2>
<p>The first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conference in Geneva, held on 10-12 December 2003, was not attended by many civil society organizations from India. Several Indian participants in the conference were part of the team of representatives from different global civil society organizations, like Digital Partners, Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN), and International Centre for New Media [ITU 2003]. Between the first and the second conference, the engagement with the WSIS process increased among Indian civil society organizations increased of the WSIS process, which was especially led by IT for Change. In early 2005, before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, it organized a discussion event titled 'Gender Perspectives on the Information Society: South Asia Pre-WSIS Seminar' in partnership with DAWN and the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, which was supported by UNIFEM and the UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme [Gurumurthy 2006]. In a separate note, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change have noted their experience as a South Asian civil society organization engaging with the WSIS process [Gurumurthy 2005]. The second WSIS conference in Tunis, held on 16-18 November 2005, however, neither saw any significant participation from Indian civil society organizations, except for Ambedkar Centre for Justice and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, and IT for Change [ITU 2005]. This contrasted sharply with the over 60 delegates from various Indian government agencies taking part in the conference [ITU 2005].</p>
<p>Two important events took place in India in early 2005 that substantially contributed to the civil society discourses in India around information technology and its socio-legal implications and possibilities. The former is the conference titled 'Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics' organized by the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Alternative Law Forum, and Public Service Broadcasting Trust, in Delhi on 6-8 January 2005. The conference attempted to look into the terms of intellectual property rights (IPR) debates from the perspectives of experiences in countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. It was based on the research carried out by the Sarai programme and Alternative Law Forum on contemporary realities of media production and distribution, and the ways in which law and legal instruments enter into the most intimate spheres of social and cultural life to operationalise the IPRs. The conference combined academic discussions with parallel demonstrations by media practitioners, and knowledge sharing by FLOSS communities [Sarai 2005]. The latter event is the first of the Asia Source workshop that took place in Bengaluru during 28 January - 4 February 2005 . It brought together more than 100 representatives from South and South-East Asian civil society organizations and technology practitioners working with them, along with several leading practitioners from Africa, Europe, North America, and Latin America, to promote adoption and usage of FLOSS across the developmental sector in the region. The workshop was organized by Mahiti (Bengaluru) and Tactical Technology Collective (Amsterdam), with intellectual and practical support from an advisory group of representatives from FLOSS communities and civil society organizations, and financial support from Hivos, the Open Society Institute, and International Open Source Network [Asia Source].</p>
<p>While the participation of representatives from Indian civil society organizations at the IGFs in Athens (2006) and Rio de Janeiro (2007) was minimal, the IGF Hyderabad, held on 3-6 December 2008, provided a great opportunity for Indian civil society actors to participate in and familiarize themselves with the global Internet governance process. Apart from various professionals, especially lawyers, who attended the Hyderabad conference as individuals, the leading civil society organizations participating in the event included: Ambedkar Center for Justice and Peace, Centre for Internet and Society, Centre for Science, Development and Media Studies, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Internet Society Chennai chapter, IT for Change, and Mahiti. The non-governmental participants from India at the event, however, were predominantly from private companies and academic institutes [IGF 2008].</p>
<p>IT for Change made a critical intervention into the discourse of global Internet governance during the Hyderabad conference by bringing back the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society [ITU 2005 b]. At IGF Sharm El Sheikh, held during 15-18 November 2009, Parminder Jeet Singh of IT for Change explained:</p>
<blockquote>[E]nhanced cooperation consists of two parts. One part is dedicated to creating globally applicable policy principles, and there is an injunction to the relevant organizations to create the conditions for doing that. And I have a feeling that the two parts of that process have been conflated into one. And getting reports from the relevant organizations is going on, but we are not able to go forward to create a process which addresses the primary purpose of enhanced cooperation, which was to create globally applicable public policy principles and the proof of that is that I don't see any development of globally applicable public policy principles, which remains a very important need. [IGF 2009]</blockquote>
<p>This foregrounding of the principle of 'enhanced cooperation' have since substantially contributed to rethinking not only the global Internet governance mechanisms and its reconfigurations, but also the Indian government's perspectives towards the same. It eventually led to the proposal made by a representative of Government of India at the UN General Assembly session on 26 October 2011 regarding the establishment of a UN Committee for Internet-Related Policies [Singh 2011].</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Policies and Censorship</h2>
<p>One of the earliest instances of censorship of online content in India is the blocking of several websites offering Voice over IP (VoIP) softwares, which can be downloaded to make low-cost international calls, during late 1990s. The India-GII mailing list initiated by Arun Mehta, as mentioned above, started almost as a response to this blocking move by Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL), the government-owned Internet Service Provider (ISP). Additionally, Mehta filed a case against VSNL for blocking these e-commerce websites, which might be identified as the first case of legal activism for Internet-related rights in India [India-GII 2001]. During the war between India and Pakistan during 1999, the Indian government instructed VSNL to block various Pakistani media websites, including that of Dawn. Like in the case of websites offering VoIP services, this blocking did not involve direct intervention with the websites concerned but only the ability of Indian users to access them [Tanna 2004].
The first well-known case of the Government of India blocking digital content for political reasons occurred in 2003, when a mailing list titled 'Kynhun' was banned. Department of Telecommunications instructed all the But the previously deployed URL-blocking strategy did not work in the new situation of mailing lists. Blocking the URL of the group did not stop it from being used by members of the group to continue sharing email through it. Government of India then approached Yahoo directly to ensure that the mailing list is closed down, which Yahoo declined to implement. This resulted in imposing of a blanket blocking of all Yahoo Groups pages across ISPs in India during September 2003. By November, Yahoo decided to close down the mailing list, and the blanket blocking was repealed [Tanna 2004]. Further blocking of several blogs and websites continued through 2006 and 2007, where the government decided to work in collaboration with various platforms offering hosted blog and personal webpage services to remove access to specific sub-domains. In resistance to this series of blocking orders by the government, there emerged an important civil society campaign titled 'Bloggers Against Censorship' led by Bloggers Collective Group, a distributed network of bloggers from all across India [Bloggers 2006].</p>
<p>A few weeks after the IGF Hyderabad, the Government of India passed the Information Technology (Amendment) Act 2008 on 22 December 2008 [MoLaJ 2009], although it was notified and enforced much later on 27 October 2009 [MoCaIT 2009]. This amendment attempted to clarify various topics left under-defined in the Information Technology Act of 2000. However, as Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet and Society noted, the casual usage of the term 'offensive content' in the amendment opened up serious threats of broad curbing of freedom of online expression under the justification that it caused 'annoyance' or 'inconvenience' [Prakash 2009]. The sections 66 and 67 of the amended Information Technology Act, which respectively address limits to online freedom of expression and legally acceptable monitoring of digital communication by government agencies, have since been severely protested against by civil society organizations across India for enabling a broad-brushed censorship and surveillance of the Internet in India. The section 66A has especially allowed the government to make a series of arrests of Internet users for posting and sharing 'offensive content' [Pahwa 2015].</p>
<p>In 2011, the Government of India introduced another critical piece of policy instrument for controlling online expressions – the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2011 [MoCaIT 2011] – targeted at defining the functions of the intermediaries associated with Internet-related services and communication, and how they are to respond to government's directives towards taking down and temporary blocking of digital content. The draft Rules were published in early 2011 and comments were invited from the general public. One of the responses, submitted by Privacy India and the Centre for Internet and Society, explicitly highlighted the draconian implications of the (then) proposed rules:</p>
<blockquote>This rule requires an intermediary to immediately take steps to remove access to information merely upon receiving a written request from “any authority mandated under the law”. Thus, for example, any authority can easily immunize itself from criticism on the internet by simply sending a written notice to the intermediary concerned. This is directly contrary to, and completely subverts the legislative intent expressed in Section 69B which lays down an elaborate procedure to be followed before any information can be lawfully blocked. [Prakash 2011]</blockquote>
<p>The policy apparatus of controlling online expression in India took its full form by the beginning of the decade under study here. The 'chilling effect' of this apparatus was made insightfully evident by a study conducted by Rishabh Dara at the Centre for Internet and Society, where fake takedown notices (regarding existing digital content) were sent to 7 important Internet intermediaries operating in India, and their responses were studied. The results of this experiment demonstrated that:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he Rules create uncertainty in the criteria and procedure for administering the takedown thereby inducing the intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply with takedown notices in order to limit their liability; and as a result suppress legitimate expressions. Additionally, the Rules do not establish sufficient safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse of the takedown process to suppress legitimate expressions. [Dara 2012]</blockquote>
<p> </p>
<h2>Reference</h2>
<p>[Bloggers 2006] Bloggers Collective Group, Bloggers Against Censorship. Last updated on April 30, 2009. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bloggers_Against_Censorship.</p>
<p>[Dara 2012] Dara, Rishabh, Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet. The Centre for Internet and Society. April 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/chilling-effects-on-free-expression-on-internet.</p>
<p>[DEF] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Community Information Resource Centre. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/circ-2/.</p>
<p>[DEF b] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Internet Rights. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://internetrights.in/.</p>
<p>[DEF c] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Our Story. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/about-def/.</p>
<p>[DEF d] Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF). Manthan Awards. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://defindia.org/manthan-award-south-asia-masa/.</p>
<p>[FSFI] Free Software Foundation of India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://fsf.org.in/.</p>
<p>[FSMI] Free Software Movement of India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.fsmi.in/node.</p>
<p>[Gurumurthy 2001] Gurumurthy, Anita, A Gender Perspective to ICTs and Development: Reflections towards Tunis. January 15. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.worldsummit2003.de/en/web/701.htm.</p>
<p>[Gurumurthy 2005] Gurumurthy, Anita, and Parminder Jeet Singh, WSIS PrepCom 2: A South Asian Perspective. Association for Progressive Communications. April 01. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://www.apc.org/en/news/hr/world/wsis-prepcom-2-south-asian-perspective.</p>
<p>[Gurumurthy 2006] Gurumuthy, Anita et al (eds.), Gender in the Information Society: Emerging Issues. UNDP Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.genderit.org/sites/default/upload/GenderIS.pdf.</p>
<p>[India-GII 2001] India-GII, Status of VSNL Censorship of IP-Telephony Sites. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://members.tripod.com/~india_gii/statusof.htm.</p>
<p>[India-GII 2005] India-GII. 2005. Last modified on May 24. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://india-gii.org/.</p>
<p>[IDP] Internet Democracy Project. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://internetdemocracy.in/.</p>
<p>[ITU 2003] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Geneva Phase of the WSIS: List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/summit_participants.pdf.</p>
<p>[ITU 2005] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), List of Participants (WSIS) – Update 5 Dec 2005. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/final-list-participants.pdf.</p>
<p>[ITU 2005 b] International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Tunis Agenda for the Information Society. November 18. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.pdf.</p>
<p>[IGF 2008] Internet Governance Forum, Hyderabad Provisional List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/content/article/385-hyderabad-provisional-list-of-participants.</p>
<p>[IGF 2009] Internet Governance Forum, Managing Critical Resources. IGF Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt . November 16. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/2009/sharm_el_Sheikh/Transcripts/Sharm%20El%20Sheikh%2016%20November%202009%20Managing%20Critical%20Internet%20Resources.pdf.</p>
<p>[Bangalore] Internet Society Bangalore Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org/.</p>
<p>[Delhi] Internet Society Delhi Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org.</p>
<p>[Chennai] Internet Society Chennai Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.isocbangalore.org.</p>
<p>[Kolkata] Internet Society Kolkata Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://isockolkata.in/.</p>
<p>[Trivandrum] Internet Society Trivandrum Chapter. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/where-we-work/chapters/india-trivandrum-chapter.</p>
<p>[ITfC] IT for Change, About IT for Change. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/aboutus.</p>
<p>[ITfC b] IT for Change, Anita Gurumurthy. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/Anita.</p>
<p>[ITfC c] IT for Change, Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society: Southern Feminist Dialogues in Practice and Theory. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.gender-is-citizenship.net/.</p>
<p>[ITfC d] IT for Change, Internet Governance. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/Techgovernance.</p>
<p>[ITfC e] IT for Change, Our Field Centre. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/field_centre.</p>
<p>[JNC] Just Net Coalition (JNC). Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://justnetcoalition.org/.</p>
<p>[Kumar 2007] Kumar, Sasi V. 2007. The Story of Free Software in Kerala, India. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://swatantryam.blogspot.in/2007/08/story-of-free-software-in-kerala-india.html.</p>
<p>[MoLaJ 2009] Ministry of Law and Justice (MoLaJ), The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008. The Gazette of India. February 05. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/it_amendment_act2008.pdf.</p>
<p>[MoCaIT 2009] Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCaIT), Notification. The Gazette of India. October 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/downloads/itact2000/act301009.pdf.</p>
<p>[MoCaIT 2011] Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCaIT), Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011. The Gazette of India. April 11. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://deity.gov.in/sites/upload_files/dit/files/GSR314E_10511%281%29.pdf.</p>
<p>[Noronha 2002] Noronha, Frederick, Linking a Diverse Country: Mailing Lists in India. The Digital Development Network. May 22. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.comminit.com/ict-4-development/content/linking-diverse-country-mailing-lists-india.</p>
<p>[Pahwa 2015] Pahwa, Nikhil, A List of Section 66A Arrests in India through the Years. Medianama. March 24. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.medianama.com/2015/03/223-section-66a-arrests-in-india/.</p>
<p>[Prakash 2009] Prakash, Pranesh, Short Note on IT Amendment Act, 2008 . The Centre for Internet and Society. February. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/publications/it-act/short-note-on-amendment-act-2008/.</p>
<p>[Prakash 2011] Prakash, Pranesh, CIS Para-wise Comments on Intermediary Due Diligence Rules, 2011. The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/intermediary-due-diligence.</p>
<p>[Prakash 2011 b] Prakash, Pranesh, et al, Open Government Data Study. The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/open-government-data-study.</p>
<p>[SFLC] Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://sflc.in/.</p>
<p>[Shah 2011] Shah, Nishant. 2011. Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? The Centre for Internet and Society. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook.</p>
<p>[Singh 2011] Singh, Dushyant, India's Proposal for a United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies. Sixty Sixth Session of the UN General Assembly, New York. October 26. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itforchange.net/sites/default/files/ItfC/india_un_cirp_proposal_20111026.pdf.</p>
<p>[SKC] Society for Knowledge Commons. About Us. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.knowledgecommons.in/about-us/.</p>
<p>[Asia Source] Tactical Technology Collective, Asia Source. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://tacticaltech.org/asiasource.</p>
<p>[Tanna 2004] Tanna, Ketan, Internet Censorship in India: Is It Necessary and Does It Work?. Sarai-CSDS Independent Fellowship. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.ketan.net/INTERNET_CENSORSHIP_IN_INDIA.html.</p>
<p>[CIS] The Centre for Internet and Society. About Us. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/about/.</p>
<p>[CIS 2008] The Centre for Internet and Society. 2008. Annual Report. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://cis-india.org/accessibility/annual-report-2008.pdf.</p>
<p>[Sarai 2005] The Sarai Programme, Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics. January 12. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://sarai.net/contested-commons-trespassing-publics/.</p>
<p>[Wikipedia 2015] Satish Babu. Wikipedia. Last modified on June 25. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Babu.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-india-open-review</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Governance ForumResearchInternet HistoriesCivil SocietyResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:51:03ZBlog EntryCivil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Open Review
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-open-review
<b>This is a book section written for the third volume (2000-2010) of the Asia Internet History series edited by Prof. Kilnam Chon. The pre-publication text of the section is being shared here to invite suggestions for addition and modification. Please share your comments via email sent to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org with 'Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia - Comments' as the subject line. This text is published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.</b>
<p> </p>
<strong>You are most welcome to read the pre-publication drafts of other sections of the Asia Internet History Vol. 3, and share your comments: <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3" target="_blank">https://sites.google.com/site/internethistoryasia/book3</a>.</strong>
<p> </p>
<h2>Preparations for the World Summit on the Information Society</h2>
<p>The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) conferences organized by the United Nations in Geneva (2003) and Tunis (2005) initiated crucial platforms and networks, some temporary and some continued, for various non-governmental actors to intensively and periodically take part in the discussions of governance of Internet and various related activities towards the goals of inclusive development and human rights. Many of the civil society organizations taking part in the WSIS conferences, as well as the various regional and thematic preparatory meetings and seminars, had little prior experience in the topic of Internet governance. They were entering these conversations from various perspectives, such as local developmental interventions, human and cultural rights activism, freedom and diversity of media, and gender and social justice. With backgrounds in such forms of applied practice and theoretical frameworks, members of these civil society organizations often faced a difficult challenge in articulating their experiences, insights, positions, and suggestions in terms of the (then) emerging global discourse of Internet governance and that of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as instruments of development. At the WSIS: An Asian Response Meeting in 2002, Susanna George, (then) Executive Director of Isis International, Manila, succinctly expressed this challenge being faced by the members of civil society organizations:</p>
<blockquote>For some feminist activists however, including myself, it has felt like trying to squeeze my concerns into a narrow definition of what gender concerns in ICTs are. I would like it to Cinderella’s ugly sister cutting off her toe to fit into the dainty slipper of gender concerns in ICTs. The development ball, it seems, can only accommodate some elements of what NGO activists, particularly those from the South, are concerned about in relation to new information and communications technologies. (George 2002)</blockquote>
<p>The above mentioned seminar, held in Bangkok, Thailand, on November 22-24, 2002, was a crucial early meeting for the representatives from Asian civil society organizations to share and shape their understanding and positions before taking part in the global conversations during the following years. The meeting was organised by Bread for All (Switzerland), Communication Rights in the Information Society Campaign (Netherlands), Forum-Asia (Thailand), and World Association for Christian Communication (United Kingdom), as a preparatory meeting before the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of WSIS, with 34 organizations from 16 Asian countries taking part in it. The Final Document produced at the end of this seminar was quite a remarkable one. It highlighted the simultaneity of Asia as one of the global centres of the information economy and the everyday reality of wide-spread poverty across the Asian countries, and went on to state that the first principle for the emerging global information society should be that the '[c]ommunication rights are fundamental to democracy and human development' (The World Summit on the Information Society: An Asian Response 2002). It proposed the following action items for the efforts towards a global inclusive information society: 1) strengthen community, 2) ensure access, 3) enhance the creation of appropriate content, 4) invigorate global governance, 5) uphold human rights, 6) extend the public domain, 7) protect and promote cultural and linguistic diversity, and 8) ensure public investment in infrastructure (ibid.).</p>
<p>Immediately after this Conference, several Asian civil society organizations attended the Asian Civil Society Forum, organised as part of the Conference of Non-governmental Organizations in Consultative Relations with the United Nations (CONGO), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during December 9-13, 2002. Representatives of Dhaka Ahsania Mission (Bangladesh), OneWorld South Asia (India), GLOCOM (Japan), Foundation for Media Alternative (Philippines), Korean Progressive Network – JINBONET (Republic of Korea), Friedrich Naumann Foundation (Singapore), International Federation of University Women (Switzerland), and Forum Asia (Regional) drafted a Joint Statement emphasising that a 'broad-based participation of civil society, especially from those communities which are excluded, marginalized and severely deprived, is critical in defining and building such a [true communicative, just and peaceful] society' (Aizu 2002). In the very next month, the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference was held in Tokyo during January 13-15, 2003, 'to develop a shared vision and common strategies for the “Information Society' (WSIS Executive Secretariat 2003: 2). The conference saw participation of representatives from 47 national governments, 22 international organizations, 54 private sector agencies, and 116 civil society organizations across the Asia-Pacific region. The Tokyo Declaration, the final document prepared at the conclusion of the Conference, recognized that:</p>
<blockquote>[T]he Information Society must ... facilitate full utilization of information and communication technologies (ICT) at all levels in society and hence enable the sharing of social and economic benefits by all, by means of ubiquitous access to information networks, while preserving diversity and cultural heritage. (Ibid.: 2)</blockquote>
<p>Further, it highlighted the following priority areas of action: 1) infrastructure development, 2) securing affordable, universal access to ICTs, 3) preserving linguistic and cultural diversity and promoting local content, 4) developing human resources, 5) establishing legal, regulatory and policy frameworks, 6) ensuring balance between intellectual property rights (IPR) and public interest, 7) ensuring the security of ICTs, and 8) fostering partnerships and mobilizing resources. It is not difficult to see how the focus of necessary actions shifted from an emphasis on concerns of community and human rights, and public investments and commons, towards those of legal and policy mechanisms, multi-partner delivery of services, and intellectual property rights. Civil society organizations, expectedly, felt sidelined in this Conference, and decided to issue a join statement of Asian civil society organizations to ensure that their positions are effectively presented. The first two topics mentioned in this document were: 1) '[c]ommunication rights should be fully recognized as a fundamental and universal human right to be protected and promoted in the information society,' and 2) '[t]he participation of civil society in the information society at all levels should be ensured and sustained, from policy planning to implementation, monitoring and evaluation' (UNSAJ et al 2003). The joint statement was endorsed by 30 civil society organizations: UDDIPAN (Bangladesh); COMFREL (Cambodia); ETDA (East Timor); The Hong Kong Council of Social Services (Hong Kong); Food India, IT for Change (India); Indonesian Infocom Society (Indonesia); Active Learning, CPSR, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, JTEC, Kyoto Journal, Ritsumeikan University Media Literacy Project, UNSAJ (Japan); Computer Association Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme (Nepal); APC Women's Networking Support Programme, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International (Philippines); Citizens' Action Network, Korean Progressive Network – Jinbonet, Labor News Production, ZAK (Republic of Korea); e-Pacificka Consulting (Samoa); National University of Singapore (Singapore); Public Television Service, Taiwan Association for Human Rights (Taiwan); Asian-South Pacific Bureau for Adult Education, FORUM ASIA, and TVE Asia Pacific (Regional) (Ibid.).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Participation in the WSIS Process</h2>
<p>The first WSIS conference was held in Geneva in December 2003. Through the processes of organizing this conference, and the second one in Tunis in November 2005, United Nations expressed a clear intention of great participation of actors from the private companies, civil society, academia, and media, along with the governmental organizations. During the first meeting of the WSIS Preparatory Committee (PrepCom-1) in Geneva, during July 1-5, 2002, the civil society organizations demanded that they should be allowed to co-shape the key topics to be discussed during the first conference (2003). There was already an Inter-Governmental Subcommittee on Contents and Themes, but no equivalent platform for the civil society organizations was available. With the approval of the Civil Society Plenary (CSP), the Civil Society Subcommittee on Content and Themes (WSIS-SCT) was instituted during PrepCom-1 (WSIS-SCT 2003b). At the second WSIS Preparatory Committee meeting (PrepCom-2) in Geneva, during February 17-28, 2003, the WSIS-SCT produced a summary of the views of its members titled 'Vision and Principles of Information and Communication Societies,' and also a one page brief titled 'Seven Musts: Priority Principles Proposed by Civil Society' to be used for lobbying purposes (Ibid.). This brief mentioned seven key principles of Internet governance identified by the civil society organization taking part in the WSIS process: (1) sustainable development, (2) democratic governance, (3) literacy, education, and research, (4) human rights, (5) global knowledge commons, (6) cultural and linguistic diversity, and (7) information security (WSIS-SCT 2003a).</p>
<p>Asian civil society organizations that took part in the PrepCom-2 meeting included United Nations Association of China (China); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, C2N - Community Communications Network (India); ICSORC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Resource Center (Iran); GAWF - General Arab Women Federation (Iraq); Daisy Consortium, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications (Japan); Association for Progressive Communication, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); WFEO - World Federation of Engineering Organization (Palestine); Asian South Pacific Bureau of Adult Education, Foundation for Media Alternatives, ISIS International – Manila (Philippines); Korean Progressive Network - Jinbonet (Republic of Korea); IIROSA - International Islamic Relief Organization (Saudi Arabia); and Taking IT Global (India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Turkey) (ITU 2003a).</p>
<p>All these efforts led to development of the Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society, which was prepared and published by the Civil Society Plenary at the Geneva conference, on December 08, 2003. The Declaration was titled 'Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2003). The Asian civil society organization that took part in the Geneva conference were BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, Drik, ICTDPB - Information & Communication Technology Development Program, Proshika - A Center for Human Development (Bangladesh); China Society for Promotion of the Guangcai Programme, Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, United Nations Association of China (China); The Hong Kong Council of Social Service (Hong Kong); CASP - Centre for Adivasee Studies and Peace, Childline India Foundation / Child Helpline International, DAWN - Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (India); Communication Network of Women's NGOs in Iran, Green front of Iran, ICTRC - Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Center, Islamic Women's Institute of Iran, Institute for Women's Studies and Research, Organization for Defending Victims of Violence (Iran); ILAM - Center for Arab Palestinians in Israel (Israel); Citizen Digital Solutions, Forum for Citizens' Television and Media, GLOCOM - Center for Global Communications, JCAFE - Japan Computer Access for Empowerment, Soka Gakkai International (Japan); LAD-Nepal - Literary Academy for Dalit of Nepal (Nepal); Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union, Global Knowledge Partnership (Malaysia); PAK Educational Society / Pakistan Development Network, SMEDA - Small & Medium Enterprise Development Authority (Pakistan); Palestine IT Association of Companies (Palestine); Isis International – Manila, Ugnayan ng Kababaihan sa Pulitika / Philippine Women's Network in Politics and Governance (Philippines); Citizen's Alliance for Consumer Protection of Korea, Korean Civil Society Network for WSIS (Republic of Korea); Youth Challenge (Singapore); Association for Progressive Communications (India and Philippines), CITYNET - Regional Network of Local Authorities for the Management of Human Settlements (India. Mongolia, and Philippines), Taking IT Global (India and Philippines) (ITU 2003b).</p>
<p>As the preparatory meetings and consultations towards the second WSIS conference advanced during the next year, the Asian civil society organizations attempted to engage more directly with the global Internet governance processes on one hand, and the national Internet and ICT policy situations on the other. Writing about their encounters at and before the second Preparatory Committee meeting of the Tunis conference, held in Geneva during February 17-25, 2005, Anita Gurumurthy and Parminder Jeet Singh made several early observations that have continued to resonate with the experiences of Asian civil society organizations throughout the decade (Gurumurthy & Singh 2005). Firstly, they indicated that the government agencies present in the dialogues tend to take diverging positions in international events and domestic contexts. Secondly, there was a marked absence of formal and informal discussions between the governmental and the civil society representatives of the same country present at the meeting. The government agencies were clearly disinterested in involving civil society organizations in the process. Thirdly, the civil society actors present in the meeting were mostly from the ICT for Development sector, and the organizations working in more 'traditional' sectors – such as education, health, governance reform, etc. – remained absent from the conversations. This is especially problematic in the case of such developing countries where there does not exist strategic linkages between civil society organizaions focusing on topics of technologized developmental interventions, and those involved in more 'traditional' development practices. Rekha Jain, in a separate report on the Indian experience of participating in the WSIS process, re-iterates some of these points (Jain 2006). She notes that '[w]hile the Secretary, [Department of Telecommunications, Government of India] was involved in (PrepCom-1) drafting the initial processes for involvement of NGOs, at the national level, this mechanism was not translated in to a process for involving the civil society or media' (Ibid.: 14).</p>
<p>The frequent lack of interest of national governments, especially in the Asian countries, to engage with civil society organizations on matters of policies and projects in Internet governance and ICTs for development (Souter 2007), further encouraged these organization to utilise the global discussion space opened up by the WSIS process to drive the agendas of democratisation of Internet governance processes, and protection and advancement of human rights and social justice. The second WSIS conference held in Tunis, during November 16-18, 2005, however, did not end in a positive note for the civil society organizations as a whole. The sentiment is aptly captured in the title of the Civil Society Statement issued after the Tunis Conference: 'Much more could have been achieved' (WSIS Civil Society Plenary 2005). Apart from producing this very important critical response to the WSIS process, within a month of its conclusions, the civil society organization contributed effectively in one of the more longer-term impacts of the process – the establishment of the Internet Governance Forums (IGFs). Immediately after the publication of the Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance (Desai et al) in June 2005, the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Japan, acting on behalf of the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus, came forward with public support for 'the establishment of a new forum to address the broad agenda of Internet governance issues, provided it is truly global, inclusive, and multi-stakeholder in composition allowing all stakeholders from all sectors to participate as equal peers' (WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2005: 3).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Asian Civil Society Organizations at the IGFs</h2>
<p>In 2006, the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus was reformed and established as a permanent 'forum for discussion, advocacy, action, and for representation of civil society contributions in Internet governance processes' (Civil Society Internet Government Caucus 2006). Representatives from Asian civil society organizations have consistently played critical roles in the functionings of this Caucus. Youn Jung Park of the Department of Technology and Society, SUNY Korea, co-founded and co-coordined the original Caucus in 2003. Adam Peake of the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), International University of Japan, was co-coordinator of the original Caucus from 2003 to 2006. Parminder Jeet Sing of IT for Change, India, was elected as one of the co-cordinators of the newly reformed Caucus in 2006, with the term ending in 2008. Izumi Aizu of the Institute for HyperNetwork Society and the Institute for InfoSocinomics, Tama University, Japan served as the co-coordinator of the Caucus during 2010-2012.</p>
<p>The first Internet Governance Forum organized in Athens, October 30 – November 2, 2006, saw participation from a very few Asian civil society organizations, mostly from Bangladesh and Japan (IGF 2006). The second Internet Governance Forum in Rio de Janeiro, November 12-15, 2007 had a wider representation from Asian civil society organizations: Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication, BFES - Bangladesh Friendship Education Society, VOICE – Voices for Interactive Choice and Empowerment (Bangladesh); China Association for Science and Technology, Internet Society of China (China); University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong); Alternative Law Forum (via Association for Progressive Communications - Women's Networking Support Programme), Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, IT for Change (India); GLOCOM, Kumon Center, Tama University (Japan); Sustainable Development Networking Programme (Jordan); Kuwait Information Technology Society (Kuwait); Assocation of Computer Engineers – Nepal, Rural Area Development Programme, Nepal Rural Information Technology Development Society (Nepal); Bytesforall – APC / Pakistan, Pakistan Christian Peace Foundation (Pakistan); Foundation for Media Alternatives, Philippine Resources for Sustainable Development Inc. (Philippines); and LIRNEasia (Sri Lanka). At the Open IGF Consultations in Geneva, on February 26 2008, the Internet Governance Caucus made two significant submissions: 1) that, although structuring the IGF sessions in Athens and Rio de Janeiro around the large themes of access, openness, diversity, and security have been useful to open up the multi-stakeholder dialogues, it is necessary to begin focused discussions of specific public policy issues to take the IGF process forward (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008a), and 2) that the Multi-Stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG), which drives the IGF process and events, should be made more proactive and transparent, and expanded in size so as to better include the different stakeholder groups who may self-identify their representatives for the MAG (Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus 2008b).</p>
<p>On one hand, the IGF Hyderabad, December 3-6, 2008, experienced a decline in the percentage of participants from civil society organizations and a rather modest increase in the percentage of participants from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables), especially since this was the first major international Internet governance summit held in an Asian country. On the other hand, the Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus succeeded to bring forth the term 'enhanced cooperation,' as mentioned in the Tunis Agenda, to be addressed and discussed in one of the main sessions of the Forum (IGF 2008). The next IGF held in Sharm El Sheikh, November 15-18, 2009, saw further decline of participation from both the representatives of civil society organizations, and the attendees from Asian countries (see: 6.1.5. Annexe – Tables). In this context, Youn Jung Park made the following statement in the Stock Taking session of the summit:</p>
<blockquote>As a cofounder of WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus in 2003, I would like to remind you ... [that] Internet Governance Forum was created as a compromise between those who supported the status quo Internet governance institution under one nation's status provision, and those who requested for more balanced roles for governments under international supervision of the Internet. While IGF has achieved a great success of diluting of such political tension between those who have different views of how to institutionalize Internet governance, ironically Internet governance forum became a forum without governance... [We] have to admit [that] IGF failed to deliver another mandate of the U.N. WSIS: Continuing discussion of how to design Internet governance institutions... The current IGF continues to function as knowledge transfer of ICANN's values to other stakeholders, while those who want to discuss and negotiate on how to design Internet governance institutions should have another platform for that specific U.N. WSIS mandate. (IGF 2009)</blockquote>
<p>The first Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) was held in Hong Kong on June 14-16, 2010. The organising committee included three civil society / acadmic organizations – Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM), Internet Society Hong Kong, and National University of Singapore – and three indpendent experts – Kuo-Wei Wu (Taiwan), Norbert Klein (Cambodia), and Zahid Jamil (Pakistan). Though the Forum had dominant presence from government and private sector participants, several representatives from Asian civil society / academic organizations spoke at the sessions: Ang Peng Hwa (Singapore Internet Research Centre, Nanyang Technological University), Charles Mok (Internet Society Hong Kong), Christine Loh (Civic Exchange), Chong Chan Yau (Hong Kong Blind Union), Clarence Tsang (Christian Action), Ilya Eric Lee (Taiwan E-Learning and Digital Archives Program, and Research Center for Information Technology Innovation), Izumi Aizu (Institute for HyperNetwork Society, and Institute for InfoSocinomics, Kumon Center, Tama University), Oliver “Blogie” Robillo (Mindanao Bloggers Community), Parminder Jeet Singh (IT for Change), Priscilla Lui (Against Child Abuse in Hong Kong), Tan Tin Wee (Centre for Internet Research, National University of Singapore), and Yap Swee Seng (Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development). As Ang Peng Hwa noted at the beginning of the summit, its key objective was to provide a formal space for various stakeholders from the Asia-Pacific region to discuss and provide inputs to the IGF process (APrIGF 2010). The regional forum was successful in enabling newer civil society entrants from the Asia-Pacific region to familiarize themselves with the IGF process, and to contribute to it. Oliver “Blogie” Robillo, represented and submit recommendations from Southeast Asian civil society organizations at IGF Vilnius, September 14-17, 2010, which was the first time he took part in the summit series. He emphasised the following topics: 1) openness and freedom of expression are the basis of democracy, and state-driven censorship of Internet in the region is an immediate threat to such global rights, 2) coordinated international efforts need to address and resolve not only global digital divides, but also the divides at regional, national, and sub-nationals scales, 3) the right to privacy is an integral part of cybersecurity, as well as a necessary condition for exercising human rights, 4) global Internet governance efforts must ensure that national governments do not control and restrict abilities of citizens to express through digital means, and it should be aligned with the universal human rights agenda, and 5) even after 5 years of the IGF process, a wider participation of civil society organizations, especially from the Asia-Pacific regions, remains an unachieved goal, which can only be achived if specific resources are allocated and processes are implemented (IGF 2010).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Internet Censorship and Civil Society Responses</h2>
<p>Throughout the decade of 2000-2010, censorship of Internet and restriction of digital expression remained a crucial Internet rights concern across the world, and especially the Asian countries. One of the earliest global reports on the matter was brought out by the Reporters without Borders. In 2006, it published a list of countries marked as 'Internet Enemies' that featured 16 countries, out of which 11 were from Asia: China, Iran, Maldives, Myanmar (then, Burma), Nepal, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam (Reporters without Borders 2006). The list was updated in 2007, and three of these countries – Libya, Maldives, and Nepal – were taken off (Ibid.). The unique contradictions of the Asian region were sharply foregrounded in the 2006-07 report on Internet censorship by OpenNet Initiative, which noted:</p>
<blockquote>Some of the most and least connected countries in the world are located in Asia: Japan, South Korea, and Singapore all have Internet penetration rates of over 65 percent, while Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal remain three of thirty countries with less than 1 percent of its citizens online. Among the countries in the world with the most restricted access, North Korea allows only a small community of elites and foreigners online. Most users must rely on Chinese service providers for connectivity, while the limited number North Korean–sponsored Web sites are hosted abroad... [T]hough India’s Internet community is the fifth largest in the world, users amounted to only about 4 percent of the country’s population in 2005. Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Nepal are among the world’s least-developed countries. Despite the constraints on resources and serious developmental and political challenges, however, citizens are showing steadily increasing demand for Internet services such as Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP), blogging, and chat. (Wang 2007)</blockquote>
<p>The report further described the strategy used by various Asian governments of 'delegation of policing and monitoring responsibilities to ISPs, content providers, private corporations, and users themselves' (Ibid.) These mechanisms enforce self-surveillance and self-censorship in the face of threats of loss of commercial license, denial of services, and even criminal liability. Defamation suits and related civil and criminal liability have also been used by several Asian governments to silence influential critics and protesters. Direct technical filtering of Internet traffic (especially inwards traffic) and blocking of URLS via government directives sent to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have also been common practice in key Asian countries (Ibid.). Expectedly, such experiences of oppression led to widespread campaigns and communications by the Asian civil society organizations, as can be sensed from the above mentioned submission by Oliver “Blogie” Robillo at IGF Vilnius.</p>
<p>Among the Asian countries, the comprehensive technologies of censorship developed and deployed by China has been studied most extensively. The Golden Shield Project was initiated by the Ministry of Public Security of China in 1998 to undertake blanket blocking of incoming Internet traffic based on specific URLs and terms. Evidences of the project getting operationalised became available in 2003 (Garden Networks for Freedom of Information 2004). Censorship of Internet in China, however, has not only been dependent on such sophisticated systems. In 2003, it was made mandatory for all residents of Lhasa, Tibet, to use a specific combination and password to access Internet, which was directly linked to their names and address. An Internet ID Card was issued by the government to implement this (International Campaign for Tibet. 2004). Tibet Action Institute has been a key civil society organization at the forefront of cyber-offensive of the Chinese government. A recent documentary by the Institute, titled 'Tibet: Frontline of the New Cyberwar,' has narrated how it has worked closely with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, to identify, trace, and resist the malware- and other cyber-attacks experienced by the civil society actors and websites in favor of independence of Tibet (Tibet Action Institute 2015). Not only activists supporting the Tibetan cause, digital security training emerged as an important aspect of the life of civil society organizations during the decade. Asian organizations like Bytes for All (Pakistan) and Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (Mynamar), as well as international organizations like Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab have educated and supported civil society activities much beyond the Internet governance sphere with tools and techniques for effectively using digital channels of communications, and defending themselves for cyber-threats.</p>
<p>Combination of traditional forms of civil society mobilizations and digital techniques have often been used resist attempts by Asian governments to control the online communication space. Huma Yusuf has extensively studied the emergence of hybrid media strategies, using both old media channels like newspapers and new media channels like blogs and video sharing platforms, among citizen journalists and civil society activists in Pakistan as the government took harsh steps towards control of both traditional and online media during 2007-2008 (Yusuf 2009). She has carefully traced how possibilities of new forms of information and media sharing enabled by Internet were initially identified and implemented by citizen journalists and student activists, which was quickly learned and re-deployed by more formal organisation, such as print and electronic news companies, and civil society organizations like those involved in election monitoring (Ibid.). Malaysia also experienced fast-accelerating face-off between the government and the civil society during 2007-2010, as the former started intervening directly into censoring blogs and newspaper websites. On one hand, the government took legal actions against critical bloggers, either directly or indirectly, and on the other it instructed ISPs to block 'offensive content.' It also borrowed the 'Singapore-model' to mandate registration of bloggers with government authorities, if they are identifed as writing on socio-political topics. The civil society actors responded to these oppressive steps by setting up a new blog dedicated to coverage of the defamation cases (filed against prominent bloggers), and publicly sharing instructions for circumvention of the blocks imposed by ISPs. The National Alliance of Bloggers was soon formed, which organised the “Blogs and Digital Democracy” forum on October 3, 2007 (Thien 2011: 46-47). Similarly, Bloggers Against Censorship campaign took shape in India in 2006 as the government first directed ISPs to block specific blogs hosted on Blogspot, TypePad, and Yahoo! Geocities, and then went for complete blocking of Yahoo! Geocities as the ISPs failed to block specific sub-domains of the platform (Bloggers Collective Group 2006). Learning from this experience, the following year Indian government decided to work directly with Orkut to take down 'defamatory content' about a politician (The Economic Times 2007). This is common for other Asian governments too, as they have continued to develop more legally binding and technically sophisticated measures to monitor and control online expression.</p>
<p>In the 'Internet Enemies Report 2012,' Reporters without Borders listed 12 countries as 'enemies of the Internet,' out of which 10 were from Asia – Bahrain, China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam – and it named 14 countries that are conducting surveillance on its citizens, out of which 7 were from Asia – India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and United Arab Emirates (Reporters without Borders 2012). At the APrIGF held in Tokyo, July 18-20, 2012, a group of delegates from civil society organizations working in the South-East Asian region issued a joint statement with a clear call for global action against the shrinking space for freedom of (digital) expression in the region (Thai Netizen Network et al 2012). They specifically noted the following national acts as examples of the legislative mechanisms being used by different Asian governments to criminalize online speech and/or to harass public dissenters:</p>
<blockquote>Burma – The 2004 Electronic Transactions Act<br />
Cambodia – The 2012 Draft Cyber-Law, the 1995 Press Law, and the 2010 Penal Code<br />
Malaysia – The 2012 Amendment to the Evidence Act and the 2011 Computing Professionals Bill<br />
Indonesia – The 2008 Law on Information and Electronic Transaction and the 2008 Law on Pornography<br />
The Philippines – The 2012 Data Privacy Act<br />
Thailand – The 2007 Computer Crimes Act, the Article 112 of the Penal Code, and the 2004 Special Case Investigation Act<br />
Vietnam – The 1999 Penal Code, the 2004 Publishing Law, the 2000 State Secrets Protection Ordinance, and the 2012 Draft Decree on Internet Management. (Ibid.)</blockquote>
<p>The statement was co-signed by Thai Netizen Network, Thai Media Policy Centre, The Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM), Southeast Asian Press Alliance (SEAPA), Southeast Asian Centre for e-Media (SEACeM), Victorius (Ndaru) Eps, Community Legal Education Center (CLEC), Sovathana (Nana) Neang, Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), and was endorsed by ICT Watch (Indonesian ICT Partnership Association).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Annexe – Tables</h2>
<h3>Table 1: Participation from Asian Countries and of representatives from Asian civil society organisations in IGFs, 2006-2010</h3>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Event</th>
<th>Participants from Asian Countries</th>
<th>Participants from Civil Society Organizations</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IGF Athens 2006</td>
<td>11%</td>
<td>29%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IGF Rio de Janeiro 2007</td>
<td>13%</td>
<td>32%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IGF Hyderabad 2008</td>
<td>56% from India, and 15% from other Asian countries</td>
<td>25%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IGF Sharm El Sheikh 2009</td>
<td>17%</td>
<td>19%</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>IGF Vilnius 2010</td>
<td>Not Available</td>
<td>Not Available</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Source: Reports available on Internet Governance Forum website (http://igf.wgig.org/cms).</p>
<h3>Table 2: Internet Society Chapters in Asia</h3>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Chapter</th>
<th>Year of Establishment</th>
<th>URL</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Afghanistan</td>
<td>In formation</td>
<td>Not available</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Bahrain</td>
<td>2001</td>
<td>http://www.bis.org.bh/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Bangladesh</td>
<td>2011</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.org.bd/dhaka/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Hong Kong</td>
<td>2005</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.hk/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India (Bangalore)</td>
<td>2010</td>
<td>http://www.isocbangalore.org/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India (Chennai)</td>
<td>2007</td>
<td>http://www.isocindiachennai.org/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India (Delhi)</td>
<td>2002. Rejuvenated in 2008.</td>
<td>http://www.isocdelhi.in/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India (Kolkata)</td>
<td>2009</td>
<td>http://isockolkata.in/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>India (Trivandrum)</td>
<td>2015</td>
<td>Not available</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Indonesia</td>
<td>2014</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.or.id/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Israel</td>
<td>1995</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.org.il/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Japan</td>
<td>1994</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.jp/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Lebanon</td>
<td>2010</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.org.lb/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Malaysia</td>
<td>2010</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.my/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Nepal</td>
<td>2007</td>
<td>http://www.internetsociety.org.np/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Pakistan (Islamabad)</td>
<td>2013</td>
<td>http://www.isocibd.org.pk/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Palestine</td>
<td>2002</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.ps/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Philippines</td>
<td>1999. Rejuvenated in 2009.</td>
<td>https://www.facebook.com/isoc.ph/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Qatar</td>
<td>2011</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.qa/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Republic of Korea</td>
<td>2014</td>
<td>Not available</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Singapore</td>
<td>2011</td>
<td>http://isoc.sg/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Sri Lanka</td>
<td>2010</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.lk/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Taipei</td>
<td>1996</td>
<td>http://www.isoc.org.tw/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Thailand</td>
<td>1996</td>
<td>http://www.isoc-th.org/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>United Arab Emirates</td>
<td>2007</td>
<td>http://www.isocuae.com/</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Yemen</td>
<td>2013</td>
<td>http://isoc.ye/</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>Source: Details of chapters available on Internet Society website (http://www.internetsociety.org/).</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Reference</h2>
<p>Aizu, Izumi et al. 2002. Joint Statement from Asia Civil Society Forum Participants on World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). December 13. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://www.wsisasia.org/wsis-acsf2002/wsis-acsfdec13f.doc.</p>
<p>Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF). 2010. APrIGF Roundtable – June 15th, 2010: Session 1 – Welcome Remarks and Introduction – Real Time Transcript. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://2010.rigf.asia/aprigf-roundtable-june-15th-2010-session-1/.</p>
<p>Bloggers Collective Group. 2006. Bloggers Against Censorship. Last updated on April 30, 2009. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://censorship.wikia.com/wiki/Bloggers_Against_Censorship.</p>
<p>Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. 2006. Internet Governance Caucus Charter. October 14. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://igcaucus.org/old/IGC-charter_final-061014.html.</p>
<p>Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. 2008a. Inputs for the Open IGF Consultation, Geneva, 26th February, 2008 – Statement II: Main Session Themes for IGF, Hyderabad. February 26. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://igcaucus.org/old/IGC%20-%20Main%20themes%20for%20IGF%20Hyd.pdf.</p>
<p>Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. 2008b. Inputs for the Open IGF Consultation, Geneva, 26th February, 2008 – Statement III: Renewal / Restructuring of Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group. February 26. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://igcaucus.org/old/IGC%20-%20MAG%20Rotation.pdf.</p>
<p>Desai, Nitin, et al. 2005. Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance. United June. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf.</p>
<p>Garden Networks for Freedom of Information. 2004. Breaking through the “Golden Shield.” Open Society Institute. November 01. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/china-internet-censorship-20041101.pdf.</p>
<p>George, Susanna. 2002. Women and New Information and Communications Technologies: The Promise of Empowerment. Presented at The World Summit on the Information Society: An Asian Response Meeting, November 22-24. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://www.wsisasia.org/materials/susanna.doc/.</p>
<p>Gurumurthy, Anita, & Parminder Jeet Singh. 2005. WSIS PrepCom 2: A South Asian Perspective. Association for Progressive Communications. April 01. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://www.apc.org/en/news/hr/world/wsis-prepcom-2-south-asian-perspective.</p>
<p>Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 2006. Athens 2006 – List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/PLP.html.</p>
<p>Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 2008. Arrangements for Internet Governance, Global and National/Regional. IGF Hyderabad, India. December 5. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://web.archive.org/web/20130621205004/http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/hyderabad_prog/AfIGGN.html [Original URL: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/hyderabad_prog/AfIGGN.html].</p>
<p>Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 2009. Taking Stock and Looking Forward – On the Desirability of the Continuation of the Forum, Part II. IGF Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. November 18. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/2009/sharm_el_Sheikh/Transcripts/Sharm%20El%20Sheikh%2018%20November%202009%20Stock%20Taking%20II.txt.</p>
<p>Internet Governance Forum (IGF). 2010. Taking Stock of Internet Governance and the Way Forward. IGF Vilnius, Lithuania. September 17. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://igf.wgig.org/cms/component/content/article/102-transcripts2010/687-taking-stock.</p>
<p>International Campaign for Tibet. 2004. Chinese Authorities Institute Internet ID Card System in Tibet for Online Surveillance. April 30. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.savetibet.org/chinese-authorities-institute-internet-id-card-system-in-tibet-for-online-surveillance/.</p>
<p>International Telecommunication Union (ITU). 2003a. PrepCom-2 / 17-28 February 2003 – Final List of Participants. February 28. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/participation/prepcom2/prepcom2-cl.pdf.</p>
<p>International Telecommunication Union (ITU). 2003b. Geneva Phase of the WSIS: List of Participants. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/summit_participants.pdf.</p>
<p>Jain, Rekha. 2006. Participation of Developing Countries in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Process: India Case Study. Association for Progressive Communications. March. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://rights.apc.org/documents/wsis_india.pdf.</p>
<p>Reporters without Borders. 2006. List of the 13 Internet Enemies. Last updated on August 28, 2007. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://en.rsf.org/list-of-the-13-internet-enemies-07-11-2006,19603.</p>
<p>Reporters without Borders. 2012. Internet Enemies Report 2012. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/rapport-internet2012_ang.pdf.</p>
<p>Souter, David. 2007. WSIS and Civil Society. In: Whose Summit? Whose Information Society? Developing Countries and Civil Society at the World Summit on the Information Society. With additional research by Abiodun Jagun. Association for Progressive Communications. Pp. 72-89. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://rights.apc.org/documents/whose_summit_EN.pdf.</p>
<p>Thai Netizen Network et al. 2012. Southeast Asian Civil Society Groups Highlight Increasing Rights Violations Online, Call for Improvements to Internet Governance Processes in the Region. Statement of Civil Society Delegates from Southeast Asia to 2012 Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF). July 31. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/AprIGF-Joint%20Statement-FINAL.pdf.</p>
<p>The Economic Times. 2007. Orkut's Tell-All Pact with Cops. May 01. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-05-01/news/28459689_1_orkut-ip-addresses-google-spokesperson.</p>
<p>The World Summit on the Information Society: An Asian Response. 2002. Final Document. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://www.wsisasia.org/materials/finalversion.doc.</p>
<p>Thien, Vee Vian. 2011. The Struggle for Digital Freedom of Speech: The Malaysian Sociopolitical Blogosphere’s Experience. In: Ronald Deibert et al. (eds.) Access Contested. OpenNet Initiative. Pp. 43-63. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://access.opennet.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/accesscontested-chapter-03.pdf.</p>
<p>Tibet Action Institute. 2015. Tibet: Frontline of the New Cyberwar. YouTube. January 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE3AQqbGVkk.</p>
<p>UNSAJ et al. 2003. Civil Society Observations and Response to the Tokyo Declaration. Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on the World Summit on the Information Society. January 15. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from http://www.wsisasia.org/wsis-tokyo/tokyo-statement.html.</p>
<p>Wang, Stephanie. 2007. Internet Filtering in Asia in 2006-2007. OpenNet Initiative. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://opennet.net/studies/asia2007.</p>
<p>WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. 2005. Initial Reactions to the WGIG Report. Contribution from GLOCOM on behalf of the WSIS Civil Society Internet Governance Caucus. July 19. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from www.itu.int/wsis/%20docs2/pc3/contributions/co23.doc.</p>
<p>WSIS Civil Society Plenary. 2003. “Shaping Information Societies for Human Needs” – Civil Society Declaration to the World Summit on the Information Society. December 8. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/civil-society-declaration.pdf.</p>
<p>WSIS Civil Society Plenary. 2005. “Much more could have been achieved” – Civil Society Statement on the World Summit on the Information Society. December 18. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/contributions/co13.pdf.</p>
<p>WSIS Civil Society Subcommittee on Content and Themes. 2003a. “Seven Musts”: Priority Principles Proposed by Civil Society. February 25. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.movimientos.org/es/foro_comunicacion/show_text.php3%3Fkey%3D1484.</p>
<p>WSIS Civil Society Subcommittee on Content and Themes. 2003b. Final Report on Prepcom-2 Activities of the Civil Society on Content and Themes. March 27. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/pcip/misc/cs_sct.pdf.</p>
<p>WSIS Executive Secretariat. 2003. Report of the Asia-Pacific Regional Conference for WSIS (Tokyo, 13-15 January 2003). WSIS. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-s/md/03/wsispc2/doc/S03-WSISPC2-DOC-0006!!PDF-E.pdf.</p>
<p>Yusuf, Huma. 2009. Old and New Media: Converging during the Pakistan Emergency (March 2007 - February 2008). MIT Centre for Civic Media. January 12. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from https://civic.mit.edu/blog/humayusuf/old-and-new-media-converging-during-the-pakistan-emergency-march-2007-february-2008.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-open-review'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-open-review</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet Governance ForumResearchInternet HistoriesCivil SocietyResearchers at Work2015-11-13T05:54:33ZBlog Entry Digital Activism in Asia Reader
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader
<b>The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn. From flash-mobs in Taiwan to feminist mobilisations in India, from hybrid media strategies of Syrian activists to cultural protests in Thailand, we see the emergence of political acts that transform the citizen from being a beneficiary of change to becoming an agent of change. In co-shaping these changes, what the digital shall be used for, and what its consequences will be, are both up for speculation and negotiation. Digital Activism in Asia marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being refracted through the ICT4D logic, or the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself, but shaped by multiplicity, unevenness, and urgencies of digital sites and users in Asia. It is our great pleasure to present the Digital Activism in Asia Reader.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Book</h2>
<p>The Reader took shape over two workshops with a diverse range of participants, including activists, change-makers, and scholars, organised by the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme in June 2014 and March 2015. During the first workshop, the participants identified the authors, topics, and writings that should be included/featured in the reader, based upon their relevance in the grounded practices of the participants, who came from various Asian countries. The second workshop involved open discussions regarding how the selected readings should be annotated, from key further questions to strategies of introducing them, followed by development of the annotations by the participants of the workshop. The full list of contributors, annotators, and editors is mentioned at the end of the book.</p>
<p>We are grateful to the <a href="http://meson.press/about/" target="_blank">Meson Press</a> for its generous and patience support throughout the development process of the book.</p>
<p><strong>Please download, read, and share this open-access book from the Meson Press <a href="http://meson.press/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/9783957960511-Digital-Activism-Asia-Reader.pdf" target="_blank">website</a>.</strong></p>
<p>The Reader has been edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, with support from Anirudh Sridhar, Denisse Albornoz, and Verena Getahun.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Excerpt from the Foreword</h2>
<p>Compiling this Reader on Digital Activism in Asia is fraught with compelling challenges, because each of the key terms in the formulation of the title is sub-ject to multiple interpretations and fierce contestations. The construction of ‘Asia’ as a region, has its historical roots in processes of colonial technologies of cartography and navigation. Asia was both, a measured entity, mapped for resources to be exploited, and also a measure of the world, promising anorientation to the Western World’s own turbulent encounters. As Chen Kuan-Hsing points out in his definitive history of the region, Asia gets re-imagined as a ‘method’ in cold-war conflicts, becoming the territory to be assimilated through exports of different ideologies and cultural purports. Asia does not have its own sense of being aregion. The transactions, interactions, flows and exchanges between different countries and regions in Asia have been so entirely mediated by powers of colonisation that the region remains divided and reticent in its imagination of itself. However, by the turn of the 21st century, Asia has seen a new awakening. It finds a regional identity, which, surprisingly did not emerge from its consolidating presence in global economics or in globalised structures of trade and commerce. Instead, it finds a presence, for itself, through a series of crises of governance, of social order, of political rights, and of cultural productions, that binds it together in unprecedented ways.</p>
<p>The digital turn might as well be marked as an Asian turn, because with the new networks of connectivity, with Asian countries marking themselves as informatics hubs, working through a circulated logic of migrant labour and dis-tributed resources, there came a sense of immediacy, proximity, and urgencythat continues to shape the Asian imagination in a new way. In the last decade or so, the rapid changes that have emerged, creating multiple registers of modernity, identity, and community in different parts of Asia, accelerated by a seamless exchange of ideas, commodities, cultures, and people have created a new sense of the region as emerging through co-presence rather than competition and conflict. Simultaneously, the emergence of global capitals of information, labour and cultural export, have created new reference points by which the region creates its identities and networks that are no longer subject to the tyranny of Western hegemony...</p>
<p>While the digital remains crucial to this shaping of contemporary Asia, both in sustaining the developmental agenda that most of the countries espouse, and in opening up an inward looking gaze of statecraft and social organisation, the digital itself remains an ineffable concept. Largely because the digital is like a blackbox that conflates multiple registers of meaning and layers of life, it becomes important to unengineer it and see what it enables and hides. The economic presence of the digital is perhaps the most visible in telling the story of Asia in the now. Beginning with the dramatic development of Singapore as the centre of informatics governance and the emergence of a range of cities from Shanghai to Manilla and Bangalore to Tehran, there has been an accelerated narrative of economic growth and accumulation of capital that is often the global face of the Asian turn. However, this economic reordering is not a practice in isolation. It brings with it, a range of social stirrings that seek to overthrow traditional structures of oppression, corruption, control, and injustice that have often remained hidden in the closed borders of Asian countries. However, the digital marks a particular shift where these questions are no longer being excavated by the ICT4D logic, of the West’s attempts to save Asia from itself. These are questions that emerge from the ground, as more people interact with progressive and liberal politics and aspire not only for higher purchase powers but a better quality of rights. The digital turn has opened up a range of social and political rights based discourses, practices, and movements, where populations are holding their governments and countries responsible, accountable, and culpable in the face of personal and collective loss and injustice...</p>
<p>In the face of this multiplicity of digital sites and usages that are reconfiguring Asia, it is obvious then, that the very nature of what constitutes activism is changing as well. Organised civil society presence in Asia has often had a strong role in shaping modern nation states, but more often than not these processes were defined in the same vocabulary as that of the powers that they were fighting against. Marked by a strong sense of developmentalism and often working in complement to the state rather than keeping a check on the state’s activities, traditional activism in Asia has often suffered from the incapacity to scale and the inability to find alternatives to the state-defined scripts of development, growth and progress. In countries where literacy rates have been low, these movements also suffer from being conceived in philosophical and linguistic sophistry that escapes the common citizen and remains the playground of the few who have privileges afforded to them by class and region. Digital Activism, however, seems to have broken this language barrier, both internally and externally, allowing for new visualities enabled by ubiquitous computing to bring various stakeholders into the fray... At the same time, the digital itself has introduced new problems and concerns that are often glossed over, in the enthralling tale of progress. Concerns around digital divide, invasive practices of personal data gathering, the nexus of markets and governments that install the citizen/consumer in precarious conditions, and the re-emergence of organised conservative politics are also a part of the digital turn. Activism has had to focus not only on digital as a tool, but digital also as a site of protest and resistance...</p>
<p>The Reader does not offer an index of the momentous emergence with the growth of the digital or a chronological account of how digital activism in Asia has grown and shaped the region. Instead, the Reader attempts a crowd-sourced compilation that presents critical tools, organisations, theoretical concepts, political analyses, illustrative case-studies and annotations, that an emerging network of changemakers in Asia have identified as important in their own practices within their own contexts.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-activism-in-asia-reader</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroDigital ActivismDigital Activism in Asia ReaderFeaturedResearchNet CulturesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-10-24T14:36:44ZBlog EntryMock-Calling – Ironies of Outsourcing and the Aspirations of an Individual
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling
<b>This post by Sreedeep is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. He is an independent photographer and a Fellow at the Centre for Public Affairs and Critical Theory, Shiv Nadar University, Delhi. In this essay, Sreedeep explores the anxieties and ironies of the unprecedented IT/BPO boom in India through the perspective and experiences of a new entrant in the industry, a decade ago. The narrative tries to capture some of the radical
hedonistic consequences of the IT-burst on our lifestyles, imagination and aspirations delineated and fraught with layers of conscious deception and prolonged probation.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>best start (the advertisement)</h2>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_01_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_01_Resized" class="image-left" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_01_Resized" /><br />
<em>In the darkest hours of night, they remain awake serving some other continent across the oceans.<br />
The sparkling exterior complements the sleeplessness.</em></p>
<p>Colorful half-pagers listing job openings in dedicated sections of dailies for the ‘educated’ and ‘experienced’ have been common in post liberalized India. When the eyes cruise through the various logos and offerings of the MNCs in these over populated pages, one gets reminded of a decade when the front, back, and inside pages of newspaper supplements overflowed with job offerings in the lowest ranks of the IT. BPO vacancies which littered the folios primarily sought to lure fresh college pass-outs ‘proficient in English’. Back then, one was yet getting familiar with names such as ‘Convergys’, ‘Daksh’, ‘Global-Vantage’, ‘EXL’, ‘Vertex’. It made one wonder why they needed so many people to ‘walk-in’ week after week, and how they made thousands of ‘on the spot offers’ with ‘revised salaries’ following ‘quick and easy interviews’ and ‘fastest selection processes’. What these selected people actually did, once they got in, was another mystery altogether.</p>
<p>Some of these MNCs promising nothing short of a ‘best start’ to one’s career, that too with the ‘best starting salaries for a fresher’, often came to college campuses for recruitment. They conducted large scale interviews and generously granted immediate offer-letters to final-year students, at the end of each academic year. I happily overlooked the (fine) print, the text, design, and all the other details of these BPO ads. In fact, I never bothered to figure out what the acronym meant till such time when I was in desperate need for a gadget make-over. My age old Range-Finder camera deserved to be disposed and displaced by a Digital SLR. That was the summer of 2003...</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_02_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_02_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_02_Resized" /><br />
<em>The iconic ship building of Convergys – one of the first amongst the many that stood alone fifteen years ago, surrounded by far-‐away sketches of multistoried constructions and a cyber-‐hub that was yet to be born and the eight lane highway leading to Jaipur, about to be built beside it.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>say something more about yourself (the interview)</h2>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_03_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_03_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_03_Resized" /><br />
<em>Call flow and traffic flow is fast and furious both inside and outside such centers of info-exchange and mega-data transmissions every second every day.</em></p>
<p>“You have mentioned in this form that your aim is to ‘do something different’. How would you relate that to your decision to work in a call center?” I was asked.</p>
<p>I had given more than couple of interviews, to get rejected on both occasions, and by then had realized what exactly they preferred to hear and the kind of profile that they wanted to hire. I was in no mood to miss my lunch and waste another day in the scorching heat traveling to one of these hotels where the interviews were conducted. I was tired of waiting for hours sipping cold water and looking at formally dressed men and women being dumped from one room to another – going through a series of eliminating rounds before reaching the interview stage, when they politely conveyed “…thank you very much, you may leave for now, we’ll get back to you…”, especially, to all those lacking a ‘neutral English accent'.</p>
<p>On the first occasion, I took great pleasure and interest in observing every bit of it. On the second, I was getting a hang of it. On the third, I felt like a school kid appearing for an oral examination at the mercy of the schoolmaster and was perennially requested at every step to say something (more) about oneself. But, I had no grudges. Neither the posh ambience nor the polite attitude of the employers towards hundreds of candidates walking-in everyday was comparable with the interview-scene of Ray’s ‘<em>Pratidwandi</em>’ [1]. The scene was acting out in reverse. Now they needed us (in bulk) more than we needed them. Any English-speaking dude eager to believe in the promises of the new-age-profession, even with less or ordinary qualifications, or with no desires to seek further qualifications, was in great demand, like never before.</p>
<p>On the fourth occasion, I thought that I had my answers ready.</p>
<p>“Well, your CV suggests something else. Why don’t you contemplate choosing a creative profession?”</p>
<p>The extra curricular activities’ column on my CV was getting reduced in size with each passing interview that I chose to face. Later I felt that I could have said something else instead of answering, “Madam, I am from a middle-class family, where creativity is not given much space beyond a point.”</p>
<p>I was reminded that I should use her first name instead of uttering ‘Madam’ repeatedly. “But, most of the creative minds come from the middle-class background”, she refuted.</p>
<p>“May be I don’t have much of confidence in my creative abilities.”</p>
<p>The conversation continued for quite long. I did not fall short of sentences to cover up this process of conscious deception. She was busy evaluating my English and was possibly overlooking the content of my answers while making points on a piece of paper as she kept asking questions regarding hobbies, movies, etc. I was asked to listen to men talking in American accent and was instructed to choose between options that summarized the probable conclusion of their conversation. Then I was asked me to wait outside.</p>
<p>The interview with the Senior Process Manager from Pune was supposedly the last round, I was told. A charming voice from across the table made me feel as if he had been waiting to hear from me since the time we met long ago, “So, how is life?”</p>
<p>“Great Sir”.</p>
<p>“Great? You don’t get to hear that too often. Okay, please say something about your self.”</p>
<p>There seemed to be no end to this essential inquiry about ‘the self’ at any stage! I started with my name and ended with my ambition, which was to make a career in a call center.</p>
<p>He must have found it useless to discuss the work profile with me. Truly, I had no idea about what I was supposed to do on the deck. But, I did not miss any chance to convey how keen I was to learn and deliver. This was followed by a discussion on salary, which was short, because as a fresher, I was in no position to bargain.</p>
<p>While passing the offer letter, the HR lady formally made a point to emphasize the formal dress code in the office. Looking back, I presume it was my appearance that prompted her to state the code. With the hair almost touching the shoulders, and a face not shaven for more than a month, the loose fit denims incapable of keeping the shirt tucked, I must have made a sufficient impression to instigate concern in her mind, although unknowingly. Jaswindar (the man who thought smoking bidi in the lawns of the corporate cathedral is quite cool) replied, “I don’t have any formal wear. Does the company pay any advance for buying some?”</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_04_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_04_Resized" /><br />
<em>Cyber Hub @ midnight – the nerve centre of several corporates.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>what if they find out (the first day)</h2>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_05_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_05_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_05_Resized" /><br />
<em>Even sky is not the limit. The exchange of information and its pace defies border – political or physical.</em></p>
<p>A cold current ran through the spine of several candidates, especially the first timers, with every signature they put on the bottom left of each page of the agreement of the terms and conditions that required them to be graduates. Obviously, quite a few of them were not graduates. What if they found out that they were not? But they did not. I guess, they never cared to verify the certificates enclosed in the pink file. Nor did they care to figure out what happened to those tax-forms, provident fund forms, insurance forms signed and submitted by the 124 employees joining job on the 9th of June. Lengthy spells of instructions related to form-filling on the first day were forgotten, as most of them were happily distracted or disinterested. The crowd was busy checking out each other – the vending machine and its options, the fancy phone and its features – also enquiring or narrating previous call center experiences, the hassle in missing or getting the first pick-up for the day...</p>
<p>While these strangers were desperate to know or let the others know ‘something more about themselves’, the junior officials instructing us ‘where to tick’, ‘what to remember’, ‘how to write’, ‘when to stop’ were not in a position to exhibit how irritated they were with the tough task of managing so many recruits. Things got even worse with the daylong induction lectures on training, transport, finance, assets, ‘our motifs’ and ‘your expectations’, ‘your contribution’ and ‘our expectations’. Thankfully, there was good lunch, free internet access (quite unthinkable in those days of expensive cyber cafes) and AC cabs to follow. I fancied my relief from the heat and hostel food for the next few weeks of my paid holiday without any sense of remorse.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_06_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_06_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_06_Resized" /><br />
<em>The Convergys building (now taken over by Vedanta) on a full moon night. The plush lawns used to be a breeding ground for generating dust haze. The compound is highly protected/exclusive zone. Epitome of global connectivity ensures complete disconnection with the local surroundings.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>my camera vs their camera (getting trained)</h2>
<p> <img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_07_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_07_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_07_Resized" /><br />
<em>The ever-expanding city with all its imposed notions of urbanity on an area essentially rural leaves no scope for the evolution of the public space. On the contrary, any space outside the strict confines of these gated nations/notions invite threats of the highest order or at least it is perceived to be so.</em></p>
<p>What if they find out? No, they didn’t.</p>
<p>For the next one and a half months, we loitered around in the mornings, nights, evenings, and graveyard shifts of the classrooms and cafés (though not in every corner as mobility was highly restricted and under severe surveillance), at times enjoying and at times sleeping through the training sessions, impatiently waiting for the salary to get transferred to the Citi Bank account which they had opened for us to be swiped-out the moment the money arrived. Their surveillant eyes were not technologically advanced enough to guess the respective reasons to take up the job casually and remain appointed before absconding. A host of young fellas kept counting the number of day remaining:</p>
<ul>
<li>While the trainer with 3 kids in 7 years (now needing one more) with a ‘do it or I’ll make you do it’ attitude reminded us that prostitution is oldest customer care service, and the role of a customer care executive is one of the most prestigious ones and definitely not deplorable just because we work at night (as do the docs and cops).</li>
<li>While listening to the trainees whose primary interests varied from stock exchange to cooking for the wife to horse breeding and extending till the ‘search for truth in Himalayas’. In a free speech session in VNA (Voice and Accent Training), fitness was synonymous with Baba Ramdev for some folks and euthanasia meant mass-killing. And what about capital-punishment? “Would have known if I attended the college debates”, someone proudly said. The trainer was kind to say “Then talk about censorship”. The girl with colored hair was quick to question, “Is that an automated cruise?”</li>
<li>While cruising through the consonants, diphthongs, vowel sounds, and imported ‘modules’, rapid ‘mock-calls’ and learning to intonate. We bit the ‘B’s, kissed the ‘W’s and by the time we rolled the ‘R’s, reached the soft ‘T’s and faded ‘P’s, I felt that the next big revolution was here. Tongue, lip, throat, teeth tried their level best to ape the ones across the Atlantic to the norms of their phonetic culture.</li>
<li>While obviously not uttering the obvious that this entire system was a consequence of service being subcontracted to places where establishment and labour costs were way more cheaper.</li></ul>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_08_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_08_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_08_Resized" /><br />
<em>Walls can guard the flow of trespassers but the walls can rarely be guarded against the practice of public urination. An employee relieves himself in the middle of a graveyard shift on his way back after a quick smoke during the miserly half an hour break.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>keeping balance (the absconding case & the attrition list)</h2>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_09_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_09_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_09_Resized" /><br />
<em>The building came first as isolated blocks of self-sufficient units generating its own electricity and meeting its own needs. The infrastructure external and essential to its sustenance is still in its nascent stage.</em></p>
<p>In between the lines of the Punjabi beats in the moving cab or Pearl Jam playing on the i-pod in full volume to resist the former; before and after ‘hi bro’, ‘hey dude’, ‘yo man’, ‘yap buddy’; from weekend <em>masti</em> to an inspirational night-out, we constantly juggled with call-center jargon and silently yapped about:</p>
<ul>
<li>How to revolt against ‘IST’ (Indian Stretchable Time)</li>
<li>Why the ‘pick-up time’ hadn’t been SMSed yet</li>
<li>Why the fucking cab driver did not come fucking five fucking minutes earlier</li>
<li>How often to ‘login’ early and ‘logout’ late</li>
<li>Why the ‘systems were running slow’</li>
<li>What should be the perfect ‘call-opening’ and ‘call ending’</li>
<li>How to handle ‘high call flow’</li>
<li>How to ‘sale’ a product to the ‘disinterested customer’</li>
<li>How to ‘appease’ the dissatisfied ‘enquiring consumers’</li>
<li>How to ‘empathize’ with an ‘irate customer’</li>
<li>How to keep the ‘call control’ while making the customer feel empowered</li>
<li>How to avoid ‘escalating’ the call</li>
<li>How to make full use of the two ‘fifteen minutes breaks’ and one ‘half hour break’</li>
<li>Why not to say – “I am sorry to hear that” – to a recently divorced customer</li>
<li>Whom to give the extra food coupons</li>
<li>What to do to in order to know when your calls are being monitored</li>
<li>How to reduce the ‘AHT’ (Average Handling Time)</li>
<li>How to increase the ‘C.Sac’ (Customer Satisfaction) scores</li>
<li>Why not to take two ‘consecutive weekend-offs’</li>
<li>What to write in the ‘feed-back forms’</li>
<li>Which friend should be referred to get compensated for the ‘referral’ before leaving the job</li>
<li>What else could be done to maximize ‘P4P’ (Pay for Performance)</li></ul>
<p>Soon after swiping the card and clearing the balance, many of us became what they called, ‘an absconding case’ and added our names to the ‘attrition list’. The ‘cost-effective-labour’ (not ‘cheap labor’), stopped coming to office just before ‘hitting the (production) floor’ without bothering to formally say a bye, and without multiplying the hundreds of dollars that their clients had invested in our training and maintenance. Some of us had to get back to our colleges, which had re-opened. The others either complained about the team-leader or the work pressure till the time they got a call from some other call-center across the road offering a slight increment, but the same work. Others changed jobs as they habitually did twice or thrice a year to acquire a new ambience and acquaintances only to get bored yet again. One chap was smart enough to hold two offices simultaneously. The rest either perished without a trace or sat on the same chair hoping to climb the ‘vertical ladder’ by pleasing the bosses and putting more working hours while executing the ‘communicative tools’ and ‘navigation skills’ that they remembered from the training days. They were the ones the industry hoped to retain. They were also the ones too particular about their performance. Habitual consumption and consistent conflicts between the personal mornings/mourning and the professional nights took a consistent toll.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_10_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_10_Resized" /><br />
<em>The city sleeps. Metros come to halt. Signs of human existence disappear. But thousands of people continue with the calls in each floor of these buildings answering queries and collecting unpaid amounts catering to a different time zone altogether.</em></p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_11_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_11_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_11_Resized" /><br />
<em>Different floors and different corners of the same floor cater to different clients across the globe.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>after-call wrap-up (remains of the flirtatious feed-back)</h2>
<p>I-cards hung like nameplates around the neck all the time along with codes that were generated from the distant land. Punching these plastic cards ensured automated entry, strictly confined to those floors where we had some business. Forgetting to carry them required prolonged human intervention to convince the security that we did deserve to get in. Losing it lead to penalty. Hiding/absconding beneath one of the many call center note-pads I found the Separation Clause 4b: “upon separation from the company, you will be required to immediately return to the company, all assets and property including documents, files, book, papers and memos in your possession.”</p>
<p>The termination clause 6.b.i. of one of the appointment letters stated - “During the probation period you are liable to be discharged from the company’s service at any time without any notice and without assigning any reason”. But I guess the employees left the company more often without any notice or assigning any reasons. The company, most often, had no answers for this unwanted discharge to its owners across the oceans. IT abroad/onboard was not advanced enough to predict/prevent people who made the industry look like a make-shift arrangement; a probation that would rarely lead to permanence.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_12_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_12_Resized" /><br />
<em>A common sight of fleet of cabs (a service which is outsourced to external vendors) outside the building waiting for scheduled drops and pick-ups.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>is there anything else that I can do to help you/me</h2>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_13_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_13_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_13_Resized" /><br />
<em>As the piling debris suggest infrastructural work perennially in progress.</em></p>
<p>Between the cafeteria cleaned once every hour and the adjacent murky road side dhaba; between the latest cars in the parking lot and the rickshaws waiting for those who couldn’t yet afford to pay the car-installment; between the fiber-glass windows and the jhopris (visible once the curtains were lifted) – new heights were achieved and new targets were set that were globally connected, locally disconnected.</p>
<p>In a site, which is otherwise devoid of consistent water supply, electricity and public transport (running it servers on generators 24X7), the vertical-limits of the translucent fiber glass and false roofs prepare the suburbs. The soothing cubicles confirm to the global standards of ‘how a city ought to look’ from a distance.</p>
<p>Just like the enormous demands of the IT industry, which has created its support sectors (catering, security, transport, house-keeping etc) to stray around the BPOs trying to extract their share of profit, I moved around its orbit as well for some time. Why and how there is a bit of BPO in most my creative endeavors and in the purchase of digital devices between 2003-2008 doesn’t require any further explanation.</p>
<p>I got better and better with my mock-calls.</p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/Sreedeep_MockCalling_14_Resized.jpg/image_large" alt="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_14_Resized" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Sreedeep_Mock-Calling_14_Resized" /><br />
<em>Surrounded by the debris of development and standing tall with its emphatic presence, such an imposing architecture seems like a myth that constantly challenges the harsh realities that envelop it. The pillared peak is so representative of its desire to remain connected with the ‘distant-impossible’ 24x7.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Endnote</h2>
<p>[1] The protagonist in the film violently revolted against the lack of basic amenities in the interview-space and against the idea of calling so many people for just a couple of vacancies, when people were expected to be selected not on the basis of merit, anyway.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post, including the text and the photographs, is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/blog_mock-calling</a>
</p>
No publisherSreedeepSpaces of DigitalDigital LabourResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2015-08-06T05:00:33ZBlog EntryStudying the Emerging Database State in India: Notes for Critical Data Studies (Accepted Abstract)
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-the-emerging-database-state-in-india-accepted-abstract
<b>"Critical Data Studies (CDS) is a growing field of research that focuses on the unique theoretical, ethical, and epistemological challenges posed by 'Big Data.' Rather than treat Big Data as a scientifically empirical, and therefore largely neutral phenomena, CDS advocates the view that data should be seen as always-already constituted within wider data assemblages." The Big Data and Society journal has provisionally accepted a paper abstract of mine for its upcoming special issue on Critical Data Studies.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>Through the last decade, the Government of India has given shape to an digital identification infrastructure, developed and operated by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The infrastructure combines the task of assigning unique identification numbers, called Aadhaar numbers, to individuals submitting their biometric and demographic details, and the task of authenticating their identity when provided with an Aadhaar number and associated data (biometric data, One Time Pin sent to the pre-declared mobile number, etc.). The aim of UIDAI is to provide universal authentication-as-a-service for all residents of India who approach any public or private agencies for any kind of service or transaction. Simultaneously, the Aadhaar numbers will function as unique identifiers for joining up databases of different government agencies, and hence allow the Indian government to undertake big data analytics at a governmental scale, and not only at a departmental one.</p>
<p>In this paper, I am primarily motivated by the challenge of finding points and objects to enter into a critical study of such an in-progress data infrastructure. As I proceed with an understanding that data is produced within its specific social and material context, the question then is to read through the data to reflect on its possible social and material context. This is complicated when approaching a big data infrastructure that is meant to produce data for explicitly intra-governmental consumption and circulation. The problem then is not one of reading through available big data, but one of reading through the assemblage and imaginaries of big data to reflect on the kind of data it will give rise to, and thus on the politics of the data assemblage and the database state it enables.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Logic of the Database State</h2>
<p>Application of data to inform governmental acts have taken place at least since government has been understood as responsible for the welfare of the population and the territory. The measurement of the population and the territory – the number of people, their demographic features, amounts and locations of natural resources, and so on – have always been integral to the functioning of the modern nation-state. Database state is used in this paper to identify a particular mode of mobilisation of data within governmental acts, which is fundamentally shaped by the possibilities of big data extraction, appropriation, and analytics pioneered by a range of companies since late 1990s. The reason for not using big data state but database dtate is that big data refers to a body of technologies emerging in response to a set of data management and analysis challenges situated in a certain moment of development of information technologies, whereas database refers to a symbolic form (Manovich 1999): a form in which not only the population is made visible to the government (as a collection of visual, textual, numeric, and other forms of records), but also how the acts of government are made visible to the population (as a collection of performance indicators, budget allocation and utilisation tables, and other data visualised through dashboards, analog and digital).</p>
<p>The data production and management logic of this database state is specifically inspired by the notion of platform introduced by the so-called Web 2.0 companies: providing a common service layer upon which various other applications may also run, but under specific arrangements (including distribution of generated user data) with the original common layer provider. Data assemblages of the database state are expected to enable the government to function as a platform, as an intensely data-driven layer that widely gathers data about population individuals and feeds it back selectively to various providers of public and private services. This transforms the data assemblage from one vertical of governmental activities to a horizontal critical infrastructure for modularisation of governmental activities.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Studying the Emerging Database State in India</h2>
<p>Government of India is presently debating the legal and technical validity of the digital identity infrastructure programme in the Supreme Court, while simultaneously carrying out the enrollment drive for the same, linking up assignment of unique identity numbers with a national drive for population registration, and rolling out citizen-facing services and applications that implement the Aadhaar number as a necessary key to access them. With the enrollment process going on and the integration with various governmental processes (termed seeding by Aadhaar policy literature) just beginning, I enter this study through two key sets of objects reflecting the imaginaries and the technical specifications of the emerging database state in India. The first entry point is through the various official documents of vision, intentions, plans, and reconsiderations, and the second entry point is through the Application Programming Interface (API) documentations published by UIDAI to specify how its identity authentication platform will collaborate with various public and private services.</p>
<p>The first section of the paper provides a brief survey of pre-UIDAI attempts by the Government of India to deploy unique identification numbers and Smart Cards for specific population groups, so as to understand the initial conceptualisation of this data assemblage of a digital identification platform. The second section foregrounds how this platform undertakes a transformation of the components and relations of the pre-existing data assemblage of the Government of India, as articulated in various official documents of promised utility and proposed collaborations. The third section studies the API documentations to track how such imaginaries are materially interpreted and operationalised through the design of protocols of data interactions with various public and private agencies offering services utilising the identity authentication platform.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Notes for Critical Data Studies</h2>
<p>Expanding the early agenda note on Critical Data Studies by Craig Dalton and Jim Thatcher (2014), Rob Kitchin and Tracey P. Lauriault have taken steps towards emphasising the responsibility of this nebulous research strategy to chart and unpack the data assemblages (2014). This is exactly what I propose to do in this paper. While Kitchin and Lauriault provide a detailed list of the components of the apparatus of a data assemblage (2014: 7), I find the concepts of infrastructural components and infrastructural relations very useful in thinking through the emerging infrastructure of authentication. Thus, my approach to these tasks of charting and unpacking is focused on the infrastructural relations that the digital identity infrastructure re-configures, instead of the infrastructural components it mobilises (Bowker et al 2010). This tactical choice of focusing on the infrastructural relations is also necessitated by the practical difficulty in having comprehensive access to the individual components of the data assemblage concerned. Addressing questions of causality and quality becomes difficult when studying the assemblage sans the produced data, and rigorously analysing concerns of security and uncertainty pre-requires an actually existing data assemblage, with a public interface to investigating its leakages, breakages, and internal functioning. In the absence of such points of entry into the data assemblage, which I fear may not be an exceptional case, I attempt an inverted reading. Turning the data infrastructure inside out, in this paper I describe how the digital identity platform is critically reshaping the basis of governmental acts in India, through a specific model of production, extraction and application of big data.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Bibliography</h2>
<p>Bowker, Geoffrey C., Karen Baker, Florence Millerand, & David Ribes. 2010. Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. Jeremy Hunsinger, Lisbeth Klastrup, & Matthew Allen (Eds.) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg London New York. Pp. 97-117.</p>
<p>Dalton, Craig, & Jim Thatcher. 2014. What does a Critical Data Studies Look Like, and Why do We Care? Seven Points for a Critical Approach to ‘Big Data.’ Society and Space. May 19. Accessed on July 08, 2015, from <a href="http://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/craig-dalton-and-jim-thatcher-what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care-seven-points-for-a-critical-approach-to-big-data/" target="_blank">http://societyandspace.com/material/commentaries/craig-dalton-and-jim-thatcher-what-does-a-critical-data-studies-look-like-and-why-do-we-care-seven-points-for-a-critical-approach-to-big-data/</a>.</p>
<p>Kitchin, Rob, & Tracey P. Lauriault. 2014. Towards Critical Data Studies: Charting and Unpacking Data Assemblages and their Work. The Programmable City Working Paper 2. July 29. National University of Ireland Maynooth, Ireland. Accessed on July 08, 2015 from <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2474112" target="_blank">http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2474112</a>.</p>
<p>Manovich, Lev. 1999. Database as Symbolic Form. Convergence. Volume 5, Number 2. Pp. 80-99.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>Note: Call for Papers for the special issue can found here: <a href="http://bigdatasoc.blogspot.in/2015/06/call-for-proposals-special-theme-on.html" target="_blank">http://bigdatasoc.blogspot.in/2015/06/call-for-proposals-special-theme-on.html</a>.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-the-emerging-database-state-in-india-accepted-abstract'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/studying-the-emerging-database-state-in-india-accepted-abstract</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBig DataData SystemsResearchFeaturedAadhaarResearchers at WorkE-Governance2015-11-13T05:54:53ZBlog EntryJuly 2015 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2015-bulletin
<b>Our newsletter for the month of July is below:</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are happy to share with you the seventh issue of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) newsletter (July 2015). The past editions of the newsletter can be accessed at <a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters</a>.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Highlights</h2>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>
<ul>
<li>NVDA team <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-in-e-speak-marathi">conducted a training at SIES College, Sion, Mumbai</a>. Thirty-four delegates attended the training programme.</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>A training workshop was held at <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-using-espeak-tamil-with-nvda-training-tirunelveli">Anne Jane Askwith Higher Secondary School</a> for the Visually Impaired, Palayamkottai, Tirunelveli by NVDA team. Sixteen delegates participated in this.</li>
<li>Konkani Wikipedia is the second Wikimedia project after Odia Wikisource that has gone live out of incubation. The project stayed in the incubation for nine long years and the community has gone through a long debate to have a Wikipedia of their own. Subhashish Panigrahi has <a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live">blogged on this highlighting the three Konkani Wikimedians</a>.</li>
<li>The 30<sup>th</sup> Session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights was held in Geneva from June 29 to July 3. Nehaa Chaudhari prepared a statement about the negotiations on the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/statement-by-the-centre-for-internet-and-society-india-on-the-broadcast-treaty-at-sccr-30">Proposed Treaty for Broadcasting Organisations</a>.</li>
<li>Sumandro Chattapadhyay <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindustan-times-july-15-2015-sumandro-chattapadhyay-iron-out-contradictions-in-the-digital-india-programme">wrote an article in the Hindustan Times</a> about India’s “Digital India” initiative to develop communication infrastructure, government information systems, and general capacity to digitise public life in India.</li>
<li>CIS published the <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/technology-business-incubators">first draft of its analysis on technology business incubators</a> ("TBI") in India. The report prepared by Sunil Abraham, Vidushi Marda, Udbhav Tiwari and Anumeha Karnatak looks at operating procedures, success stories and lessons that can be learnt from TBIs in India.</li>
<li>Pranesh Prakash did a <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/clearing-misconceptions-dot-panel-net-neutrality">brief analysis</a> about the Department of Telecommunications Panel Report on Net Neutrality.</li>
<li>CIS has participated in the Expert Committee for DNA Profiling constituted by the Department of Biotechnology in 2012 for the purpose of deliberating on and finalizing the draft Human DNA Profiling Bill and appreciates this opportunity. <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-dissent">CIS has prepared a dissent note to the Expert Committee on DNA Profiling</a>.</li>
<li>In the last few decades, all major common law jurisdictions have decriminalised non-procreative sex – oral and anal sex (sodomy) – to allow private, consensual, and non-commercial homosexual intercourse. Bhairav Acharya <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-autonomy-sexual-choice-common-law-recognition-of-homosexuality">brought out the developments from across the world in a blog entry</a>. </li>
<li>As part of its project on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia, CIS conducted interviews with a <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-22-anonymous">Tibetan security researcher and information activist</a> and <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-24-2013-shantanu-ghosh">Shantanu Ghosh, Managing Director, Symantec Product Operations, India</a>.</li>
<li>CIS, the Observer Research Foundation, the Internet Policy Observatory, the Centre for Global Communication Studies and the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania had organized a conference in April in New Delhi. The findings have been condensed in a report titled “<a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/freedom-of-expression-in-a-digital-age">Effective research, policy formulation, and the development of regulatory frameworks in South Asia</a>”.</li>
<li>Pranesh Prakash in a research paper titled <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/regulatory-perspectives-on-net-neutrality">Regulatory Perspectives on Net Neutrality</a> gives an overview on why India needs to put in place net neutrality regulations, and the form that those regulations must take to avoid being over-regulation.</li>
<li>Rakshanda Deka undertook an analysis <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/anti-spam-laws-in-different-jurisdictions">on the anti-spam laws in different jurisdictions</a>. This analysis is a part of a larger attempt at formulating a model anti-spam law for India by analysing the existing spam laws across the world.</li>
<li style="text-align: left; ">As part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series, RAW has published blog entries on <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_whatsapp-and-the-creation-of-a-transnational-sociality">WhatsApp and the Creation of a Transnational Sociality</a>; <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet">Users and the Internet</a>; <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_effective-activism">Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi</a>; <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights">Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights</a>; and <a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_understanding-tagores-music-on-youtube">'Originality,' 'Authenticity,' and 'Experimentation': Understanding Tagore’s Music on YouTube</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The National Optic Fibre Network, a part of the Government's Digital India Initiative, has been in the news since the recent Expert Committee Report. Aditya Garg in a blog entry <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/funding-of-national-optic-fibre-network-who-is-accountable">examined the accountability of the funding of the project</a>.</li>
</ul>
</th>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility and Inclusion</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. CIS in partnership with CLPR (Centre for Law and Policy Research) compiled the National Compendium of Policies, Programmes and Schemes for Persons with Disabilities (29 states and 6 union territories). The publication has been finalised and is being printed. The draft chapters and the quarterly reports can be accessed on the <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/national-resource-kit-project">project page</a>. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">NVDA and eSpeak</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Monthly Updates</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/july-2015-report.pdf">July 2015 Report</a> (Suman Dogra; July 31, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Reports</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>The training programmes were held in June and the reports were published in July</i>:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-using-espeak-tamil-with-nvda-training-tirunelveli">Tamil Computing with NVDA Training Workshop</a> (Organized by NVDA team: Anne Jane Ask with Higher Secondary School for the Visually Impaired, Palayamkottai, Tirunelveli; June 3 – 7, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/report-on-training-in-e-speak-marathi">Training in eSpeak Marathi</a> (Organized by NVDA team; SIES College, Sion, Mumbai; June 28, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submission / Comment</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/statement-by-the-centre-for-internet-and-society-india-on-the-broadcast-treaty-at-sccr-30">Statement by the Centre for Internet and Society on the Broadcast Treaty at SCCR 30</a> (Nehaa Chaudhari; July 2, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/reading-devanagri-konkani-wikipedia-in-kannada-script">Reading Devanagari Script based sites like Konkani Wikipedia in Kannada Script</a> (Dr. U.B. Pavanaja; July 13, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/konkani-wikipedia-goes-live">Konkani Wikipedia Goes Live After 'Nine Years' of Incubation</a> (Subhashish Panigrahi; July 18, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Events Co-organized</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li>Christ University Undergraduate Programme (Organized by CIS-A2K; Bangalore; July 1 - 8, 2015). Students were initiated into the Wikimedia activities with hands on sessions of typing on Wikisource. Faculty of the Christ University helped the A2K team in deciding on the texts that were to be typed. These texts will provide much needed impetus for Wikisource related activities in Indian Languages. Wikipedia Education Programme at Christ University received support from Ravishankar.A of the Tamil Wikimedia community and Sayant Mahato from Sanskrit Wikimedia community.</li>
<li>Aloysius College (Organized by CIS-A2K; Mangalore; July 1 – 4, 2015). Tulu and Kannada Wikipedia workshops were conducted in St. Aloysis College, Mangalore. Tulu Wikipedia is in Incubator and a small community is growing in Mangalore. Pavanaja U.B. and Rahmanuddin Shaik participated in this events.</li>
<li>Media Wiki Train the Trainer Program (Organized by CIS-A2K; Bangalore; June 24 – 27, 2015): A four-day long train-the-trainer program aimed at building leadership among technical contributors to Indic language Wikimedians in the areas of bugs, bots--Pywikipedia and Auto Wiki Browser, various MediaWiki tools, and translations. Ravishankar A. from Wikimedia India, MediaWiki developers Pavithra H., Yogesh Omshivaprakash H.L. and Harsh Kothari, and Tamil Wikimedian Dineshkumar Ponnusamy provided support for the event.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimania">Wikimania 2015</a> (Organized by Wikimedia Foundation; Mexico City; July 15 - 19, 2015): A whole day was dedicated for evaluation of strategies and activities by various major stakeholders of the Wikimedia movement. Community members who lead major activities, Wikimedia chapters, affiliate organizations and Wikimedia Foundation itself took part in the discussions. There were several group activities, exchange of ideas focused on project and community level outreach and other activities, tools and techniques, and best practices. Subhashish Panigrahi participated in this event and gave a talk on <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_to_do_Guerrilla_GLAM_-_presentation_in_Wikimania_2015,_Mexico_City.pdf">How to do Guerrilla GLAM</a>. Subhashish Panigrahi was a panelist along with Rohini Lakshané in the session “<a href="https://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Edit-a-thons_for_bridging_the_gender_gap_on_Wikimedia">Edit-a-thons for Bridging the Gender Gap on Wikimedia: A Panel Discussion</a>”. An Indic Meet-up was also organized. Wikimedians from India, Bangladesh and Nepal representing various language communities, Wikimedia India, Wikimedia Bangladesh, Wikimedia Nepal, and Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) gathered to discuss about various challenges, cross-community collaborative projects, organizing larger events, and strategies to grow the Wikimedia movement in South Asia.</li>
<li>Classical Languages in the Digital Era Conference (Organized by Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore; July 17, 2015) Tanveer Hasan participated in this conference aimed at discussing about the future of Indian classical languages in the digital era. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/the-times-of-india-july-5-2015-not-many-contributors-for-kannada-centric-wiki-page">Not many contributors for Kannada-centric Wiki page</a> (The Times of India, July 5, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/indian-express-july-5-2015-upload-more-kannada-articles-on-wikipedia">Upload More Kannada Articles on Wikipedia</a> (Indian Express, July 5, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-july-4-2015-coverage-in-udayavani">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mangaluru</a> (Udayavani; July 5, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-july-5-2015-coverage-in-prajavani">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop in Mangaluru</a> (Prajavani; July 5, 2015)</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Staff Movement</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li>Tito Dutta, Luis Gomes and Abhinav Garule have joined the CIS-A2K team as Programme Associates from March this year. Tito is working for internal documentation and resource building, and Luis and Abhinav are implementing the Konkani and Marathi work plan respectively along with community liaison.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/regulatory-perspectives-on-net-neutrality">Regulatory Perspectives on Net Neutrality</a> (Pranesh Prakash; July 8, 2015). Vidushi Marda and Tarun Krishnakumar assisted Pranesh Prakash in this.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/policy-in-india-community-custom-censorship-and-future-of-internet-regulation">Free Speech Policy in India: Community, Custom, Censorship, and the Future of Internet Regulation</a> (Bhairav Acharya; July 13, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/net-neutrality-and-law-of-common-carriage">Net Neutrality and the Law of Common Carriage</a> (Bhairav Acharya; July 14, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/freedom-of-expression-in-a-digital-age">Freedom of Expression in a Digital Age</a> (Geetha Hariharan and Jyoti Panday; July 14, 2015). CIS, the Observer Research Foundation, the Internet Policy Observatory, the Centre for Global Communication Studies and the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania organized this conference on April 21, 2015 in New Delhi. Elonnai Hickok edited the report.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/clearing-misconceptions-dot-panel-net-neutrality">Clearing Misconceptions: What the DoT Panel Report on Net Neutrality Says</a> (and Doesn't) (Pranesh Prakash; July 21, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/role-of-intermediaries-in-counting-online-abuse">Role of Intermediaries in Countering Online Abuse</a> (Jyoti Panday; July 31, 2015). This got published as two blog entries in the NALSAR Law Tech Blog. Part 1 can be accessed <a href="https://techlawforum.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/role-of-intermediaries-in-countering-online-abuse-still-a-work-in-progress-part-i/">here</a> and Part 2 <a href="https://techlawforum.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/role-of-intermediaries-in-countering-online-abuse-still-a-work-in-progress-part-ii/">here</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Co-organized</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/a-public-discussion-on-criminal-defamation-in-india">A Public Discussion on Criminal Defamation in India</a> (Organized by CIS, the Network of Women in Media, India; and Media Watch; Bangalore; July 29, 2015). The event was a public discussion about the continued criminalisation of defamation in India.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/round-table-discussion-on-whois">Roundtable discussion on WHOIS</a> (Organized by Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY), Govt. of India; July 28, 2015; New Delhi). Sunil Abraham and Vidushi Marda participated in the discussion remotely. Aditya Garg attended in person.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Privacy</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/anti-spam-laws-in-different-jurisdictions">Anti-Spam Laws in Different Jurisdictions: A Comparative Analysis</a> (Rakshanda Deka; July 2, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-dissent">A Dissent Note to the Expert Committee for DNA Profiling</a> (Elonnai Hickok; July 17, 2015). Click for <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-bill-functions.pdf">DNA Bill Functions</a>, <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dna-list-of-offences.pdf">DNA List of Offences</a>, and <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-note-on-dna-bill.pdf">CIS Note on DNA Bill</a>. A modified version was published by <a href="http://bangalore.citizenmatters.in/articles/dna-bill-problems-issues-inputs-from-bangalore">Citizen Matters Bangalore</a> on July 28.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-autonomy-sexual-choice-common-law-recognition-of-homosexuality">Privacy, Autonomy, and Sexual Choice: The Common Law Recognition of Homosexuality</a> (Bhairav Acharya; July 18, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/aadhaar-vs-social-security-number">Aadhaar Number vs the Social Security Number</a> (Elonnai Hickok; July 21, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/best-practices-meet-2015">7th Best Practices Meet 2015</a> (Organized by Data Security Council of India; Bangalore; July 9 – 10, 2015). Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session "Architecting Security for transformation to Digital India". Elonnai Hickok was a panelist in the session "Steering privacy in the age of extreme innovation technology & business models."</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber Security</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Videos</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-22-anonymous">Cyber Security Series Part 23</a> (Purba Sarkar; July 13, 2015). CIS interviews a Tibetan security researcher and information activist.</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-24-2013-shantanu-ghosh">Cyber Security Series Part 24</a> (Purba Sarkar; July 15, 2015). CIS interviews Shantanu Ghosh, Managing Director, Symantec Product Operations, India, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Miscellaneous</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Article</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindustan-times-july-15-2015-sumandro-chattapadhyay-iron-out-contradictions-in-the-digital-india-programme">Iron out contradictions in the Digital India programme</a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; Hindustan Times; July 28, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Research Paper</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/technology-business-incubators">First draft of Technology Business Incubators: An Indian Perspective and Implementation Guidance Report</a> (Sunil Abraham, Vidushi Marda, Udbhav Tiwari and Anumeha Karnatak; July 25, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Op-ed</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-op-ed-july-2-2015-shyam-ponappa-centrality-of-cash-flows">The Centrality of Cash Flows</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; July 1, 2015 and Organizing India Blogspot; July 2, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/funding-of-national-optic-fibre-network-who-is-accountable">Funding of National Optic Fibre Network (NOFN) - Who's Accountable?</a> (Aditya Garg; July 17, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by contemporary concerns to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It is interested in producing local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_whatsapp-and-the-creation-of-a-transnational-sociality">WhatsApp and the Creation of a Transnational Sociality</a> (Maitrayee Deka; July 1, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_users-and-the-internet">Users and the Internet</a> (Purbasha Auddy; July 10, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_effective-activism">Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi</a> (Sarah McKeever; July 16, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_studying-the-internet-discourse-in-india-through-the-prism-of-human-rights">Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights</a> (Deva Prasad M.; July 22, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw/blog_understanding-tagores-music-on-youtube">'Originality,' 'Authenticity,' and 'Experimentation': Understanding Tagore’s Music on YouTube)</a> (Ipsita Sengupta; July 27, 2015).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/news">News & Media Coverage</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cio-july-1-2015-irctc-aadhaar-play-can-violate-sc-order-and-derail-national-security">'IRCTC’s Aadhaar play can violate SC order and derail National Security'</a> (Shubhra Rishi; CIO.IN; July 1, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/catch-news-july-2-2015-the-digital-divide-pros-and-cons-of-modi-s-latest-big-initiative">The Digital Divide: pros and cons of Modi's latest big initiative</a> (Suhas Munshi; July 2, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-statesman-rakesh-kumar-july-13-2015-corporate-push-modis-billion-digital-dream">Corporate push to Modi’s Rs.4.5-billion digital dream</a> (Rakesh Kumar; The Statesman; July 13, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-july-16-2015-betwa-sharma-criminal-defamation-the-urgent-cause-that-has-united-rahul-gandhi-arvind-kejriwal-and-subramanian-swamy">Criminal Defamation: The Urgent Cause That has United Rahul Gandhi, Arvind Kejriwal and Subramanian Swamy</a> (Betwa Sharma; Huffington Post; July 15, 2015).</li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/five-nations-one-future">Five Nations, One Future?</a> (Bjorn Ludtke, Ellen Lee, Jaideep Sen, Gwendolyn Ledger, David Nicholson, and Jesko Johannsen; Voestalpine; July 18, 2015).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-scariest-bill-in-parliament-is-getting-no-attention-2013-here2019s-what-you-need-to-know-about-it">The scariest bill in Parliament is getting no attention – here’s what you need to know about it</a> (Nayantara Narayanan; Scroll.in; July 24, 2015)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-nikita-mehta-july-29-2015-regulation-misuse-concerns-still-dog-dna-profiling-bill">Regulation, misuse concerns still dog DNA profiling bill</a> (Nikita Mehta; Livemint; July 29, 2015)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with diverse abilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the mediation and reconfiguration of social and cultural processes and structures by the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li>CIS - Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Twitter:<a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K"> https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - Facebook:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a></li>
<li>Access to Knowledge - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:a2k@cis-india.org">a2k@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - E-Mail: <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>Researchers at Work - Mailing List: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, Access to Knowledge, at <a href="mailto:tanveer@cis-india.org">tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2015-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2015-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchers at Work2015-11-21T16:23:52ZPage