The Centre for Internet and Society
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July 2013 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2013-bulletin
<b>Our newsletter for the month of July 2013 can be accessed below. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the seventh issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/institute-on-internet-and-society-event-report">a report on the Institute on Internet and Society</a> held in the month of June, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/comments-on-draft-guidelines-for-computer-related-inventions">comments submitted</a> by us to the Office of the Controller General of Patents Designs and Trademarks on the draft guidelines on computer related inventions, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-the-5th-privacy-round-table">report from the fifth privacy roundtable meeting</a> held in Kolkata, updates from Kannada Wikipedia workshops held in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-hubli">Hubli</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wiki-workshop-at-sagara">Sagara</a>, a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education">report on Digital Humanities for higher education</a>, media coverage, and information on our forthcoming events.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Archives of our newsletters are <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/">here</a>. Our policies on Ethical Research Guidelines, Non-Discrimination and Equal Opportunities, Privacy, Terms of Website Use and Travel can be<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/policies"> accessed here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Jobs</b><br /> CIS is inviting applications for the posts of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-for-developer">Developer</a> (NVDA Screen Reader Project). To apply for this post, send in your resume to Nirmita Narasimhan (<a href="mailto:nirmita@cis-india.org">nirmita@cis-india.org</a>). CIS is also seeking applications for the post of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/policy-associate-internet-governance">Policy Associate</a> (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to Sunil Abraham (<a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a>) and Pranesh Prakash (<a href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>).</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the <b>Hans Foundation</b>. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities</b><br />CIS and the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Punjab, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and Chandigarh:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-punjab-chapter-call-for-comments">The Punjab Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, July 31, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-uttarakhand-chapter-call-for-comments">The Uttarakhand Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, July 31, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-chandigarh-chapter-call-for-comments">The Chandigarh Chapter</a> (by CLPR, July 31, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-maharashtra-chapter-call-for-comments">The Maharashtra Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, July 31, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p>Note: <i>All the chapters published on the website are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated</i>.</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness">Openness</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikimedia Foundation has given a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">grant</a> to CIS to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k"><b>Access to Knowledge</b></a><b> </b>(Previously IP Reforms)</h3>
<p><b>Comments </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/comments-on-draft-guidelines-for-computer-related-inventions">Comments on the Draft Guidelines for Computer Related Inventions</a> (by Puneeth Nagaraj, July 31, 2013). The comments were submitted to the office of the Controller General of Patents Designs & Trademarks, Mumbai on July 26, 2013.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/the-assocham-international-conference-on-the-interface-between-intellectual-property-and-competition-law">An International Conference on Interface between Intellectual Property and Competition Law</a> (organized by ASSOCHAM, July 12, 2013). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the conference and shares select notes in a blog post.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia)</b><br />The <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_To_Knowledge/Team" title="Access To Knowledge/Team">A2K team</a> consists of three members based in Bangalore: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">T. Vishnu Vardhan</a>, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">Dr. U.B. Pavanaja</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Subhashish Panigrahi</a> and one team member <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Nitika Tandon</a> who is working from Delhi office.</p>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-at-hubli">A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop</a> (organized by CIS-A2K team, July 21, 2013, Hubli). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave training to the participants on Wikipedia. Leading newspapers like the Times of India, Vijaya Karnataka, Deccan Herald, VijayaVani, Prajavani, Samyukta Karnataka and HosaDiganta covered the event. Scanned versions of the published articles can be <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/hubli-workshop-press-coverage.zip">viewed here</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wiki-workshop-at-sagara">A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Sagara</a> (organized by CIS-A2K team, Sagara, July 28, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk on Wikipedia and Kannada Wikipedia.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Co-organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/telegu-wiki-academy-at-centre-for-good-governance">Telugu Wiki Academy at Centre for Good Governance</a> (organized by CIS-A2K and Telegu Wikipedia Community, Centre for Good Governance, Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad, April 9, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan participated in this event.</li>
</ul>
<p><i>Note: The event was organized in April but report got published only in July</i>.</p>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/free-software">Free Software</a> (organized by Free Software Movement of Karnataka in partnership with Jnana Vikas Institute of Technology, Bidadi, July 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja made a presentation on Wikipedia.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Ongoing Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindu-r-krishna-kumar-august-2-2013-stress-on-posting-articles-on-kannada-wikipedia">A Workshop on Posting Articles in Kannada on Wikipedia</a> (organised by the Centre for Proficiency Development Placement Service, University of Mysore, CPDPS premises, Manasagangotri, August 6, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja is conducting a workshop. The <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/tp-karnataka/stress-on-posting-articles-on-kannada-wikipedia/article4980552.ece">announcement was made in an article</a> by R. Krishna Kumar in the Hindu on August 2, 2013.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Press Coverage</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/oheraldo-july-27-2013-diana-fernandes-konkani-wikipedia-next">Konkani Wikipedia next?</a> (by Diana Fernandes, OHeralO, July 27, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan is quoted.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Openness</h3>
<p><b>Events Organised </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-activism-in-europe">Delhi: Digital Activism in Europe</a> (The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, July 8, 2013). Bernadette Längle gave a talk about the hacker scene and digital activism in Europe, with a focus on the <a href="http://ccc.de/en">Chaos Computer Club</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/open-hardware-lab">Open Hardware Lab: Play & Invent + Bonus Film Screening</a> (CIS, Bangalore, August 4, 2013). There was a film screening of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin:_An_Electronic_Odyssey">Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey</a> at the event.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS began two projects earlier this year. The first one on facilitating research and events on surveillance and freedom of expression is with Privacy International and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The second one on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia is with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada:<b> </b></p>
<p><b><span>SAFEGUARDS Project</span><br />Events Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/cryptoparty-delhi">Delhi: Learn to Secure Your Online Communication</a>! (IIC, DU Campus, Delhi, July 6, 2013). A cryptoparty was held in Delhi. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.cryptoparty.in/dharamsala">Dharamsala: Learn to Secure Your Online Communication</a>! (Dharamsala, July 13, 2013). A cryptoparty was held in Dharamsala. This was also covered in an article published in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/caravan-magazine-august-1-2013-rahul-m-crypto-night">the Caravan</a> on August 1, 2013.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-the-5th-privacy-round-table">Privacy Roundtable Meeting</a> (co-organized by CIS, DSCI, and FICCI, Kolkata, July 13, 2013). An event report was written by Maria Xynou. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/the-hackers-way-of-reshaping-policies">The Hackers Way of Reshaping Policies</a> (CIS, Bangalore, August 2, 2012). Bernadette Langle gave a talk on privacy.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Participated In</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/biometrics-or-bust-indias-identity-crisis">Biometrics or bust? India's Identity Crisis</a> (organised by the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University Press, July 2, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker on UID and Privacy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dsci-bpm-2013-conference-notes">DSCI Best Practices Meet 2013</a> (organized by DSCI, Anna Salai, Chennai, July 12, 2013). Kovey Coles attended the meeting.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cii-conference-on-act">Achieve Cyber Security Together</a> (organized by the Confederation of Indian Industries, Chennai, July 13, 2013). Kovey Coles attended this event.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Ongoing / Upcoming Events</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/the-phishing-society-a-talk-by-maria-xynou">The Phishing Society: Why 'Facebook' is more dangerous than the Government Spying on You - A Talk by Maria Xynou</a> (CIS, Bangalore, August 7, 2013). Maria Xynou will give a talk on phishing society.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cryptoparty-chennai">Learn to Protect your Online Activities!</a> (ACJ - Asian College of Journalism, Second Main Road (Behind M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation), Taramani, Chennai, August 7, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-meeting-brussels-bangalore">Privacy Meeting: Brussels – Bangalore</a> (CIS, Bangalore, August 14, 2013). Gertjan Boulet and Dariusz Kloza will give a talk on privacy.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-round-table-delhi">Privacy Round Table, New Delhi</a> (co-organised with FICCI and DSCI, FICCI, Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, August 24, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Columns</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/nytimes-july-10-2013-pranesh-prakash-how-surveillance-works-in-india">How Surveillance Works in India</a> (by Pranesh Prakash, New York Times, July 10, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/new-york-times-july-11-2013-can-india-trust-its-government-on-piracy">Can India Trust Its Government on Privacy?</a> (by Pranesh Prakash, New York Times, July 11, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-hoot-july-13-2013-chinmayi-arun-parsing-the-cyber-security-policy">Parsing the Cyber Security Policy</a> (by Chinmayi Arun, <a href="http://www.thehoot.org/web/Parsing-the-cyber-security-policy/6899-1-1-19-true.html">The Hoot</a>, and cross-posted in <a href="http://thefsiindia.wordpress.com/2013/07/13/indias-national-cyber-security-policy-preliminary-comments/">Free Speech Initiative</a>, July 13, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-difficult-balance-of-transparent-surveillance">The Difficult Balance of Transparent Surveillance</a> (by Kovey Coles, July 10, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/moving-towards-surveillance-state">Moving Towards a Surveillance State</a> (by Srinivas Atreya, July 15, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/more-than-hundred-global-groups-make-principled-stand-against-surveillance">More than a Hundred Global Groups Make a Principled Stand against Surveillance</a> (by Elonnai Hickok, July 31, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-audacious-right-to-be-forgotten">The Audacious ‘Right to Be Forgotten’</a> (by Kovey Coles, July 31, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Interview</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/interview-with-finnish-data-protection-ombudsman">An Interview with Reijo Aarnio</a>: Maria Xynou conducted an interview with Reijo, the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/economic-times-july-30-2013-indu-nandakumar-google-brings-tabs-to-sneak-advertisements-into-your-inbox">Google brings tabs to sneak advertisements into your inbox</a> (by Indu Nandakumar, Economic Times, July 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-leslie-d-monte-joji-thomas-philip-july-3-2013-how-the-worlds-largest-democracy-is-preparing-to-snoop-on-its-citizens">How the world’s largest democracy is preparing to snoop on its citizens</a> (by Leslie D' Monte and Joji Thomas Philip, July 3, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/report-dna-july-7-2013-joanna-lobo-geeks-have-a-solution-to-digital-surveillance-in-india-cryptography">Geeks have a solution to digital surveillance in India: Cryptography</a> (by Joanna Lobo, DNA, July 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/theregister-uk-phil-muncaster-july-9-2013-indias-centralised-snooping-system-facing-big-delays">India's centralised snooping system facing big delays</a> (by Phil Muncaster, The Register, July 9, 2013). CIS is mentioned in this article.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/firstpost-danish-raza-july-10-2013-indias-central-monitoring-system-security-cant-come-at-cost-of-privacy">India’s Central Monitoring System: Security can’t come at cost of privacy</a> (by Danish Raza, FirstPost, July 10, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/forbesindia-article-real-issue-july9-2013-rohin-dharmakumar-is-cms-a-compromise-of-your-security">Is CMS a Compromise of Your Security?</a> (by Rohin Dharmakumar, Forbes India magazine, July 12, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/firstpost-pierre-fitter-july-17-2013-snooping-technology">Snooping technology: Will CMS work in India?</a> (by Pierre Fitter, FirstPost, July 17, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bbc-uk-july-18-2013-parul-aggarwal-social-media-monitoring">सावधान आपके प्रोफ़ाइल पर है पुलिस की नज़र!</a> (by Parul Aggarwal, BBC, July 18, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dna-july-21-2013-shikha-kumar-your-life-is-an-open-facebook">Your life's an open Facebook</a> (by Shikha Kumar, DNA, July 21, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-aloke-tikku-june-28-2013-concerns-over-central-snoop">Concerns over central snoop</a> (by Aloke Tikku, Hindustan Times, June 28, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-july-30-2013-joji-thomas-philip-leslie-d-monte-shauvik-ghosh-your-telco-could-help-spy-on-you">Your telco could help spy on you</a> (by Joji Thomas Philip, Leslie D'Monte and Shauvik Ghosh, LiveMint, July 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>DNA Profiling Bill</b><br />A sub-committee has been constituted as per the recommendations of the Expert Committee of DNA Profiling Bill. The sub-committee will have a meeting in Hyderabad on August 6, 2013. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/meeting-of-sub-committee-on-dna-profiling-bill">Sunil Abraham is one of the members of the sub-committee</a>.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><b>Cyber Stewards Project</b><br /></span>Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project.</p>
<p>Video Interviews</p>
<ul>
<li>Part 3: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-3-eva-galperin">Interview with Eva Galperin</a> (July 10, 2013).</li>
<li>Part 4: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-4-marietje-schaake">Interview with Marietje Schaake</a> (July 11, 2013).</li>
<li>Part 5: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-5-amelia-andersdotter">Interview with Amelia Andersdotter</a> (July 12, 2013).</li>
<li>Part 6: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-6-lhadon-tethong">Interview with Lhadon Tethong</a> (July 15, 2013).</li>
<li>Part 7: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-7-jochem-de-groot">Interview with Jochem de Groot</a> (July 18, 2013).</li>
<li>Part 8: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-8-jeff-moss">Interview with Jeff Moss</a> (July, 23, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><span><b>Cyber Security</b></span><br /><b>Blog Entries </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-national-cyber-security-policy-in-review">India's National Cyber Security Policy in Review</a> (by Jonathan Diamond, July 31, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/guidelines-for-protection-of-national-critical-information-infrastructure">Guidelines for the Protection of National Critical Information Infrastructure: How Much Regulation?</a> (by Jonathan Diamond, July 31, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Free Speech, Expression and Censorship</b><br />Column</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/down-to-earth-july-17-2013-nishant-shah-you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent">You Have the Right to Remain Silent</a> (by Nishant Shah, July 22, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated In </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/citizenlab-summer-institute-on-monitoring-internet-openness-and-rights">Connaught Summer Institute on Monitoring Internet Openness and Rights</a> (organized by the Munk School of Global Affairs, Bloor Street West, July 23, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated in this event and spoke on "<a href="https://citizenlab.org/summerinstitute/abstracts.html#jayaram">India's Civil Liberties Crisis: Digital Free Will in Free Fall</a>".</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access">Knowledge Repository on Internet Access</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project to create a knowledge repository on Internet and society. This repository will comprise content targeted primarily at civil society with a view to enabling their informed participation in the Indian Internet and ICT policy space. The repository is available at <a href="http://www.internet-institute.in">www.internet-institute.in</a>.</p>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/institute-on-internet-and-society-event-report">Institute on Internet and Society: Event Report</a> (supported by Ford Foundation, Golden Palms Resort, Bangalore, June 8 – 14, 2013). Pranesh Prakash, Bernadette Längle, Vir Kamal Chopra, AK Bhargava, Ananth Guruswamy, Archana Gulati, Chakshu Roy, Elonnai Hickok, Gaurab Raj Upadhaya, Helani Galpaya, Michael Ginguld, Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, C. Nandini, Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan, Dr. Nishant Shah, Parminder Jeet Singh, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Satyen Gupta, Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam, Sunil Abraham, Tulika Pandey and T. Vishnu Vardhan were speakers at the event. The presentations and videos can now be accessed in this report.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/telecom">Telecom</a></h3>
<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><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-op-ed-shyam-ponappa-july-3-2013-building-up-vs-tearing-down">Building Up vs Tearing Down</a> (by Shyam Ponappa, July 3, 2013, originally published in the Business Standard, and also mirrored in Organizing India Blogspot).</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia.</p>
<p><b>Event Co-organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education">Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education</a> (co-organised by HEIRA, CSCS, Tumkur University, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and CIS, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, July 13, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-talk-at-cis">Digital Humanities Talk</a> (CIS, Bangalore, July 31, 2013). Sara Morais gave a talk on the advantages and problems in doing digital humanities work.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated In<br /></b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/iippee-july-8-2013-fourth-annual-conference-in-political-economy">Political Economy, Activism and Alternative Economic Strategies</a> (organized by the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam, The Hague, July 9 – 13, 2013). Nishant Shah presented his paper on paper on <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12036/full">Citizen Action in the Time of Network.</a></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/designing-change-gatekeepers-in-digital-humanities">Designing Change? Gatekeepers in Digital Humanities</a> (by Sara Morais, July 2, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/towards-critical-tool-building">Towards Critical Tool-building</a> (by Sara Morais, July 12, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<p>Follow us elsewhere</p>
<ul>
<li>Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="https://twitter.com/cis_india">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Join the CIS group on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/groups/28535315687/">Facebook</a></li>
<li>Visit us at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Support Us<br />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<br />We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a></p>
<p><i>CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2013-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2013-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesOpenness2013-08-21T09:30:32ZPageDigital Humanities for Indian Higher Education
http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education
<b>The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hosted by <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/">HEIRA, CSCS</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/">Tumkur University</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tiss.edu/">Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)</a>, Mumbai the <a class="external-link" href="http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh/ccs/">Center for Cultural Studies (CCS)</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge Programme</a> of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)</a>, the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/tejaswini-niranjana">Tejaswini Niranjana</a> of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Visdaviva">Vishnu Vardhan,</a> Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the first session of the day <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/profile.php?uid=140">Amlan Dasgupta</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/index.php">Jadavpur University</a>, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.</p>
<table class="invisible">
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<th><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Ravi.png" title="Ravi Sundaram" height="297" width="397" alt="Ravi Sundaram" class="image-inline" /></th>
<td style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/faculty_ravi_sundaram.htm">Ravi Sundaram</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sarai.net/">Sarai programme</a> at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/index.php">Centre for the Study of Devloping Society</a> added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and<br /></td>
</tr>
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<td colspan="2" style="text-align: justify; ">therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nishant Shah</a>, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. T<span>he critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was </span><i>about</i><span> reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data </span><i>produces </i><span>a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. F</span><span>acebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. </span><span>So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Returning to scholarship, </span><span><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy_of_sabah-siddiqui">Tanveer Hasan</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy2_of_sabah-siddiqui">Sneha PP</a> introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.</span></p>
<hr />
<p>Video</p>
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<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="400" src="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Digital_Humanities_Consultation.webm?embedplayer=yes" width="400"></iframe></p>
</th>
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<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/ashish-rajadhyaksha">Ashish Rajadhyaksha</a> describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under </span></span><a class="external-link" href="http://pad.ma/CIZ/editor/BR">Pad.ma</a><span><span>, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/students-cscs/copy17_of_ashwin-kumar-a.p">Arun Menon</a> of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The last presentation of the day had <a class="external-link" href="http://presiuniv.academia.edu/SouvikMukherjee">Souvik Mukherjee</a> addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that </span></span><span><i>the </i></span><span><span>digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Summarizing the consultation, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ashwin-Profile-ENGLISH.pdf">Ashwin Kumar</a> articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education'>http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherSara Morais and Subhashish PanigrahiVideoResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeDigital Humanities2015-04-17T10:53:17ZBlog EntryPolitical Economy, Activism and Alternative Economic Strategies
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/iippee-july-8-2013-fourth-annual-conference-in-political-economy
<b>The fourth annual conference in political economy was organized by the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam at the Hague from July 9 - 13, 2013.</b>
<hr />
<p>Nishant Shah participated as a speaker and presented the paper on <a class="external-link" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/dech.12036/full">Citizen Action in the Time of Network.</a> Click to read the full details of the conference <a class="external-link" href="http://iippe.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Final-Programme-3-July-2013.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>About the Conference<br /></b><br />The financial crisis revealed its first signs over five years ago, on August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribus suspended payment on three of its funds. It has since morphed into the deepest US and then world economic crisis since the Great Depression. The “green shoots” of recovery of some Third World economies, that the IMF had acclaimed in 2010, had withered within a year. By 2012 it was admitted that the “world recovery had stalled”, as even the handful of large, better-performing, developing economies slowed. But, ever upbeat except when imposing adjustment, the IMF predicts not only an improved 2013 but continual yearly growth over the following four years as well.<br /><br />Yet, the world’s largest economy remains stuck. While even the weak economic growth in the USA looks good by comparison with Europe, measured unemployment remains around 8%. Home loss, homelessness, poverty and hunger remain at their highest levels in decades. Nor is there a prospect of a recovery across Europe. The northern economies, and especially Germany, that until now have performed better in the core- periphery division of the continent, have stagnated, inevitable perhaps given the prolonged implosion of the economies of their most important foreign customers. There is a particularly severe crisis of youth unemployment. And the stagnation of the economies of the First World has caused a sharp slowing of growth in their BRIC counterparts and the few other better-performing Third World economies that the recovery Pollyannas had projected for several years as the engines that would drive the world rebound. Popular discontent has manifested itself in varieties of ways, from the Arab Spring to the renewal of Latin American left radicalism. In the global North, it has erupted in the form of the movements of the Indignados in Spain, Occupy Wall Street in the USA, and popular resistance in Greece. Whilst the Greek political system has been transformed beyond recognition but without resolution of the ongoing economic and political crisis, action in the rest of the North has appeared to have limited lifespan and effects, even with polls showing very high dissatisfaction with the current economic and political situation. It is striking how no broadly supported political movements have arisen, successfully promoting and engaging in a struggle for alternative economic policies. And, in their absence, finance has slowly , if not rapidly, and surely restored its economic, political and ideological hegemony over everything from our daily lives to our longer-term prospects, from the environment to our social and economic prospects.<br /><br />The ongoing economic and political crises place two related questions on history’s agenda. In the face of the dismal failure of the continuing, mostly overt neoliberal policies to resolve the deep problems, what alternative economic strategies should be pursued? And a more radical form of that same question, are alternative economic structures and an entirely different system of economic structures and practices necessary? The second question is concerns the sorts of actions that must be engaged to move the political process on to a path of alternative outcomes, from mild reforms to major transformation (and the connection between the two).<br /><br />The 2013 Annual Conference of IIPPE will focus on these questions. In doing so, it will need to acknowledge: the breadth and depth of discontent and the more or less spontaneous protest and conflict against the consequences of the crisis; how struggles have been conditioned by the crisis and the failure to resolve it without either determining their form and strength, their diversity and their complex dependence on non-economic factors; and the lack of strength, unity and coherence of oppositions and posing of alternatives. In this light, the conference will bring together scholars from all strands of political economy and heterodox economics, in seeking to engage debate with political parties and other progressive organisations in order to explain the incidence of struggles and how they might best be supported in bringing about broader, deeper and more unified responses to the crisis. In particular, it will be necessary to interrogate how continuing general conceptualisations, such as financialisation and neoliberalism, can (or cannot) be put to these purposes, when set against the diverse experiences of, and response to, the crisis.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://iippe.org/wp/?page_id=113">Read the original published at the IIPPE website</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/iippee-july-8-2013-fourth-annual-conference-in-political-economy'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/iippee-july-8-2013-fourth-annual-conference-in-political-economy</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital ActivismDigital Humanities2013-08-05T05:59:45ZNews ItemJune 2013 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2013-bulletin
<b>Our newsletter for the month of June 2013 can be accessed below.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the sixth issue of its newsletter for 2013. Hivos published a White Paper by Nishant Shah titled <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway">Whose Change is it Anyway?</a>, which attempts to reflect critically on existing patterns of making change and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. The Access to Knowledge team carried out a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics">quantitative analysis to identify trends and growth patterns in Indian Language Wikipedias</a> from September 2012 to April 2013. CIS drafted the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-protection-bill-2013-with-amendments-based-on-public-feedback">Privacy Protection Bill</a> and amended it as per feedback gained from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Privacy Roundtable Events. CIS made <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/cis-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind">closing statement on the Treaty for the Blind</a> at the WIPO Diplomatic Conference which was concluded with the adoption of the <a href="http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/doc_details.jsp?doc_id=241683">Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or otherwise Print Disabled</a>. In a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/patent-pools">research paper</a> Nehaa Chaudhari gives an analysis of patent pools, Sameer Boray gives an <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/the-right-way-to-fight-video-piracy">analysis of video piracy</a> and Pranav Menon <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/india-eu-fta-issues-surrounding-data-protection-and-security">gives an analysis of India-EU FTA and issues surrounding data protection and security</a>. In this period we organised the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/institute-on-internet-and-society">Institute on Internet and Society</a> with support from the Ford Foundation at Golden Palms, Bangalore from June 8 to 14, 2013.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Celebrating 5 Years of CIS</b><br />CIS is now 5 years old and we just celebrated this by holding an open exhibition in our offices in Bangalore and Delhi from May 20 to 23, showcasing our work and accomplishments over the period. We had about 170 visitors from the general public coming in to our office. Videos of the event are <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/celebrating-5-years-of-cis">here</a>.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/google-policy-fellowship-call-for-applications-2013"><b>Google Policy Fellowship</b></a><br />CIS has initiated processing of applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Shortlisted candidates would be informed about their interview. However, as of now there will be a 20 days delay in announcing the list for the interview.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Jobs</b><br /> CIS is inviting applications for the posts of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-for-developer">Developer</a> (NVDA Screen Reader Project) and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/content-developer-requirement">Editor/Content Developer</a>. To apply for these posts, send in your resume to Nirmita Narasimhan (<a href="mailto:nirmita@cis-india.org">nirmita@cis-india.org</a>). CIS is also seeking applications for the post of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-internet-governance">Programme Officer</a> (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to Sunil Abraham (<a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a>) and Pranesh Prakash (<a href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>).</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the <b>Hans Foundation</b>. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities</b><br />CIS and the Centre for Law and Policy Research (CLPR) are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapter on Jharkhand:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-jharkhand-call-for-comments">The Jharkhand Chapter</a> (by CLPR, June 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Note: <i>All the chapters published on the website are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated</i>.</p>
<p><b>Award</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/girls-in-ict-day-2013-in-delhi">Girls in ICT Day 2013</a> (organized by ITU-APT Foundation of India with support from CMAI - Association of India Communication and Infrastructure, FICCI Auditorium, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, May 7, 2013). Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan got a felicitation for her contribution and achievements in the field of Information and Communication Technology. The honour was conferred during the celebration of this event.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/business-world-june-26-2013-chitra-narayanan-a-treat-for-the-blind">A Treat for the Blind</a> (by Chitra Narayanan, Business World, June 26, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was quoted. </li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness">Openness</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikimedia Foundation has given a <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">grant</a> to CIS to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k"><b>Access to Knowledge</b></a><b> (Previously IP Reforms)</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>WIPO</b><br />Pranesh Prakash participated in the WIPO Diplomatic Conference to Conclude a Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works by Visually Impaired Persons and Persons with Print Disabilities in Marrakesh, Morocco, June 17 to 28, 2013. The conference concluded with the adoption of the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works by blind persons, persons with visual impairment, and other print disabled persons, by requiring mandatory exceptions in copyright law to enable conversions of books into accessible formats, and by enabling cross-border transfer of accessible format books. Click for:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/cis-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind">CIS's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind</a> (by Pranesh Prakash, June 28, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/india-closing-statement-marrakesh-treaty-for-the-blind">India's Closing Statement at Marrakesh on the Treaty for the Blind</a> (June 29, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Pervasive Technologies</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/patent-pools">Pervasive Technologies: Patent Pools</a> (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 27, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Other (FTA, Piracy)</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/the-right-way-to-fight-video-piracy">The Right Way to Fight Video Piracy?</a> (by Sameer Boray, June 6, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/india-eu-fta-issues-surrounding-data-protection-and-security">India-EU Proposed Free Trade Agreement: Issues Surrounding Data Protection and Security</a> (by Pranav Menon, June 8, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/india-eu-fta-copyright-issues">India- EU FTA: A Note on the Copyright Issues</a> (by Nehaa Chaudhari, June 18, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/inet-bangkok-june-8-2013-governance-in-the-age-of-internet-and-fta">Governance in the Age of the Internet and Free Trade Agreements</a> (organized by Thai Netizen Network and co-hosted by the Ministry of Information and Communication and the National Science and Technology Development Agency, Queen Sirikit National Convention Center, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; "><b>Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia)</b></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_To_Knowledge/Team" title="Access To Knowledge/Team">A2K team</a> consists of three members based in Bangalore: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">T. Vishnu Vardhan</a>, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">Dr. U.B. Pavanaja</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Subhashish Panigrahi</a> and one team member <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Nitika Tandon</a> who is working from Delhi office.</p>
<p><b>Statistical Report</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/indian-language-wikipedia-statistics">Indian Language Wikipedia Statistics</a> (by Nitika Tandon, June 30, September 2012 – April 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-bloggers">A 'Kannada' Wikipedia Workshop for Bloggers</a> (Suchitra, Bengaluru, June 23, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Co-organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop">Telugu Wikipedia Training Workshop</a> (co-organised by A2K team and Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad, Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad, March 8, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan conducted the workshop.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Upcoming Event</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education">Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education</a> (co-organised by HEIRA-CSCS, Tumkur University, CILHE-TISS and CCS, Indian Institute of Science, July 13, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop">My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad</a> (by T. Vishnu Vardhan, June 26, 2013). <i>The workshop was conducted in March but the report was published only in June</i>.</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/visual-editor.pdf/view">Wikipedia Visual Editor</a> (by Nitika Tandon, June 27, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Press Coverage (including videos)</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hmtv-may-30-2013-wikipedia-and-telegu-wikipedians">A Feature on Wikipedia and Telegu Wikipedians</a> (HMTV, May 30-31, 2013). Watch the video.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-live-phone-in-programme">Wikipedia Live Phone-in Programme</a> (HMTV, June 1, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan took part in a one hour live phone-in programme on Wikipedia.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/timeout-bengaluru-akhila-seetharaman-june-21-2013-wiki-donors">Wiki donors</a> (by Akhila Seetharaman, TimeOut Bengaluru, June 21, 2013). T. Vishnu Vardhan and Dr. U.B. Pavanaja are quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/prajavani-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan</a> (Prajavani, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/samyukta-karnataka-june-5-2013-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-coverage">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan</a> (Samyukta Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/vijaya-karnataka-june-5-2013-report-of-kannada-wikipedia-workshop-in-hasan">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Hasan</a> (Vijaya Karnataka, June 5, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop on June 4, 2013.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/suvarna-news-june-13-2013-wiki-rahasya-panel-discussion">Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion</a> (Suvarna News, June 13, 2013). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific.</li>
</ul>
<h3><b>Openness</b></h3>
<p><b>Column</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/dml-central-june-24-2013-nishant-shah-big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-of-openness">Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness</a> (by Nishant Shah, DML Central, June 24, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Hosted</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/bangalore-rhok-june-1-2-2013-report">RHoK Global Event</a> (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, June 1 – 2, 2013). Yogesh Londhe shares with you a post-event report.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS began two projects earlier this year. The first one on facilitating research and events on surveillance and freedom of expression is with Privacy International and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The second one on mapping cyber security actors in South Asia and South East Asia is with the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and support from the International Development Research Centre, Canada:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Cyber Stewards Project</b><br />Laird Brown, a strategic planner and writer with core competencies on brand analysis, public relations and resource management and Purba Sarkar who in the past worked as a strategic advisor in the field of SAP Retail are working in this project.</p>
<p><b>Video Interview</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-2-ram-mohan">An Interview with Ram Mohan</a> (June 30, 2013)</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/geo-politics-of-information-controls">The Geopolitics of Information Controls: A Presentation by Masashi Crete-Nishihata</a> (TERI, Bangalore, June 19, 2013). About 20 people participated in the event.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Privacy Research</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-protection-bill-2013-with-amendments-based-on-public-feedback">Privacy Protection Bill, 2013</a> (With Amendments based on Public Feedback) (by Elonnai Hickok, June 30, 2013): CIS drafted the Bill. Based on feedback received from the New Delhi, Bangalore, and Chennai Roundtables the Bill was amended. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Interviews</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/interview-with-citizen-lab-on-internet-filtering">Interview with the Citizen Lab on Internet Filtering in India</a> (June 24, 2013). Maria Xynou interviewed Masashi Crete-Nishihata and Jakub Dalek from the Citizen Lab on internet filtering in India.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/interview-with-irish-data-protection-commissioner">Interview with Billy Hawkes</a> (June 20, 2014). Maria Xynou interviewed Billy Hawkes, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on recommendations for data protection in India.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Columns</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-june-13-2013-pranesh-prakash-indian-surveillance-laws-and-practices-far-worse-than-us">Indian Surveillance Laws & Practices Far Worse than US</a> (by Pranesh Prakash, Economic Times, June 13, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-world-wide-rule">World Wide Rule</a> (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, June 14, 2013). Nishant Shah reviews Schmidt and Cohen's book “The New Digital Age”.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-26-2013-chinmayi-arun-way-to-watch">Way to Watch</a> (by Chinmayi Arun, Indian Express, June 26, 2013). </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-together-june-26-2013-snehashish-ghosh-the-state-is-snooping-can-you-escape">The State is Snooping: Can You Escape?</a> (by Snehashish Ghosh, India Together, June 26, 2013). </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-subject-to-nsa-dragnet-surveillance">India Subject to NSA Dragnet Surveillance! No Longer a Hypothesis — It is Now Officially Confirmed</a> (by Maria Xynou, June 13, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sebi-and-communication-surveillance">SEBI and Communication Surveillance: New Rules, New Responsibilities?</a> (by Kovey Coles, June 27, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/open-letter-to-not-recognize-india-as-data-secure-nation">Open Letter to "Not" Recognize India as Data Secure Nation till Enactment of Privacy Legislation</a> (by Elonnai Hickok, June 19, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/open-letter-to-siam-on-rfid%20installation-in-vehicles">Open Letter to Prevent the Installation of RFID tags in Vehicles</a> (by Maria Xynou, June 27, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/technology-power-and-revolutions-in-arab-spring">Technology, Power, and Revolutions in the Arab Spring</a> (CIS, July 2, 2013). Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan gave a talk.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/cryptoparty-bangalore">Learn to Secure Your Online Communication!</a> (CIS, Bangalore, June 30, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/cryptoparty-delhi">Learn to Secure Your Online Communication!</a> (IIC, Delhi University, South Campus, New Delhi, July 6, 2013). A Crypto Party was organised.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Co-organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-the-4th-privacy-round-table-meeting">4<sup>th</sup> Privacy Round Table Meeting</a> (co-organised with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Data Security Council of India, Mumbai, June 15, 2013). </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Upcoming / Ongoing Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-activism-in-europe">Digital Activism in Europe</a> (The Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, July 8, 2013). Bernadette Längle will give a talk.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-round-table-kolkata">Privacy Round Table, Kolkata</a> (co-organised with the Federation for Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, and the Data Security Council of India, Lytton Hotel, Sudder Street, Kolkata, July 13, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated In</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/biometrics-or-bust-indias-identity-crisis">Biometrics or bust? India's Identity Crisis</a> (organized by the Oxford Internet Institute, July 2, 2013). Malavika Jayaram was a speaker.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Video</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/tehelka-june-15-2013-pranesh-prakash-on-us-snooping-into-indian-cyber-space">Pranesh Prakash on the US snooping into Indian cyber space</a> (by Tehelka, June 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Media Coverage</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-kim-arora-june-6-2013-indian-student-in-cornell-university-hacks-icse-isc-databas">Indian student in Cornell University hacks into ICSE, ISC database</a> (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 6, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-june-7-2013-vasudha-venugopal-karthik-subramanian-hacking-sparks-row-over-exam-evaluation">‘Hacking’ sparks row over exam evaluation</a> (by Vasudha Venugopal and Karthik Subramanian, Hindu, June 7, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-javed-anwer-ishan-srivastava-june-8-2013-internet-firms-deny-existence-of-prism">Internet firms deny existence of PRISM</a> (by Javed Anwer and Ishan Srivastava, Times of India, June 8, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash are quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/tech-dirt-june-8-2013-indian-govt-quietly-brings-central-monitoring-system">Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications</a> (Tech Dirt, June 8, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-javed-anwer-june-9-2013-facebook-google-deny-spying-access">Facebook, Google deny spying access</a> (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 9, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindu-businessline-thomas-k-thomas-june-10-2013-govt-mulls-advisory-on-privacy-issues-related-to-google-facebook">Govt mulls advisory on privacy issues related to Google, Facebook</a> (by Thomas K Thomas, Hindu Business Line, June 10, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-june-22-2013-kim-arora-cyber-experts-suggest-open-source-software-to-protect-privacy">Cyber experts suggest using open source software to protect privacy</a> (by Kim Arora, Times of India, June 22, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-javed-anwer-june-26-2013-govt-goes-after-porn-makes-isps-ban-sites">Govt goes after porn, makes ISPs ban sites</a> (by Javed Anwer, Times of India, June 26, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-register-phil-muncaster-june-27-2013-indian-govt-blocks-40-smut-sites-forgets-to-give-reason">Indian govt blocks 40 smut sites, forgets to give reason</a> (by Phil Muncaster, The Register, June 27, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-aloke-tikku-june-28-2013-concerns-over-central-snoop">Concerns over central snoop</a> (by Aloke Tikku, Hindustan Times, June 28, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-maitreyee-boruah-june-29-2013-internet-users-enraged-over-us-online-spying">Internet users enraged over US online spying</a> (by Maitreyee Boruah, Times of India, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-anirban-sen-june-29-2013-issue-of-duplication-of-identities-of-users-under-control">Issue of duplication of identities of users under control: Nilekani</a> (by Anirban Sen, Livemint, June 29, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/time-world-anjan-trivedi-june-30-2013-in-india-prison-like-surveillance-slips-under-the-radar">In India, Prism-like Surveillance Slips Under the Radar</a> (by Anjan Trivedi, Time World, June 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access">Knowledge Repository on Internet Access</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access. It will also touch upon various policies and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation of policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules are being published in the <a href="http://www.internet-institute.in/">Internet Institute website</a>:</p>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/institute-on-internet-and-society">Institute on Internet and Society</a> (supported by Ford Foundation, Golden Palms Resort, Bangalore, June 8 – 14, 2013). Pranesh Prakash, Bernadette Längle, Vir Kamal Chopra, AK Bhargava, Ananth Guruswamy, Archana Gulati, Chakshu Roy, Elonnai Hickok, Gaurab Raj Upadhaya, Helani Galpaya, Michael Ginguld, Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, C. Nandini, Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan, Dr. Nishant Shah, Parminder Jeet Singh, Ravikiran Annaswamy, Dr. Ravina Aggarwal, Satyen Gupta, Dr. Subbiah Arunachalam, Sunil Abraham, Tulika Pandey and T. Vishnu Vardhan were speakers at the event. The presentations can be accessed <a href="http://internet-institute.in/repository">here</a>.</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/telecom">Telecom</a></h3>
<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><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-article-opinion-shyam-ponappa-june-5-2013-law-and-order-through-traffic-systems">Law & Order through Traffic Systems</a> (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, June 5, 2013 and cross-posted in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-article-opinion-shyam-ponappa-june-5-2013-law-and-order-through-traffic-systems">Organizing India Blogspot</a>).</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives">Digital Natives</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:</p>
<p><b>White Paper</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway">Whose Change is it Anyway?</a> (by Nishant Shah, Hivos, June 18, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia.</p>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/mapping-the-field-of-digital-humanities">Mapping the Field of Digital Humanities</a> (by Sara Morais, June 11, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/a-suggested-set-of-values-for-the-digital-humanities">A Suggested Set of Values for the Digital Humanities</a> (by Sara Morais, June 12, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/archive-practice-and-digital-humanities">Archive Practice and Digital Humanities</a> (by Sara Morais, June 24, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<p><b>Follow us elsewhere</b></p>
<ul>
<li>Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="https://twitter.com/cis_india">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Join the CIS group on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/groups/28535315687/">Facebook</a></li>
<li>Visit us at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Support Us</b><br />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>
<h3>Request for Collaboration</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a></p>
<hr />
<p><i>CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2013-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2013-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesOpennessResearchers at Work2013-07-27T09:48:16ZPageThe Pervert in the Cubicle: Of Pornographers, Pirates and Terrorists: A Talk by Nishant Shah
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/annenberg-oxford-media-policy-summer-institute
<b>Dr. Nishant Shah was a speaker at the 2013 Annenberg - Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute organized by Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford from June 24 to July 5, 2013 at the University of Oxford.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/sites/pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/files/schedulejune20.pdf">Click to read the schedule published by the University of Oxford</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="http://cgcsblog.asc.upenn.edu/annenberg-oxford-summer-institute/">Center for Global Communication Studies</a> at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania and the <a href="http://pcmlp.socleg.ox.ac.uk/">Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy</a> at the University of Oxford (PCMLP) are pleased to invite applications to the<b> 15th annual Annenberg-Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute,</b> to be held from <span><b>Monday, June 24 to Friday, July 5, 2013 at the University of Oxford.</b></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For the past fifteen years, the Annenberg- Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute has brought together researchers, academics, and practitioners for two weeks of scholarship on a range of media issues. A partnership between the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania and the Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy at the University of Oxford, the program brings together a diverse range of participants from across the world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The annual summer institute brings together young scholars and regulators for two weeks to discuss important recent trends in technology, international politics and development and its influence on media policy. Participants come from around the world; countries represented at previous summer institutes include Myanmar, Bosnia and Herzegonia, Iran, Kenya, China, Brazil, Egypt, Nigeria, Jordan, Italy, Iran, Colombia, El Salvador, among others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This year the summer institute seeks, as part of the cohort, researchers and academics (PhD candidates and early career academics, for example), who will come with a research project related to the general subject of the seminar. We welcome applications from emerging scholars and practitioners working on topics such as media and democracy, public service broadcasting, Internet policy and politics, monitoring and evaluation of media development programs, the media’s role in conflict and post-conflict environments, strategic communications, as well as other topics. For full application instructions please visit our <a href="http://cgcsblog.asc.upenn.edu/anox-faq/"><span>Frequently Asked Questions pag</span><span>e</span></a><a href="http://cgcsblog.asc.upenn.edu/anox-faq/"><span></span></a>. The application is available <a href="https://crm.orionondemand.com/crm/forms/Md670cB0I670x6700mr">here</a>. Please note, applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis until April 1, 2013.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/annenberg-oxford-media-policy-summer-institute'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/annenberg-oxford-media-policy-summer-institute</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Humanities2013-08-28T10:10:34ZNews ItemJohannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/jwtc-workshop
<b>The 2013 Session will take place in Johannesburg (South Africa) from June 22 to July 2, 2013. Nishant Shah is participating as a speaker. The event is organized by WITS Institute for Social and Economic Research.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.jwtc.org.za/the_workshop/speakers_2013/nishant_shah.htm">Click to read the original here</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant is the founder and Director of Research for the Bangalore-based<a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/"> Centre for Internet and Society</a>. His doctoral work at the <a href="http://cscs.res.in/">Centre for the Study of Culture and Society</a>, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009), he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an IT City in India and China. He is the series editor for a three year collaborative project on <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet">"Histories of the Internet(s) in India"</a> that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant's current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples' use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Nishant writes regularly for The Indian Express and GQ India to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the intersections of digital technologies and social justice within the higher education space in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/jwtc-workshop'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/jwtc-workshop</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaDigital Humanities2013-08-28T09:42:08ZNews ItemApril 2013 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2013-bulletin
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the fourth issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/celebrating-5-years-of-cis"><b>Celebrating 5 Years of CIS</b></a><br />We at the Centre for Internet and Society celebrate 5 years of existence with an exhibition showcasing our work and accomplishments over this time. The exhibition will be held concurrently at both our Bangalore and Delhi offices from May 20 to 24, 2013, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/google-policy-fellowship-call-for-applications-2013">Google Policy Fellowship</a></b><br />CIS is inviting applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India fellow who will be selected by July 1, 2013. Fellowship focus areas include Access to Knowledge, Openness in India, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, and Telecom Send in your applications for the position by June 15, 2013.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Jobs</b><br /> CIS invites applications for the posts of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-for-developer">Developer</a> (NVDA Screen Reader Project), and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-internet-governance">Programme Officer</a> (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> and <a href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>. CIS also invites applications for the post of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-pilot-projects-access-to-knowledge">Programme Officer</a> (Access to Knowledge, Pilot Projects). To apply for this position send your resume to <a href="mailto:vishnu@cis-india.org">vishnu@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the <b>Hans Foundation</b>. One is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities</b><br />Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Himachal Pradesh, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-himachal-pradesh-call-for-comments">The Himachal Pradesh Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-goa-call-for-comments">Goa Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-jammu-kashmir-call-for-comments">The Jammu & Kashmir Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-rajasthan-call-for-comments">The Rajasthan Chapter</a> (by Manojna Yeluri, April 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p>Note: <i>All of these are early drafts and will be reviewed and updated</i>.</p>
<p><b>Events Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/girls-in-ict-day-mithra-jyothi">Girls in ICT Day</a> (April 25, 2013, Mitra Jyothi Auditorium, HSR Layout, Bangalore). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja gave a talk on Social Media and Kannada Language for Women with Disabilities. Sara Morais wrote an event report.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/events/global-accessibility-awareness-day-2013">Global Accessibility Awareness Day</a> (May 9, 2013, TERI, Southern Regional Centre, Domlur, Bangalore).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Announcement</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/cis-itu-d-sector-membership">CIS Gets ITU-D Sector Membership</a>: CIS has become a sector member of ITU-D.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness">Openness</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikimedia Foundation <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">awarded</a> CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan"><b>Wikipedia</b></a><br />Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">awarded</a> CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_To_Knowledge/Team" title="Access To Knowledge/Team">A2K team</a> consists of four members based in Delhi: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">T. Vishnu Vardhan</a>, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Nitika Tandon</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Subhashish Panigrahi</a>, and one team member <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">Dr. U.B. Pavanaja</a> who is working from Bangalore office. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Noopur Raval</a>, Programme Officer has left the organisation. April 24, 2013 was her last working day.</p>
<p><b>Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-page-views-and-project-pages">Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project #2: Visualising Page Views and Project Pages</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/indian-wiki-women-history-month">Indian WikiWomen celebrate Women’s History Month</a> (by Netha Hussain, April 29, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/konkani-wikipedia-analysis">Analysis of Konkani Wikipedia: Facts & Challenges</a> (by Nitika Tandon, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/odia-wikipedia-needs-assessment">Odia Wikipedia: Needs Assessment</a> (by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop-udupi-april-29-2013">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop</a> (April 29, 2013, Govinda Pai Research Centre, MGM College Udupi). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led the workshop and gave a talk on Kannada Wikipedia.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Events Co-organised</b><br />The following events were organised in the month of March but reports were written during the month of April. Vishnu Vardhan and Subhashish Panigrahi held meetings with wikipedians:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wiki-meet-up-kolkata">Kolkata Wiki Community Meetup</a> (organised by CIS and Kolkata Wiki Community, March 14, 2013). </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/odia-wikipedia-cuttack-community-meetup-march-16-2013">Odia Wikipedia - Cuttack Community Meetup</a> (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Cuttack, March 16, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/odia-wikipedia-meet-up-bhubaneswar-march-17-2013">Odia Wikipedia – Bhubaneswar Community Meetup</a> (organised by CIS and Odia Wiki Community, Bhubaneswar, March 17, 2013). </li>
</ul>
<p>The following event was organised in the month of April. We will be publishing the report soon:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/telegu-wiki-mahotsavam-2013">Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013</a> (organised by Telugu Wikipedia Community and CIS, Hyderabad, April 9 – 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan was one of the trainers at the Wikipedia Academy at Centre for Good Governance on April 9, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan spoke about the Access to Knowledge work in one of the sessions of Wikimedia Meeting with Media Heads on April 10, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan gave a talk on A2K’s plans for the growth of Telegu Wikipedia in 2013-14 at the Telegu Wikipedia general meeting on April 11, 2013. Vishnu Vardhan also gave a talk about Access to Knowledge in the digital era at the Wiki Chaitanya Vedika on April 11, 2013.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Other </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k"><b>Access to Knowledge</b></a><b> Updates</b></p>
<p><b>WIPO</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blog/cis-intervention-eu-blocking-wipo-treaty-for-blind">CIS Intervention on the Treaty for the Visually Impaired at SCCR/SS/GE/2/13</a> (Geneva, April 18 – 20, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in the session and spoke about the rights of the visually impaired.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with <b>Privacy International</b>, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.</p>
<p><b>Information Technology</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/it-amendment-act-69-a-rules-draft-and-final-version-comparison">IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69A Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison</a> (by Jadine Lannon, April 27, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-telegraph-act-419-a-rules-and-it-amendment-act-69-rules">Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, 419A Rules and IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69 Rules</a> (by Jadine Lannon, April 28, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/it-amendment-act-69-rules-draft-and-final-version-comparison">IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69 Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison</a> (by Jadine Lannon, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/it-amendment-act-69-b-draft-and-final-version-comparison">IT (Amendment) Act, 2008, 69B Rules: Draft and Final Version Comparison</a> (by Jadine Lannon, April 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Resources</b><br />The below rules were published recently:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/it-procedure-and-safeguards-for-interception-monitoring-and-decryption-of-information-rules-2009">Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards for Interception, Monitoring and Decryption of Information) Rules, 2009</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/it-procedure-and-safeguard-for-monitoring-and-collecting-traffic-data-or-information-rules-2009">Information Technology (Procedure and safeguard for Monitoring and Collecting Traffic Data or Information) Rules, 2009</a></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/indian-telegraph-act-section-419-a-rules">Rules Under Section 419A of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885</a></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-april-6-2013-nishant-shah-off-the-record">Off the Record</a> (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, April 6, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Privacy</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-big-brother-the-central-monitoring-system">India´s ´Big Brother´: The Central Monitoring System</a> (CMS) (by Maria Xynou, April 8, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Events Organised</b><br />Maria Xynou gives an overview of the discussions and recommendations from the privacy round tables held in Delhi and Bangalore:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-the-first-privacy-round-table-meeting">A Privacy Round Table in Delhi</a> (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/report-on-the-2nd-privacy-round-table">A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore</a> (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Announcements</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">2nd Expert Committee meeting on draft 'Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012': The Department of Biotechnology has constituted an Expert Committee to discuss various issues of this Bill in detail. Sunil Abraham has been nominated as one of the members of this Committee. A meeting of this Expert Committee has been scheduled for May 13, 2013 under the Chairmanship of Dr. T. S. Rao, Adviser, DBT.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Chinmayi Arun is one of the international experts supporting the Internet & Jurisdiction project, a global multi-stakeholder dialogue process.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Upcoming Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-round-table-chennai">A Privacy Round Table in Chennai</a> (co-organised with Data Security Council of India and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Residency Towers, Sir Thyagaraja Road, T Nagar, Chennai, May 18, 10.30 a.m. to 4.00 p.m.).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/consilience-2013-law-technology-committee-nls-bangalore">Consilience – 2013</a> (National Law School of India University, Bangalore, May 26 – 27, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Other Event Hosted</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/a-talk-by-marialaura-ghidni">Or-bits.com — A Talk by Marialaura Ghidini</a> (CIS, Bangalore, April 19, 2013). Marialaura Ghidini gave a talk abou the creation and activities of or-bits.com, a web-based curatorial platform that she founded in 2009.</li>
</ul>
<h3>News and Media</h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-april-1-2013-prashant-jha-clarify-and-define-terms-in-it-rules-panel-tells-govt">Clarify and define terms in IT rules, panel tells govt</a>. (by Prashant Jha, Hindu, April 1, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/privacy-surgeon-simon-davies-april-9-2013-india-takes-its-first-serious-step-toward-privacy-regulation">India takes its first serious step toward privacy regulation – but it may be misguided</a> (Privacy Surgeon, April 9, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/ndtv-video-april-11-2013-the-social-network-regulating-social-media-unrealistic-impossible-necessary">Regulating Social Media: Unrealistic, Impossible, Necessary?</a> (NDTV, April 11, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in a discussion on social media aired on NDTV.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-zia-haq-april-12-2013-social-media-may-influence-160-lok-sabha-seats-in-2014">Social media may influence 160 LS seats in 2014</a> (by Zia Haq, Hindustan Times, April 12, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wall-street-journal-april-15-2013-r-jai-krishna-vote-will-social-media-impact-the-election">Vote: Will Social Media Impact the Election?</a> (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, April 15, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/d-w-april-15-2013-untangling-the-web-of-indias-ungovernable-net">Untangling the web of India's 'ungovernable' Net</a> (Deutsche Welle, April 15, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/gni-annual-report-mentions-cis">CIS in GNI Annual Report</a> (April 25, 2013). CIS gets mentioned in GNI Annual Report. Sunil Abraham is quoted in it. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/india-together-april-27-2013-satarupa-sen-bhattacharya-is-free-speech-an-indian-value">Is free speech an Indian value?</a> (by Satarupa Sen Bhattacharya, India Together, April 27, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access">Knowledge Repository on Internet Access</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: <a href="http://www.internet-institute.in">www.internet-institute.in</a>.</p>
<p><b>Upcoming Event</b><br />We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” with the support of Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details have been <a href="http://www.internet-institute.in/">announced</a>.</p>
<p>The following units have been published:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-infrastructure">Internet Infrastructure</a> (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, April 30, 2013).</li>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/isp-introduction">Internet Service Provider – Introduction</a> (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, April 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/telecom">Telecom</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility of 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><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-april-4-2013-prioritizing-communications-energy">Prioritizing Communications & Energy</a> (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot, April 4, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/open-citizen-radio-networks-to-race-for-.radio-gtld">From Open Citizen Radio Networks to the Race for .RADIO gTLD</a> (by Sharath Chandra Ram, April 30, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<ul>
<li>Broadband Policy Course (organised by Lirne Asia, Bangalore, April 5 – 6, 2013). Nirmita Narasimhan and Snehashish Ghosh attended the course.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2 style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p>The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.<br /> <b>Follow us elsewhere</b></p>
<ul>
<li>Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="https://twitter.com/cis_india">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Join the CIS group on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/groups/28535315687/">Facebook</a></li>
<li>Visit us at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Support Us</b><br />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; "><b>Request for Collaboration</b><br />We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2013-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2013-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesCISRAWOpenness2013-05-31T08:07:38ZPageMarch 2013 Bulletin
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the third issue of its newsletter for the year 2013. In this issue we bring you an overview of our research programs, updates of events organised by us, events we participated in, news and media coverage, and videos of some of our recent events.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Jobs</b><br />CIS invites applications for the posts of <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/vacancy-for-developer">Developer</a> (NVDA Screen Reader Project), <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-access-to-knowledge-and-openness">Programme Officer</a> (Access to Knowledge and Openness), and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/jobs/programme-officer-internet-governance">Programme Officer</a> (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> and <a href="mailto:pranesh@cis-india.org">pranesh@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is doing two projects in partnership with the <b>Hans Foundation</b>. One of this is to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India and another is for developing a screen reader and text-to- speech synthesizer for Indian languages. CIS is also working with the World Blind Union and many other organisations to develop a Treaty for the Visually Impaired helped by the WIPO:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities</b><br />Anandhi Viswanathan from CIS and Manojna Yeluri from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are working in this project. Draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from readers for the chapters on Lakshadweep, Meghalaya and Uttar Pradesh:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-lakshadweep-chapter-call-for-comments">The Lakshadweep Chapter</a> (by Anandhi Viswanathan, March 25, 2013): The union territory of Lakshadweep has not passed any legislation for persons with disabilities, but implements the provisions under the central laws. The benefits currently available to persons with disabilities in Lakshadweep include disability pension, unemployment allowance and grant for setting up kiosks.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-kit-the-meghalaya-chapter-call-for-comments">The Meghalaya Chapter</a> (by Manojna Yeluri, March 25, 2013): Meghalaya is one of the few north-eastern states, which has appointed a Commissioner for Disabilities. Most of the schemes and benefits given to persons with disabilities in Meghalaya are under centrally sponsored schemes. Very few schemes are initiated by the state government. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/national-resource-uttar-pradesh-chapter-call-for-comments">The Uttar Pradesh Chapter</a> (by Manojna Yeluri, March 31, 2013): The Government of Uttar Pradesh has established shelter homes and vocational training centres in several parts of the states — most recently in Meerut, Bareilly and Gorakhpur. It has also undertaken to finance nearly 4340 corrective surgeries for polio across nine cities of Uttar Pradesh. It also intends to start several projects in 2013. These include the establishment of a Braille Press in order to produce Braille books, magazines and other study material.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Resources<br /></b>We now have a new section on our website which contains all government notifications, RTI applications, and accessibility related resources: cases, statutes, etc. The following were published earlier this month:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/information-about-schemes-for-disabled-haryana">Information about Schemes for Disabled Persons in Haryana</a> We received this notification on schemes and policies for persons with disabilities from the Government of Haryana.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/haryana-notification">Haryana Government Notification</a> (Hindi version): The notification that we received from the state government was in Hindi. We will put up the English translation soon.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/west-bengal-govt-notifications">West Bengal (Govt) Notifications</a>: We received a series of notifications from the West Bengal Government from its various departments such as finance, higher education, transport, health and family welfare, labour, land and land reforms, panchayats and rural development, etc. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/west-bengal-notifications.zip">OCR versions</a> of the same have been published.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/lakshadweep-govt-notifications">Lakshadweep (Govt) Notifications</a>: Notifications received from the Lakshadweep Government including guidelines for functioning of KIOSKS, grant of unemployment allowance and special jobs to persons with disabilities, issuing identity card to persons with disabilities for availing government benefits, etc., are published. <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/lakshadweep-ocr-notifications">OCR versions</a> have also been put up.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated In</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/discussion-on-intercept-between-uncrpd-and-cedaw">A Discussion on Intercept between UNCRPD & CEDAW</a> (organized by the Shanta Memorial Institute of Rehabilitation – Odisha, CBR Network and Mitra Jyoti, Bangalore, Karnataka, February 4, 2013): Anandhi Viswanathan participated in this event. </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness">Openness</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Wikimedia Foundation <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">awarded</a> CIS a two year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop the growth of Indic language communities and projects by community collaborations and partnerships. This is being carried out by the Access to Knowledge team based in Delhi. CIS is also doing a project (Pervasive Technologies) on examining the relationship between production of pervasive technologies and intellectual property. CIS also promotes openness including open government data, open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software through its Openness programme.</p>
<h3><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan"><b>Wikipedia</b></a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">awarded</a> CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The <a href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Access_To_Knowledge/Team" title="Access To Knowledge/Team">A2K team</a> consists of four members based in Delhi: <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">T. Vishnu Vardhan</a>, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Nitika Tandon</a>, <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Subhashish Panigrahi</a> and <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/people/our-team">Noopur Raval</a>, and one team member <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/our-team">Dr. U.B. Pavanaja</a> who is working from Bangalore office.</p>
<p><b>Indic Wikipedia Visualisation Project</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/indic-wikipedia-visualisation-project-visualising-basic-parameters">Visualising Basic Parameters</a> (by Sajjad Anwar and Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): Sajjad and Sumandro bring you a visualisation of the growth of Indic Wikipedia in this first post on Indic Wikipedia Visualisation project. They look into the different aspects of the past and present activities of Indic Wikipedias, and divide the visualisation into three different focus areas: (1) basic parameters, (2) geographic patterns of edits, and (3) exploring the topics that receives the greatest number of edits. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/wikipedia-session-at-bits-goa">Introductory Wikipedia session at BITS Goa</a> (organised by CIS, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani, Goa, March 7, 2013). The Access to Knowledge team was invited by Nikhil Dixit from BITS to organise a Wikipedia editing session. Nitika Tandon led the session on IP editing. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/kannada-wikipedia-workshop">Kannada Wikipedia Workshop</a> (organised by CIS, Institution of Engineers, JLB Road, Mysore, March 24, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja led this workshop.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Co-organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/wiki-womens-day-in-goa">Wiki Women's Day in Goa</a> (organised by the Wikimedia India Chapter and CIS, Nirmala Institute of Education, Panaji, Goa, March 8, 2013). Nitika Tandon participated in this workshop held on International Working Women's Day, and shares the developments in this report.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/wikipedia-workshop-for-kannada-science-writers">Wikipedia Workshop for Kannada Science Writers</a> (organised by Wikimedia India Chapter, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath and CIS, Karnataka Rajya Vijnana Parishath Conference Hall, Banashankari 2nd Stage, Bangalore, March 17, 2013). Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Upcoming Event</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/telegu-wiki-mahotsavam-2013">Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013</a> (co-organised with the Telegu Wikipedia community, Hyderabad, April 9 to 11, 2013). Vishnu Vardhan is participating in this event as a speaker. A public event will be held on April 11 from 5.00 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. at Golden Threshold (Sarojini Naidu's house) in Hyderabad. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Participated</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-womens-workshop-bangalore-2013">Wikipedia Women's Workshop Bangalore 2013</a> (organised by Wikimedia India, Servelots Infotech, Jayanagar, Bangalore, March 8, 2013). The event was covered by Kannada Prabha on March 9, 2013. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja participated in the event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wikipedia-at-avenir">Wikipedia at Avenir</a> (organised by the Wikipedia community, Netaji Subhash Engineering College, Kolkata, West Bengal, March 11, 2013). CIS supported this event. </li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Report from Other Organisations</b><br />Wikipedia Community members helped the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications Programme (HEIRA) of CSCS Bangalore to organize a day-long workshop on ‘Digital Literacy’ at Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, Maharasthra on January 17, 2013. Tanveer Hasan of HEIRA shares with us the developments in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/ahmednagar-marathi-wikipedia-workshop-report">this report</a>.</p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<h3><b>Other </b><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness"><b>Openness</b></a><b> Updates</b></h3>
<p><b>Event Report</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog/iraqi-public-data-scenario-workshop">Iraqi Public Data Scenario Workshop: A Summary</a> (by Sumandro Chattapadhyay, March 26, 2013): A workshop on public data was conducted by Sunil Abraham and Sumandro Chattapadhyay for the officials of the Government of Iraq. It was organized by UNDP Iraq in Amman, Jordan from October 18 to 23, 2012. Sumandro Chattapadhyay shares with us the developments from the workshop held over five days. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-data-camp-2013">Open DataCamp - 2013</a> (organized by Open Data Camp, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram (inside Christ University Campus), Dairy Circle, Bangalore, March 2 and 3, 2013): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>HasGeek</b><br />HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the <a href="http://fifthelephant.in/2012/">Fifth Elephant</a>, <a href="http://droidcon.in/2011">Droidcon India 2011</a>, <a href="http://androidcamp.hasgeek.com/">Android Camp</a>, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works from the CIS office in Bengaluru.</p>
<p><b>Upcoming Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://pigworkshop.fifthelephant.in/">Pig Workshop</a> (organized by HasGeek, Alchemy Solutions, Domlur, Bangalore, 9.00 a.m. to 6.00 p.m.): A workshop on how to use Pig for mining useful information from data. It is open to programmers who have a background in Java programming, some familiarity with Hadoop and MapReduce algorithms, and have worked with large chunks of data.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/fifth-elephant-2013">The Fifth Elephant 2013</a> (organized by HasGeek, July 11 to 13, 2013, NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore). </li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes. Currently, CIS is doing a project with <b>Privacy International</b>, London to facilitate research and events around surveillance, and freedom of speech and expression.</p>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p><b>Policy</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/draft-human-dna-profiling-bill-april-2012">Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill</a> (April 2012): High Level Concerns (by Elonnai Hickok, March 12, 2013). The post examines the high level concerns that CIS has with the April 2012 draft of the Bill.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/human-dna-profiling-bill-analysis">Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012 Analysis</a> (by Jeremy Gruber, Council for Responsible Genetics, US, March 19, 2013). Jeremy provides an analysis of the Human DNA Profiling Bill, 2012. He says that India’s updated 2012 Human DNA Profiling Bill offers largely superficial changes from its predecessor, the Draft DNA Profiling Bill, 2007.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-protection-bill-2013-citizens-draft">The Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013: A Citizen's Draft</a> (by Bhairav Acharya, March 26, 2013). Bhairav Acharya has drafted the Privacy (Protection) Bill 2013. It contains provisions that speak to data protection, interception, and surveillance and also establishes the powers and functions of the Privacy Commissioner, and lays out offenses and penalties for contravention of the Bill. The Bill represents a citizen's version of possible privacy legislation for India, and will be shared with key stakeholders including civil society, industry, and government.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Upcoming Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-round-table">A Privacy Round Table in Delhi</a> (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, FICCI Federation House, Tansen Marg, New Delhi, April 3, 2013). </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/privacy-round-table-in-bangalore">A Privacy Round Table in Bangalore</a> (organized by CIS and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, Jayamahal Palace, Jayamahal Road, Bangalore, April 20, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/analyzing-draft-human-dna-profiling-bill">Analyzing the Draft Human DNA Profiling Bill 2012</a> (organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, March 1, 2013): Maria Xynou shares <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/summary-of-cis-workshop-on-dna-profiling-bill-2012">a summary of the workshop</a> in this report.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Participated In</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/global-partners-meeting-london">Global Partners Meeting @ London</a> (organized by Privacy International, London School of Economics and Political Science, March 22 – 25, 2013). Sunil Abraham and Malavika Jayaram participated in the event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/global-asc-upenn-events-indias-civil-liberties-crisis">India’s Civil Liberties Crisis: Of Bans, Blocks, Bullying and Biometrics</a> (organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, March 28, 2013). Malavika Jayaram participated as a speaker.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/future-of-privacy-in-india-on-april-5-2013-at-oberoi-hotel-new-delhi">Future of Privacy in India</a> (organized by DSCI and ICOMP, Oberoi Hotel, New Delhi, April 5, 2013). Sunil Abraham is a speaker at this event.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Blog Posts</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hacking-without-borders-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-and-surveillance">Hacking without borders: The future of artificial intelligence and surveillance</a> (by Maria Xynou, March 15, 2013). In this post, Maria looks at some of DARPA´s artificial intelligence surveillance technologies in regards to the right to privacy and their potential future use in India.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/driving-in-the-surveillance-society-cameras-rfid-black-boxes">Driving in the Surveillance Society: Cameras, RFID tags and Black Boxes...</a> (by Maria Xynou, March 26, 2013). Maria examines red light cameras, RFID tags and black boxes used to monitor vehicles in India.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/microsoft-releases-first-report-on-data-requests-by-law-enforcement-agencies">Microsoft Releases its First Report on Data Requests by Law Enforcement Agencies around the World</a> (by Maria Xynou, March 27, 2013). CIS presents Microsoft´s report on law enforcement requests, with a focus on data requested by Indian law enforcement agencies.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-criminal-law-amendment-bill-2013">The Criminal Law Amendment Bill 2013 — Penalising 'Peeping Toms' and Other Privacy Issues</a> (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013). The pending amendments to the Indian Penal Code, if passed in their current format, would be a huge boost for individual physical privacy by criminalising stalking and sexually-tinted voyeurism and removing the ambiguities in Indian law which threaten the privacy and dignity of individuals.</li>
</ul>
<h3>IT Act</h3>
<p><b>Featured Blog Post</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-welcomes-standing-committee-report-on-it-rules">CIS Welcomes Standing Committee Report on IT Rules</a> (by Pranesh Prakash, March 27, 2013). CIS welcomes the report by the Standing Committee on Subordinate Legislation, in which it has lambasted the government and has recommended that the government amend the Rules it passed in April 2011 under section 79 of the Information Technology Act. The post was quoted in: <a href="http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-03-28/internet/38098800_1_rules-self-regulation-pranesh-prakash">The Times of India</a> (March 28, 2013), <a href="http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=449591&catid=73">The Statesman</a> (March 28, 2013), <a href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-03-28/news/38099676_1_google-chairman-eric-schmidt-government-pranesh-prakash">Economic Times</a> (March 28, 2013), <a href="http://www.dqindia.com/dataquest/news/186012/cis-welcomes-panels-anti-govt-stand-it-rules">Data Quest</a> (March 28, 2013), and <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/clarify-and-define-terms-in-it-rules-panel-tells-govt/article4570291.ece">The Hindu</a> (April 1, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Submissions<br /></b>Bhairav Acharya, on behalf of CIS submitted comments to the Committee on Subordinate Legislation of the 15<sup>th</sup> Lok Sabha for the following rules:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-it-electronic-service-delivery-rules-2011">Comments on the Information Technology (Electronic Service Delivery) Rules, 2011</a>. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 316(E) on April 11, 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-it-reasonable-security-practices-and-procedures-and-sensitive-personal-data-or-information-rules-2011">Comments on the Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules, 2011</a>. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 313(E) on April 11, 2011.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-it-guidelines-for-cyber-cafe-rules-2011">Comments on the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Cafe) Rules, 2011</a>. The Rules were notified by the Central Government in the Gazette of India vide Notification GSR 315(E) on April 11, 2011.</li>
</ul>
<p>Note: <i>The above rules were submitted earlier but published on our website only recently</i>.</p>
<h3>Unique ID Project</h3>
<p><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/uid-and-npr">Unique Identity Number (UID), National Population Register (NPR), and Governance</a> (organized by CIS and Say No to UID Campaign, TERI, Bangalore, March 2, 2013): CIS interviewed Usha Ramanathan and Anant Maringanti. Watch the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/workshop-on-the-uid-and-npr">videos</a> uploaded in this blog post by Maria Xynou. This was covered in <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/newzfirst-march-3-2013-people-should-resist-enforcement-of-uid-scheme-say-experts">newzfirst</a> on March 3, 2013 and in the <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-march-3-2013-uid-has-no-legal-sanctity">Hindu</a> on March 3, 2013.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Interview</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uid-and-npr-a-background-note">Unique Identification Scheme (UID) & National Population Register (NPR), and Governance</a> (by Elonnai Hickok, March 14, 2013). The post examines the UID, NPR and Governance as it exists in India. A video on the UID interview Questions and Answers is published.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>News and Media</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/zdnet-mahesh-sharma-march-14-2013-indian-id-crisis-unveils-aadhar-doubts">Indian ID crisis unveils Aadhaar doubts</a> (ZDNet, March 14, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/aeg-india-march-16-2013-new-dollar-one-billion-ric-project-casts-doubts-on-aadhar">New $1 Billion RIC Project Casts Doubts on Aadhaar</a> (AEG India, March 16, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indias-biometric-identification-programs-and-privacy-concerns">India's Biometric Identification Programs and Privacy Concerns</a> (by Divij Joshi, March 31, 2013). </li>
</ul>
<h3>Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p><b>News and Media</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/openmagazine-article-business-prashant-reddy-march-2-2013-foreign-funding-of-ngos">Foreign Funding of NGOs</a> (by Prashant Reddy, Open Magazine, March 2, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/rt-march-1-2013-icelands-proposed-porn-ban">Iceland’s proposed porn ban ‘like repression in Iran, N. Korea’ – activists</a> (RT, March 1, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wsj-march-4-2013-dhanya-ann-thoppil-chidambaram-to-talk-budget-on-google-hangout">Chidambaram to Talk Budget on Google+ Hangout</a> (by Dhanya Ann Thoppil, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/livemint-ruchita-saxena-march-13-2013-responding-to-govt-requests-is-a-challenge-for-online-firms">Responding to govt requests is a challenge for online firms: Colin Maclay</a> (LiveMint, March 13, 2013). Colin M. Maclay, managing director of Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard mentioned CIS.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/afp-march-18-2013-indian-police-set-up-lab-to-monitor-social-media">Indian police set up lab to monitor social media</a> (originally published by <a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iVMgMkOgpXOTaon2VoLdvu2x5oyg?docId=CNG.6d8f555d3498b94bac2fb1046fc7d3a6.4a1">AFP</a>, March 18, 2013, and also carried in <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130318/indian-police-set-lab-monitor-social-media">Global Post</a> on the same day). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wsj-r-jai-krishna-march-20-2013-namaste-mr-eric-schmidt">Namaste, Mr. Eric Schmidt</a> (by R. Jai Krishna, Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-ishan-srivastava-march-28-2013-parliament-panel-blasts-govt-over-ambiguous-internet-laws">Parliament panel blasts govt over ambiguous internet laws</a> (by Ishan Srivastava, The Times of India, March 28, 2013). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/times-of-india-atul-sethi-march-30-2013-what-if-the-net-shut-down-for-a-few-days">What if the Net shut down for a few days</a> (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, March 30, 2013). Sunil Abraham is quoted.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-times-uk-jerome-starkey-francis-elliott-david-brown-march-21-2013-press-controls-send-wrong-message-to-rest-of-world">Press controls ‘send wrong message to rest of world’</a> (by Jerome Starkey from Johannesburg, Francis Elliott from Delhi and David Brown, The Times, UK). </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/freedom-song-film-screening-and-discussion">Freedom Song: Film Screening and Discussion</a> (IIHS Bangalore City Campus, March 21, 2013). Freedom Song, a documentary film produced by the Public Service Broadcasting Trust and directed by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and Subi Chaturvedi was screened. </li>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Participated In</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.iijnm.org/iijnmnews-rept.html">Is Social Media Incredible?</a> (organized by Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore, March 2, 2013). Snehashish Ghosh participated in a panel discussion. The New Indian Express <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/new-indian-express-march-4-2013-social-media-undermining-journalistic-credibility">published a post-event report</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/rethinking-the-internet">Rethinking the Internet: The Way Forward</a> (organized by Telecom Italia and Financial iTimes, Telecom Italia Future Centre, Italy, March 21 – 22, 2013). Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Others</h3>
<p><b>Events Organised</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dml-hub-net-dml-2013">DML 2013: Fourth Annual Conference</a> (co-organised by CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central, Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2013). We had a special track that ran through the conference on "Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)". Noopur Raval was one of the 16 presenters that we had selected on the tracks. Nishant Shah was one of the members in the <a href="http://http/dml2013.dmlhub.net/">Conference Committee</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p><b> </b></p>
<p><b>Blog Posts</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/wgig-8-stock-taking-mapping-and-going-forward">WGIG+8: Stock-Taking, Mapping, and Going Forward</a> (Fontenoy Building, conference room # 7, UNESCO Headquarters, Paris, February 27, 2013). Pranesh Prakash was the moderator for the session. A summary of the discussion has been published.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/dns-singularity-of-icann-and-the-gold-rush">What’s In a Name? — DNS Singularity of ICANN and the Gold Rush</a> (by Sharath Chandra Ram, March 31, 2013). March 2013 being the 28th birthday of the first ever registered Internet domain as well as the exigent launch of the Trademark Clearing House disguised as a milestone in rights protection by ICANN for its new gTLD program, Sharath Chandra Ram, dissects the transitory role of ICANN from being a technical outfit to the Boardroom Big Brother of Internet Governance.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/bensonsamuel-an-introduction-to-bitfilm-and-bitcoin-in-bangalore">An Introduction to Bitfilm & Bitcoin in Bangalore, India</a> (by Benson Samuel, March 12, 2013). Video of the event organized by CIS on January 23, 2013 is published in this blog post.</li>
</ul>
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access">Knowledge Repository on Internet Access</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS in partnership with the Ford Foundation is executing a project on Internet Access. It covers the history of the internet, technologies involved, principle and values of internet access, broadband market and universal access and will touch upon various polices and regulations which has an impact on internet access and bodies and mechanism which are responsible for formulation policies related to internet access. The blog posts and modules will be published in a new website: <a href="http://www.internet-institute.in">www.internet-institute.in</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Upcoming Event</b><br />We are hosting an “Institute on Internet and Society” in collaboration with the Ford Foundation India, which is to be held from June 8, 2013 to June 14, 2013. Call for registration and relevant details will be announced soon on our website.</p>
<p>The following units have been published:</p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-protocols">Internet Protocols</a> (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 18, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/how-email-works">How email works, how do you get your email? Email Protocols</a> (SMTP, POP, IMAP), SPAM/Phishing (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, March 19, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-corporation-for-assigned-names-and-numbers">Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers</a> (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 19, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/international-telecommunication-union">ITU sectors — ITU-R, ITU-T, ITU-D, etc</a>. (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 27, 2013).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/wcit-2012">World Conference on International Telecommunications 2012</a> (by Snehashish Ghosh, March 29, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/about/telecom">Telecom</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility of 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><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/organizing-india-blogspot-shyam-ponappa-march-8-2013-are-indias-glory-days-over">Are India's Glory Days Over?</a> (by Shyam Ponappa, <a href="http://organizing-india.blogspot.in/2013/03/are-indias-glory-days-over.html">Organizing India Blogspot</a>, March 8, 2013, originally published in the <a href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/are-india-s-glory-days-over-113030600625_1.html">Business Standard</a>, March 6, 2013).</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives">Digital Natives</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:</p>
<p><b>Events Participated In</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/video-vortex-9-net-re-assemblies-of-video">Video Vortex # 9 Re:assemblies of Video</a> (organized by the Institute of Network Cultures, Post Media Lab, Moving Image Lab, Leuphana, et.al, February 28 – March 2, 2013). Nishant Shah gave the <a href="http://videovortex9.net/ai1ec_event/reassemblies/?instance_id=292">key note</a>. Videos of the event are published.</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities">Digital Humanities</a></h2>
<p>From 2012 to 2015, the Researchers @ Work series is focusing on building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. We organised the first Habits of Living workshops in Bangalore last year. The next workshop is being held in Brown University</p>
<p><b>Event Co-organised</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects">Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects</a> (co-organised with Brown University, March 21 – 23, 2013, Brown University, Rhode Island). Nishant Shah was a <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Conference/Habits/">speaker</a> at this event. He made a presentation on network ontologies.</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Participated</b></p>
<p><b> </b></p>
<ul>
<b> </b>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts">Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World</a> (organized by Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National University of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University, Seoul, March 27 – 29, 2013). Nishant Shah was a speaker at this event. He spoke on "The Asian Intercourse: Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ in networks".</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Follow us elsewhere</h3>
<ul>
<li>Get short, timely messages from us on <a href="https://twitter.com/cis_india">Twitter</a></li>
<li>Join the CIS group on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/groups/28535315687/">Facebook</a></li>
<li>Visit us at <a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/">http://cis-india.org</a></li>
</ul>
<h3>Support Us</h3>
<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>
<h3>Request for Collaboration</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at <a href="mailto:sunil@cis-india.org">sunil@cis-india.org</a> or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at <a href="mailto:nishant@cis-india.org">nishant@cis-india.org</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.</i></p>
<ul>
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2013-bulletin</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceDigital HumanitiesOpennessResearchers at Work2013-04-14T11:45:29ZPageKorean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World
http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts
<b>This conference to be held from March 27 to 29, 2013 is being organized by Trans - Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National university of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.trans-review.com/conferenceabout">Click</a> to read about the conference published on the website Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah will be participating in this event as part of our collaboration with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies consortium, to launch a new research cluster around trans-cine-media in the global context along with Kim SoYoung and Earl Jackson. He will speak on "The Asian Intercourse : Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ In networks".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The conference is a response to what we see as a new epistemic shift, a new possibility for the reading of Korean cinema and Korean media texts. The previous “discovery” or “acceptance” of Im Kwon-Taek at Cannes, and the ambivalent Japanese obsession with “Winter Sonata” are moments in a recognition of Korean textual achievements that, at best, maintain a hierarchical (and highly circumscribed) “tolerance” of Korean cultural production. The subsequent achievements of other directors such as Pak Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk deepened and expanded the hermeneutic situation internationally – a tendency that has continued in recent European conferences dedicated to Korean auteurs and most recently, Kim Ki-duk’s receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, Korean transformations of Japanese media texts have advanced a new kind of alchemical conversation across media that engages both the present and the past in new, multi-vocal ways. Beyond these mass-media events that can capture the attention of journalists, is the years of work of the scholars involved with the decentering of film history and canon in the work of scholars such the late Paul Willemen. And in addition to the “external” legitimation of the international film festival circuit are the internal developments within Korean cinema – namely the recent resurgence of a vital and engaged independent cinema – in both fiction documentary films. These events create an environment in which we can return anew to Korean cinema- past, present, and future – to read and realize in ways not-here-to-fore possible.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">These readings will include taking Korean cinema seriously on its own terms, but also to set Korean cinema in dialogue with other East Asian Cinemas in a global context.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">The outcome of the conference will be contributed to the project entitled as “A Compendium of History of Korean Cinema” sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts.pdf" class="internal-link">Click</a> to download the full program.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts'>http://editors.cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkDigital Humanities2013-03-21T10:32:40ZNews ItemBack When the Past had a Future: Being Precarious in a Network Society
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future
<b>We live in Network Societies. This phrase has been so bastardised to refer to the new information turn mediated by digital technologies, that we have stopped paying attention to what the Network has become. Networks are everywhere. They have become the default metaphor of our times, where everything from infrastructure assemblies to collectives of people, are all described through the lens of a network.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This article by Nishant Shah was published in a peer-reviewed newspaper <a class="external-link" href="http://www.aprja.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/researching_bwpwap_large.pdf">Researching BWPWAP</a>. The write-up is on Page 3.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We are no longer just human beings living in socially connected, politically identified communities. Instead, we have become actors, creating archives of traces and transactions, generating traffic and working as connectors in the ever expanding fold of the network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The network is an opaque metaphor, conflating description and explanation. So it becomes the object to be studied, the originary context that produces itself, and the explanatory framework that accounts for itself. In other words, the network was our past – it gives us an account of who we were, it is our present – it defines the context of all our activities, and it is our future – where we do everything to support the network because it is the only future that we can imagine for ourselves. It is this flattening characteristic of networks that are diagrammatically mapped, cartographically reproduced, and presented outside of and oblivious to temporality, that produces a condition of the future that can no longer be imagined through our everyday lives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Networks neither promise nor deliver a flattened utopia of coexistence and decentralised power. Networks are, in fact, quite aware of the structures of inequity and conditions of privilege they create and perpetuate: the only way to recognise the existence of a network is to be outside of it, the only aspiration to belong to a network is to be kept outside of it when you recognise it. Networks create themselves as simultaneously ubiquitous and scarce, of everpresent and ephemeral, creating a new ontology for our being human – an ontology of precariousness, contingent upon erasure of our histories, archives of our present, and unimaginable futures; futures we are not ready for, and don’t have strategies to occupy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I remember the times, before networks became the default conditions of being human, when kids, negotiating the variegated temporalities of their past-present-futures, would often begin their speculations on future, by saying, "When I grow up...". In that hope of growing up, was the potential for radical political action, the possibility of social reconstruction. In network societies, though, time has no currency. It has been replaced by attentions, flows of information and actions, and do not offer a tomorrow to grow into.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is no future to help mitigate the exigencies of the present. And with the overwhelming emphasis on archiving the present, there is no more a coherent future that can be accounted for in the vocabulary that the network develops to explain itself, and the hypothetical world outside it.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedHabits of LivingResearchers at WorkDigital Humanities2013-02-12T06:16:12ZBlog EntryHabits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects
<b>Brown University is organizing an international conference that elucidates the networked conditions of our times, how they produce ways, conditions, and habits of life and living, how they spread local actions globally. The conference will be held from March 21 to 23, 2013 at Brown University, Rhode Island. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah is participating as a speaker in this event. Read the full details published on the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.brown.edu/Conference/Habits/">Brown University website</a>. Also see the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.brown.edu/Conference/Habits/thinkathon.html">Thinkathon page</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Through a series of workshops, art residences, and dialogues, Habits of Living seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conference: Habits of Living</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This international conference will bring together prominent and innovative scholars and artists at Brown University. There will be ninety-minute panels (each with two speakers), a keynote address by the RAQs Media Collective, a series of concurrent "unconferences" (informal sessions to be run by the audience), a scrapyard challenge, and an exhibition of work running in parallel. Speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Elizabeth Bernstein, Biella Coleman, Didier Fassin, Kara Keeling, Laura Kurgan, Ganaelle Langlois, Colin Milburn, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Elias Muhanna, Lisa Parks, Raqs Media Collective, Nishant Shah, Ravi Sundarum, Tiziana Terranova, and Nigel Thrift.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This event is designed as a large public conference whose major segments are participant-driven "unconferences." Unconferences are fluid events of casual five-minute "lightning" presentations and informal dialogue generated through group interactions. To facilitate discussion around networked societies, the multiple unconference sessions will focus around topics generated in advance by all the participants in the audience who will be guided through a quick and easy sign-up process. The unconferences are meant to take a more improvisational form, so the themes and locations will remain flexible, and entirely driven by audience participation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Attendance at the conference is free, but please <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dE5uQlJQVVVYZ3dCMHRqOFgyTG9rcUE6MQ">register here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Habits of Living is generously sponsored by <a href="http://www.brown.edu/">Brown University</a> via the <a href="http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/dean-of-faculty/">Dean of the Faculty</a>, <a href="http://www.brown.edu/academics/modern-culture-and-media/about/malcolm-s-forbes-center-culture-and-media-studies">The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies</a>, <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Humanities_Center/">The Cogut Center for the Humanities</a>, <a href="http://news.brown.edu/pressreleases/2010/10/corporation">The Humanities Initiative</a>, <a href="http://www.brown.edu/about/administration/international-affairs/">The Vice President for International Affairs</a>, and <a href="http://www.brown.edu/initiatives/india/">The Brown India Initiative</a>. Additional sponsorship provided by <a href="http://dm.risd.edu/">RISD Digital + Media</a>.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Conference Schedule</h3>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Thurs., Mar. 21</span></b></p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>1:00-5:00pm</td>
<td>Scrapyard Challenge—Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>7:30-9:00</td>
<td>Raqs Media Collective</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Fri., Mar. 22</span></b></p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>9:00-10:20am</td>
<td>Nigel Thrift and Laura Kurgan</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:30-11:50</td>
<td>Elizabeth Bernstein and Didier Fassin</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1:00pm-2:20</td>
<td><b>UNCONFERENCES</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:30-3:50</td>
<td>Nishant Shah and Kara Keeling</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:00-5:20</td>
<td>Nick Mirzoeff and Ariella Azoulay</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b><span style="text-decoration: underline;">Sat., Mar. 23</span></b></p>
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>9:00-10:20am</td>
<td>Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundarum</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>10:30-11:50</td>
<td>Elias Muhanna and Speaker TBD</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>1:00pm-2:20</td>
<td><b>UNCONFERENCES</b></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>2:30-3:50</td>
<td>Lisa Parks and Ganaele Langlois</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>4:00-5:20</td>
<td>Colin Milburn and Gabriella Coleman</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Speakers</h3>
<table class="grid listing">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b>Ariella Azoulay, </b><i>Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University</i><br /><br />Ariella Azoulay studies revolutions from the 18th century onward and investigates how civil historical knowledge can be portrayed from photographs and other visual media. The Israeli political regime has been a primary focus of her work.</p>
<p>Recent books: <i>From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950</i> (Pluto Press, 2011), <i>Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography</i> (Verso, August 2012) and <i>The Civil Contract of Photography</i> (Zone Books, 2008); co-author with Adi Ophir, <i>The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River</i> (Stanford University Press, 2012).</p>
<p>Curator of <i>When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea</i>, Exhibition Room – <i>Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices</i> No. 16 (folded format in Hebrew, MOBY, 2013), <i>Potential History</i> (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Louven), <i>Untaken Photographs</i> (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), <i>Architecture of Destruction</i> (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), <i>Everything Could Be Seen</i> (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Director of documentary films <i>Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48</i> (2012), <i>I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara</i> (2004), <i>The Food Chain</i> (2004), among others.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Elizabeth Bernstein</b>, <i>Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University</i><br /><br />Professor Bernstein is the author of <i>Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex</i> (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received two distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association as well as the 2009 Norbert Elias Prize—an international prize which is awarded biennially to the author of a first major book in sociology and related disciplines. Her current book project is <i>Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom</i>, which explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary global policies surrounding the traffic in women. Her research has received support from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Social Science Research Council, the NSF, the AAUW, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. At Barnard and Columbia, she teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, on trafficking, migration, and sexual labor, and on contemporary social theory.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Jonah Brucker-Cohen</b>, <i>Adjunct Assistant Professor, Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT)</i>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dr. Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award winning researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of Trinity College Dublin. His work and thesis is titled "Deconstructing Networks" and includes over 77 creative projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His work has been exhibited and showcased at venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport), Palais du Tokyo,Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His writing has appeared in publications such as <i>WIRED</i>, <i>Make</i>, <i>Gizmodo</i>, <i>Neural</i> and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 14 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Portfolio and Work: <a href="http://www.coin-operated.com/">http://www.coin-operated.com</a><br /> Scrapyard Challenge Workshops: <a href="http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com/">http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com</a><br /> Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/coinop29">@coinop29</a></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b>Gabriella Coleman,</b> <i>Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/gabriella-coleman">Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University</a></i></p>
Trained as an anthropologist, <a href="http://gabriellacoleman.org/">Gabriella (Biella) Coleman</a> teaches, researches, and writes on computer hackers and digital activism. Her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9883.html">"Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking"</a> has been published with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism.
<p>Source: <a href="http://gabriellacoleman.org/">http://gabriellacoleman.org/</a></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<p><b>Didier Fassin,</b> <i>James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Director of Studies, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Didier Fassin was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Social Sciences (CNRS — Inserm — EHESS — University Paris North). Trained as a medical doctor, he has been Vice-President of Médecins sans Frontières and is President of the Comité médical pour les exilés. His field of interest is political and moral anthropology, and he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state through a study of policing and the prison. His recent publications include: <i>De la question sociale à la question raciale?</i> (with Eric Fassin, 2006), <i>Les politiques de l’enquète: Épreuves ethnographiques</i> (with Alban Bensa, 2008), <i>Les nouvelles frontières de la société française</i> (2009) and <i>Moral Anthropology</i> (2012) as editor; <i>When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa</i> (2007), <i>The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood</i> (with Richard Rechtman, 2009), <i>Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present</i> (2011), and <i>Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing</i> (2013), as author.</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b>Kara Keeling,</b> <i>Associate Professor of Critical Studies (School of Cinematic Arts) and African American Studies (Department of American Studies and Ethnicity), University of Southern California</i></p>
<p>Kara Keeling’s current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, <i>The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense</i>, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled <i>European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing</i> and (with Josh Kun) of a collection of essays about sound in American Studies entitled <i>Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies</i>. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled <i>Queer Times, Black Futures</i> and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled "From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling was an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and American Quarterly, where she is a managing editor, and she is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of the journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).</p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b>Laura Kurgan,</b> <i>Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), Director of Visual Studies, Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning, Columbia University</i></p>
Professor Kurgan's work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment, and a collaborative exhibition on global migration and climate change. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009, and named one of Esquire Magazine's ‘Best and Brightest’ in 2008. She has published articles and essays in <i>Assemblage</i>, <i>Grey Room</i>, <i>ANY</i>, <i>Volume</i>, and <i>Else/Where Mapping</i>, among other books and journals.
<p><br />Source: <a href="http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/people.php?id=10">http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/people.php?id=10</a></p>
</td>
</tr>
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<p><b>Ganaele Langlois,</b> <i>Assistant Professor of Communication, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Associate Director of the <a href="http://www.infoscapelab.ca/" title="Infoscape Research Lab | Centre for the Study of Social Media">Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media</a></i></p>
<p>Professor Langlois has recently published a co-authored book entitled <i>The Permanent Campaign – New Media, New Politics</i> (Peter Lang).</p>
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<p><b>Colin Milburn,</b> <i>Associate Professor of English and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities, UC Davis</i></p>
Professor Milburn's research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a member of the <a href="http://sts.ucdavis.edu/" title="STS at UCD">Science & Technology Studies Program</a> and the <a href="http://innovation.ucdavis.edu/" title="Center for Science and Innovation Studies">Center for Science and Innovation Studies</a>. He is also affiliated with the programs in <a href="http://www.ls.ucdavis.edu/harcs/dean/cinema-and-technocultural-studies.html" title="Cinema and Technocultural Studies - College of Letters & Science">Cinema and Technocultural Studies</a>, <a href="http://culturalstudies.ucdavis.edu/">Cultural Studies</a>, <a href="http://performancestudies.ucdavis.edu/" title="Performance Studies">Performance Studies</a>, and <a href="http://crittheory.ucdavis.edu/FrontPage">Critical Theory</a>, as well as the <a href="http://keckcaves.org/people/start">W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences</a> (KeckCAVES). Since 2009, he has been serving as the director of the UC Davis <a href="http://modlab.ucdavis.edu/" title="UC Davis Humanities Innovation Lab">Humanities Innovation Lab</a>, an experimental offshoot of the <a href="http://dhi2.ucdavis.edu/about/" title="The Digital Humanities Initiative @ the Davis Humanities Institute">Digital Humanities Initiative</a>.
<p><br />Source: <a href="http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/milburn">http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/milburn</a></p>
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<p><b>Nicholas Mirzoeff,</b> <i>Professor of <a href="http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/" title="Media, Culture, and Communication - NYU Steinhardt">Media, Culture and Communication, New York University</a></i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">My work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas. First, I have been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals "visualized" a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero.</p>
<p>My book <i>The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality</i> was published by Duke University Press (2011).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Second, I produce texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third <i>Visual Culture Reader</i> was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of <i>An Introduction to Visual Culture</i> was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Third, I work on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011.</p>
<p>Finally, I am working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit <i>Islands First</i>.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html">http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html</a></p>
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<p><b>Katherine Moriwaki,</b> <i>Assistant Professor of Media Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design</i></p>
<p>Professor Moriwaki’s focus is on interaction design and artistic practice. She teaches core curriculum classes in the M.F.A. Design + Technology Program where students engage a broad range of creative methodologies to realize new possibilities in interactive media. Katherine is also currently completing a Ph.D. in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin.</p>
<p>Her work has appeared in numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou, Futuresonic, Break 2.2, SIGGRAPH, eculture fair, Transmediale, ISEA, Ars Electronica, WIRED Nextfest, and Maker Faire. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of venues such as Rhizome.org, Ubicomp, CHI, ISEA, NIME, the European Transport Conference, and the Journal of AI & Society. Her project Umbrella.net, in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen was featured in "New Media Art" by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in 2006.</p>
<p>She has taught at a wide variety of institutions and departments, such as Trinity College Dublin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, as has lead workshops on interaction design and the creative re-use of electronic objects around the globe. These "Scrapyard Challenge" workshops have been held thirty-seven times in fourteen countries across five continents. Katherine received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where people and enabling interaction were emphasized over any specific technology. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://www.kakirine.com/?page_id=2">http://www.kakirine.com/?page_id=2</a></p>
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<p><b>Elias Muhanna,</b> <i>Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, Brown University</i></p>
Professor Muhanna teaches courses on classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University in 2012, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law in 2011-12. His current research focuses on classical and early modern encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world, and on particularly on the diverse forms of large-scale compilation during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517).
<p><br />In addition to his academic scholarship, Muhanna writes extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several publications, including <i>The New York Times</i>, <i>The Nation</i>, <i>Foreign Policy</i>, <i>The Guardian</i>, <i>The National</i>, <i>Mideast Monitor</i>, <i>World Politics Review</i>, <i>Bidoun</i>, and <i>Transition</i>.</p>
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<p><b>Lisa Parks,</b> <i>Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara</i></p>
Dr. Parks is a Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of the Department of Feminist Studies. She also currently serves as the Director of the <a href="http://www.cits.ucsb.edu/">Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara</a>. Parks has conducted research on the uses of satellite, computer, and television technologies in different TRANSnational contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, art, international relations, and communication studies. She has published on topics ranging from secret satellites to drones, from the mapping of orbital space to political uses of Google Earth, from mobile phone use in post-communist countries to the visualization of communication infrastructures.
<p style="text-align: justify; "><br />Parks is the author of <i>Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual</i>, and <i>Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 9/11</i> (forthcoming), and is working on a third book entitled <i>Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies</i>. She has co-edited three books: <i>Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures</i>, <i>Planet TV</i>, and <i>UNDEAD TV</i>, and is working on a fourth entitled <i>Signal Traffic: Studies of Media Infrastructures</i>. She has served on the editorial boards of 10 peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed to many anthologies and edited collections.</p>
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<p>Raqs Media Collective, <b>Jeebesh Bagchi</b>, (b. 1965, New Delhi, India), <b>Monica Narula</b>, (b. 1969, New Delhi, India), <br /> <b>Shuddhabrata Sengupta</b>, (b. 1968, New Delhi, India)</p>
Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces, locates them in the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory — often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai-CSDS, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series.
<p><br />Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu and means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance.</p>
<p>Selected Exhibitions:</p>
<ul>
<li>2012 Art Unlimited, Art Basel</li>
<li>2012 solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London</li>
<li>2012 group exhibition of billboards around the city of Birmingham (UK), Ikon Gallery & BCU</li>
<li>2012 solo exhibition Frith Street Gallery</li>
<li>2010 <i>The Things That Happen When Falling In Love</i>, a solo exhibition at Baltic Centre, Gateshead</li>
<li>2010 <i>The Capital of Accumulation</i>, a solo exhibition at Project 88, Mumbai</li>
<li>2010 a group exhibition at 29th Sao Paulo Biennial 2010, Brazil</li>
<li>2010 a group exhibition at 8th Shanghai Biennale, China</li>
<li>2010 <i>The New Décor</i>, a touring group exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London; The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow</li>
<li>2009 <i>The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet</i>, a solo exhibition at Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London</li>
<li>2009 <i>When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes</i>, a solo exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham (UK)</li>
<li>2009 <i>Escapement</i>, a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery</li>
<li>2008 Co-curators for <i>Manifesta 7</i>, Trentino</li>
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<p><b>Nishant Shah,</b> <i>Founder and Director of Research, <a href="http://www.cis-india.org/" title="Centre for Internet and Society">Centre for Internet and Society</a>, Bangalore</i></p>
Dr. Shah's doctoral work at the <a href="http://cscs.res.in/" title="Centre for the Study of Culture and Society">Centre for the Study of Culture and Society</a>, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an <a href="http://www.asianscholarship.org/asf/index.php">Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009)</a>, he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an <a href="http://www.cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city" title="The promise of invisibility - Technology and the City">IT City in India and China</a>. He is the series editor for a three-year collaborative project on <a href="http://www.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet" title="Histories of the Internet — Centre for Internet and Society">"Histories of the Internet(s) in India"</a> that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country.
<p style="text-align: justify; "><br />Nishant’s current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples’ use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Working with a community of 150 young people and other stakeholders in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has co-edited a 4-volume book titled <a href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News/Digital-AlterNatives-with-a-Cause-book">Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?</a> and an information kit titled D:Coding Digital Natives. Nishant writes regularly for <a href="http://www.indianexpress.com/section/eye/722/" title="Eye News">The Indian Express</a> and <a href="http://www.gqindia.com/">GQ India</a> to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the <a href="http://www.cis-india.org/research/grants/pathways/pathways-proposal-info">intersections of digital technologies and social justice</a> within the higher education space in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://dmlcentral.net/node/4815">http://dmlcentral.net/node/4815</a></p>
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<p><b>Ravi Sundaram</b>, <i>Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai</i></p>
Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the post-colonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the post-colonial city.
<p><br />Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe. His current research deals with urban fear after media modernity, where he looks at the worlds of image circulation after the mobile phone, ideas of transparency and secrecy, and the media event.</p>
<p>Sundaram was one of the initiators of the Centre’s <a href="http://www.sarai.net/">Sarai</a> programme which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: <a href="http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/01-the-public-domain">The Public Domain (2001)</a>, <a href="http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/02-the-cities-of-everyday-life">The Cities of Everyday Life, (2002)</a>, <a href="http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/03-shaping-technologies">Shaping Technologies (2003)</a>, <a href="http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/04-crisis-media">Crisis Media (2004)</a> and <a href="http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/06-turbulence">Turbulence (2006)</a>.</p>
<p>His other publications include <a href="http://www.scholarswithoutborders.in/item_show.php?code_no=CUL107&ID=undefined&calcStr=">Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi</a> (2009). Two of his other volumes are No Limits: Media Studies from India (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Delhi’s Twentieth Century (forthcoming, OUP).</p>
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<p><b>Tiziana Terranova,</b> <i>Associate Professor, Sociology of Communications, Coordinator, PhD programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’</i></p>
<p>Tiziana Terranova's Her research interests lie in the area of the culture, science, technology and the economy from the perspective of the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivation. She is the author of <i>Corpi Nella Rete</i>, <i>Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age</i>, and numerous essays on new media published in journals such as <i>New Formations</i>, <i>Ctheory</i>, <i>Angelaki</i>, <i>Social Text</i>, <i>Theory, Culture and Society</i>, and <i>Culture Machine</i>. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal <i>Studi Culturali (Il Mulino)</i> and <i>Theory, Culture and Society</i>, a regular participant to the grassroots seminars of the Italian nomadic university ‘uninomade’ and occasionally also a writer on matters of new media for the Italian newspaper <i>Il manifesto</i>.</p>
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<p><b>Nigel Thrift</b>, <i>Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick</i></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Professor Thrift is one of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists. His current research spans a broad range of interests, including international finance; cities and new forms of political life; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of time. During his academic career Professor Thrift has been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards including the Scottish Geographical Society Gold Medal in 2008, the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research in 2003 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prior to becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, he was the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oxford.</p>
<p>Source: <a href="http://liftconference.com/people/nigel-thrift">http://liftconference.com/people/nigel-thrift</a></p>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHabits of LivingDigital Humanities2013-01-26T09:49:07ZBlog EntryAlt needs to Shift
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/indian-express-nov-18-2012-nishant-shah-alt-needs-to-shift
<b>People maybe talking more online, but they all seem to be talking about the same kind of thing.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center; ">Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/alt-needs-to-shift/1031583/0">published in the Indian Express</a> on November 18, 2012.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If you were to recount what has happened in the world, based entirely on your tweetosphere and Facebook timelines, you might realise that everything important seems to have happened elsewhere. It is true that we live in a widely connected viral world, where if the USA sneezes, India gets a flu, but it seems as if lately, the things that I hear and read about are generally things that happen only at a global level. More surprisingly, most of the news that trends on Twitter, gets promoted on Facebook, and discussed on Google Plus, is in sync with what is being reported in mainstream media.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Of course, the voices are different. People have found a space for their opinions. There are strong critiques and alternative viewpoints around these events which are finding space in the public domain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Much like the salons and cafes of the 18th century, which saw a whole range of new educated classes coming into the public to discuss and shape the society they lived in, the digital commons have created new public spaces of expression and discussion. This has been, indeed, one of the visions of the social web and we have reached a point where, at least for digital natives who have grown up within digital ecosystems, there is space to produce alternative opinions in their immediate environments.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the turn of the millennium, when the social Web was being shaped, this was one of the biggest excitements — the possibility that voices from outside of mainstream and traditional media, which often get curtailed, would find contestations and alternative visions from people’s everyday experiences. And in many ways, it looks like we have achieved this dream, and found channels, communities and information strategies, which allow for conflicting views to co-exist in our knowledge spectrum. It is fascinating to realise that just a decade ago, the ways in which we talked about the key questions of our life, was so different, and was largely controlled by those in positions of power who identified only certain things as “newsworthy”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Traditional media has also changed dramatically, with citizen reporters contributing to the content, crowdfunded information shaping news, and ordinary people being the first to witness globally significant events before the larger media complexes arrived. And now that we are well on our way to harnessing the power of this social web, there is something else that needs to be addressed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is the concern that increasingly people are talking more, but they seem to be talking about the same kind of thing! Sure, there are many different voices, but their focus of attention is the same. We see a whole range of alternative opinions emerging, but they are still clustered around the things that traditional media is also covering.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the age of information overload, with so many different information streams, it feels like there is a homogenisation of information where increasingly only that which can be easily understood, easily read, easily captured to create spectacles gets to be at the centre of the attention economies. Which is why, news which is local, things which do not have global interest, and events which cannot be captured in videos on YouTube and hashtags on Twitter, do not feature in the alternative worlds of the social web. And when these locally relevant and significant things get mentioned, they have to work so much harder, to overcome the visibility threshold to get attention from the local publics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We have found the alternative to the mainstream, but maybe it is now time to find the alternative to the alternative. We need to think of localisation of our social web. A lot of effort is made towards being on the global information highway, but we now also need to start investing energy into rendering our local contexts more accessible and intelligible, not only to the larger worlds but also to ourselves. Maybe it is time to reflect on how much we posted, read and consumed of the recent presidential elections in the USA, and try to recollect what else happened in the world. Maybe it is time to step out of our silos where we have replaced multiplicity of things with diversity of opinions about a narrow range of things. The next time you see something trending or popular, it might be a good idea to reflect on what else might be hiding behind the virality of that digital object.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This column was informed by conversations from a thought exploration on ‘Habits of Living’ supported by Brown University and Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/indian-express-nov-18-2012-nishant-shah-alt-needs-to-shift'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/indian-express-nov-18-2012-nishant-shah-alt-needs-to-shift</a>
</p>
No publishernishantFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Humanities2012-12-14T10:03:30ZBlog EntryHabits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/dml-central-blog-oct-22-2012-nishant-shah-habits-living-being-human-networked-society
<b>Recently, in Bangalore, a cluster of academics, researchers, artists, and practitioners, were supported by Brown University, to assemble in a Thinkathon (a thinking marathon, if you will) and explore how our new habits of everyday life need to be re-thought and refigured to produce new accounts of what it means to be human, to be friends, and to be connected in our networked societies.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah's column was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/habits-living-being-human-networked-society">DML Central</a> on October 22, 2012.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is no denying the fact that life on the interwebz is structured around various negotiations with information. Even as we go blue in the face, in the face of information overload, we have a sacred trust in the idea that information is the new currency of society. In our networked worlds, it is our role and function to transmit information to the nodes we are connected to. On a daily basis, we commit ourselves to the task of producing content, consuming information, relaying and sharing resources, saving and archiving material. We add, through our transactions and interactions, new data sets of information to the already burgeoning world of the web. These information practices, for those of us who are immersed in the info-networks, have become so naturalised, that we have become oblivious to the effort, care, time and resources that go into a sustained engagement with them. They have become a part of our everyday lives, creating structures of comfort and desire, so that the reward and gratification we experience masks the physical and affective energy we invest in sustaining these networks. The discussions at our Thinkathon, spread over four intense days, brought out some really interesting insights I want to map, in a series of posts, providing new ways of thinking about life as created through habits within a network.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Habits of Being Human</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the most effective human turns the digital networks have produced is about connections. Beyond the interfaces, the platforms, the networks and the infrastructure of access, on the other end is a human being who emerges as a friend, mediated by the huge complex of hardware and software that facilitates this relationship. We have learned how to make these mediations invisible, talking about real-time, and instant messaging, and live-chats, concentrating only on the human actors that engage with us in this networked state of being. This making invisible of the network is not a natural thing. Even for digital natives who are supposed to be immersed in these environments like ‘fish taking to water’, there is a recognition that the network demands time, attention, financial and emotional investment in order to sustain the social relations web we create within these worlds. <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Departments/MCM/people/facultypage.php?id=10109">Wendy Chun</a> from Brown University suggested we have converted these networks into habits – unthinking, visceral, prewired responses that gloss over the toll they take over us. Which is why, for instance, we habitually connect to our networks, and the human beings within that, and yet face information fatigue and network tiredness that takes us by surprise.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://reneeridgway.net/">Renee Ridgeway</a> (NEWS, Amsterdam) introduced us to the idea that networked habits stand-in for the transactions we make, ignoring the fact that they are largely a commodification of social relationships, making the labour of care invisible in the quantification through systems of Like, Share, Retweet, Follow, Ping, etc. It becomes important to unpack this idea of ‘labour of care’ because we generally think of care as an essentially human condition. Which is why, we connect, share information, help, offer sympathetic shoulders to cry on, for people who are separated from us through geographies and lifestyles. Care is the way in which we separate ourselves from the technological bots and algorithms which can often outstrip us in performing networked habits but cannot emotionally invest in the relations as we human beings can.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/wmst/page86402.html">Radhika Gajjalla</a> (Bowling Green State University) furthered this notion of care to look at crowdfunding platforms like <a href="http://www.kiva.org/">Kiva</a> and <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/">Kickstarter</a>, which essentially bank on the lay-user’s idea of care, and helps them invest a small sum to better the living conditions of somebody in need. She showed us however, that care is not a ‘natural’ response. The interfaces, the representations of the people, the narrative structures of the stories told within these kind of microfinance websites, are all geared towards shaping a particular kind of first world guilt on the user, inviting them to quantify their ‘care’ towards those in the poorer worlds, in need of financial support. The ways in which networks shape our habits, make them natural and encourage us to believe in them as the preconditions of being digitally human, need to be given more attention.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These so-called habits have direct implications on how young people learn and engage with conditions of knowledge production. That which we think of as a natural response within the networked worlds is often a habit that disguises the complex mechanics of control, containment, societal pressures and expectations, and systems of reward and punishment which all get flattened as we rethink what it means to be human in the digital worlds. Looking at the infrastructure, the interface, the processes of training, the threshold of critical competence and the incessant personal investment that is actually labour but is disguised as a habit within the networks of learning, makes us more conscious of the fact that the young users are not ‘born digital’ and nor are they going to become experts left to their own devices. It brings back to the surface the question of the role of technology in education, and the form and function of new knowledge actors in our systems of learning.</p>
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<p><i>Banner image credit: timparkinson <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/3788726140/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/3788726140/</a></i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/dml-central-blog-oct-22-2012-nishant-shah-habits-living-being-human-networked-society'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/dml-central-blog-oct-22-2012-nishant-shah-habits-living-being-human-networked-society</a>
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No publishernishantHabits of LivingDigital Humanities2012-10-23T10:26:19ZBlog EntryDigital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like
<b>There aren’t always rational explanations for the ways in which we behave on networks. While there are trend spotting sciences and pattern recognition methods which try to make sense of how and why we behave in these strange ways on networks, they generally fail to actually help us understand why we do the things that we do when we are connected.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.firstpost.com/tech/digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like-488701.html">originally published in FirstPost</a> on October 12, 2012.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Recently, in a workshop on ‘Habits of Living’, organised by Brown University (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), a collection of researchers, artists, practitioners and educators came together to understand how networks form these habits that we take for granted in our digital lives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Habits are unthinking, visceral actions that we do for survival within a network. They are things that we do without even realising that we are doing them – Liking a post, retweeting a tweet, sharing an interesting link, adding pictures on an album. These are all things we do without realising that they distract us from our work, need time, energy, and attention which we could have spent on other tasks. Instead of looking at these as actions which can be rationally explained, we might start looking at them as habits that shape the ways in which we trust, transmit and treasure information online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Networks are everywhere these days. They are the things that we study and the lens through which we study the world around us. In the last week, I have faced three separate instances that reminded me of how we live in networked societies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There was the scare that the private messages on facebook have suddenly turned public and available on our timelines for everybody to view. The social network, these simulated fortresses of friendships and trust, suddenly became a place of danger. Conversations which were committed as acts of secrecy emerged as potentially compromising public acts. The network was in my face, blinking red, making me suddenly aware of the fact that the network is not merely something I can take for granted. It is something that works seamlessly for most of the time, is actually something that I cope with, negotiate with, and teach myself to live with, without realising it. The relationship I have with my social network is a lot of work but it gets explained away as ‘habits’ , which are such an everyday part of my digital life that I have stopped looking at it as work.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second incident was when a friend complained about the hostility she faces when she is not on any of the popular social networks. As an outsider, who refuses by choice, to belong to either Facebook or Google Plus or many of the activity networks (like Instagram, for instance) around, she constantly gets a raised eyebrow, a pointed question and a look of incredulity when she confesses it to somebody. More often than not, she gets treated like digital pariahs, social outcast who is no longer ‘relevant’ in the current scheme of things. She was telling me about how hard she has to work to convince people that she belongs to the communities, even though not to these networks. And how, she is constantly afraid that while she plugs out, people might be saying things about her that she might want to hear but never get to know.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The third is perhaps more common than we would agree to but it deals with multiple identities online. In the world of Wikipedia, there are people who use sock-puppets and meat-puppets, using multiple avatars and identities to make their point, to fake support for their arguments, and to build false consensus in order to win the edit wars that they are fighting. These puppets, that stand in as surrogate structures of real people, are not mere surface structures. They are fleshed out, have personalities, have styles and identities which the users invest in quite passionately. While the community frowns upon these false identities, and indeed social network platforms encourage us to shun all role-play and stick to our one authenticated social identity, these flourish and often gain a life of their own as a shadow double of the user. And yet, everybody knows that these identities are a matter of habits, a collection of ‘things that we do’ which emerge as important actors in the networks.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These habits might offer us an explanation of why we participate in memes, sharing and disseminating information virally across the interwebz. They might also give us an insight into why we troll and transmit viruses and spam, to friends in the networks, even when we do not mean to. They might help us understand why we are suffering from such an information fatigue, even when we have smart algorithms and softwares constantly sifting through the information web and filtering customised results for us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The idea of the network as a series of habits opens up a new way to thinking about all the three instances, which I described above. It shows that the networks become invisible in our everyday practice, thus creating a condition of false crisis, because they are simultaneously transparent and opaque. It shows that networks are not ‘natural’ but take a lot of effort and energy to sustain – something that digital natives might take to easily but are not kind to digital immigrants, settlers or non-inhabitants, who cannot invest as much time in their networked lives, thus creating new demography of exclusion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And it shows that the network, despite the much acclaimed wisdom of the crowds, can be easily manipulated by those who learn how to fake conditions of life and living within the simulated networked environments. And it would explain why, if I end this column by asking you to go to Google Images and search for “completely wrong”, partly out of curiosity, partly because of expectation, and partly because of habit, you will run the search strings anyway, in the process, supporting the network but also reinforcing your habits of information search and connections.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like</a>
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No publishernishantHabits of LivingDigital Humanities2012-10-23T10:13:36ZBlog EntryWho’s that Friend?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend
<b>If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.</b>
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<p style="text-align: left; ">Nishant Shah's column was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/who-s-that-friend-/1011997/0">Indian Express</a> and in the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/who-s-that-friend-/1011997/0">Financial Express</a> on October 7, 2012.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">We have all received messages of this order — if not exactly this much silliness — on the various social networks that we belong to. These are messages that warn us that our security is breached, our data is unsafe, that our transactions are public, and all the sensitive information we have trusted to the different platforms on the Web, is now up for grabs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The best of us have fallen prey to such messages of alarm, and have “shared”, “liked”, or “retweeted” them, and in retrospect felt foolish when we realised that the message was just a hoax. For those of us who are savvy with the ways of the Web, even when we are sending these messages, there is an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, but we do it nevertheless, joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists who make this world enchanting and mysterious in its quotidian banality. These messages are common, harmless and habit-forming — they spread, even when we recognise that they are not completely plausible — because we have formed habits online, which we immediately perform, before rational thought or reason sets in.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At a recent Thought Marathon on “Habits of Living”, supported by Brown University and organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, a handful of scholars, artists, practitioners and researchers examined how such habits shape the world of the digital. One of the concerns about such habits of viral dissemination is about the design of trust and the nature of friendship in our social networking systems. How do you trust information online? What is the information that uses you as a conduit, disseminating through you into the network? What role do we play in keeping these messages alive, by spreading them, by talking about them, by retracting and discussing them, giving them more value than they could muster on their own?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the centre of all these questions is the idea of proximity, intimacy and friendship. Within the social Web, we have all become “friends”. The six degrees of separation have fallen — every lurker is a potential friend, just waiting to be authenticated by a system, tagged in a photo, connected by a weak link of interest or closeness. These friends are our social safety nets on the Net. They give us a sense of belonging and safety when we are committing our intensely personal and private data on the publically private digital platforms. Despite knowing that information we produce online is going to be archived in servers over which we have no control, in forms and formats that will outlive our social relations and indeed, our very lives, we constantly produce data that quantifies and marks our social relationships. We commit secrets and private thoughts to “friends” in the network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, friendship within the social network is a non-reciprocal one-way transmission of secrets. The covenant of digital friendship on Facebook is that we pass on a secret to a friend, knowing well, that the act of passing on the secret expects a betrayal of that secret. The information that we submit to somebody to show our trust, has already been witnessed, stored, archived and mapped by the code and algorithms that make that system. Which is why, we live in constant fear of our data being compromised by the “system” which is both vulnerable and fragile. Which is why, we are continually bombarded by warnings of glitches in the matrix, outside of our control, reminding us of the fearful precariousness of being on the Web.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, the trolling messages and the way they spread, remind us that in the system, it is the “friend” who is invariably the person who puts us in danger. There are almost no documented cases of a system endangering the person who shares information on the social Web. The leak in the network is always done through a human actor — somebody who is close to us, somebody who we trust — who invariably passes on that secret to another “friend” in the network. Similarly, the chances of your machine getting infected by a random virus by a stranger are very low. The people who infect you are those you trust, because you receive information from them without questioning it. An attachment in the email, a link to a dodgy site, instructions asking for personal details are all safe because we are naturally suspicious of strangers bearing candy. But when these questions come from our “friends”, we drop our guards and accept viruses, share personal data, give out compromising pictures, putting ourselves in conditions of threat.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is the fundamental paradox of the social Web — that those who we trust, are generally the primary sources who put us in danger, and yet, because we think of them as “friends”, we continue to trust them, while remaining suspicious of the systems that are far more benign than the humans in the network.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend</a>
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No publishernishantHabits of LivingDigital Humanities2012-11-04T06:46:10ZBlog Entry