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Open Access Week begins in Bangalore
On Monday 24 October, the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bangalore held an event to mark the beginning of Open Access Week 2011
Facing up to Moral Hazard
Systems upholding the law and standards help navigate the grey areas of moral hazard and adverse selection writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on October 6, 2011.
Barriers to Access in a Connected World
Accessibility is an imperative to achieve a truly inclusive and participatory society writes and every individual, corporation, organization and government has a crucial role to play in nurturing it, writes Nirmita Narasimhan in this article which was published by Hans Foundation in their Annual Review 2011.
Privacy & Sexual Minorities
Danish Sheikh examines the status of sexual minorities in the light of privacy framework in India. Culling out some real life examples based on various studies, media reports and judgments from the Supreme Court and the High Courts of Delhi and Allahabad, the research brings to light the privacy violations being committed by both individuals as well as state authorities. The research concludes by saying that privacy doesn’t necessarily encompass a one-size-fits-all approach, and can raise as many questions as it answers.
Sixth Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, Nairobi: A Summary
The sixth annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum was held from 27 to 30 September 2011 at the United Nations Office in Nairobi, Kenya. Sunil Abraham participated in six workshops: Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses, Use of Digital Technologies for Civic Engagement and Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward, The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise, Proprietary Influences in Free and Open Source Software: Lessons to Open and Universal Internet Standards, Access and Diversity of Broadband Internet Access and Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?
Design!Public II in Bangalore ― Event Report
Design Public, a high-level conclave on innovation, took place in Bangalore at the National Gallery for Modern Art on October 14, 2011. The event was organized by the Centre for Knowledge Societies in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, the Centre for Law and Policy Research, Mint, and others. The conclave brought together industry experts, scholars, and activists to create a dialogue about design and innovation in the public interest. This blog post captures the developments as it happened on this day.
Indian Government Websites Not Accessible Enough for the Disabled
Innumerable websites! All are citizen centric. But are they accessible to you? Srinivasu Chakravarthula examines this and stresses that website owners need to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 to enable persons with disabilities and the elderly to surf portals more effectively.
SCOSTA and UID Comparison not Valid, says Finance Committee
The Standing Committee on Finance Branch, Lok Sabha Secretariat has responded to the suggestions offered by CIS on the National Identification Authority of India, Bill 2010 and has requested it to mail its views by 14 October 2011.
Seventh Open Letter to the Finance Committee: A Note on the Deduplication of Unique Identifiers
Sahana Sarkar on behalf of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) had sent in a Right to Information application on 30 June 2011 to Ashish Kumar, Central Public Information Officer, UIDAI. The UIDAI sent in its reply. Through the seventh open letter, Hans attempts to characterize in an abstract way the replies that CIS managed to elicit and makes some elementary observations.
Hack Night in CIS ― A Meeting of Java Script Hackers
CIS hosted a hack night in conjunction with the tech-event organizers HasGeek at its office on 24 September 2011. The event brought together local java script hackers on a common platform. Tom Dane and Kiran Jonnalagadda participated in the event.
CIS-TWN Analysis of WIPO Treaty for the Print Disabled (SCCR/22/15)
CIS and the Third World Network (TWN) conducted a quick analysis of the "Consensus document on an international instrument on limitations and exceptions for persons with print disabilities presented by Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Paraguay, and the United States of America" presented as WIPO document numbered SCCR/22/15.
UID: Questions without Answers – A Talk by Usha Ramanathan
UID enrolment is in full swing, providing an official identification to millions of Indians, yet there are numerous unanswered questions. A public talk on UID was held at the Institute of Science, Bangalore on September 6, 2011. Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher on jurisprudence, poverty and rights, discussed the questions that plague the UID project and the veil of silence enveloping the answers.
Porn: Law, Video, Technology
Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures.
Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities
The monograph on Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar, is an entry into debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of Internet technologies. Going beyond the regular debates on the modern urban, the monograph deploys a team of students from the field of architecture and urban design to investigate how city spaces – the material as well as the experiential – are changing under the rubric of digital globalisation. Placing his inquiry in the built form, Shankar manoeuvres discourse from architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to look at the notions of cyber-publics, digital spaces, and planning policy in India. The findings show that the relationship between cities and cyberspaces need to be seen as located in a dynamic set of negotiations and not as a mere infrastructure question. It dismantles the presumptions that have informed public and city planning in the country by producing alternative futures of users’ interaction and mapping of the emerging city spaces.
Re:Wiring Bodies
Asha Achuthan initiates a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. Tracing the history from nationalist debates between Gandhi and Tagore to the neo-liberal perspective based knowledge produced by feminists like Martha Nussbaum; Asha’s research offers a unique entry point into cyberculture studies through a feminist epistemology of science and technology. The monograph establishes that there is a certain pre-history to the Internet that needs to be unpacked in order to understand the digital interventions on the body in a range of fields from social sciences theory to medical health practices to technology and science policy in the country.
Understanding the Right to Information
Elonnai Hickok summarises the Right to Information Act, 2005, how it works, how to file an RTI request, the information that an individual can request under the Act, the possible responses and the challenges to the citizen and the government. She concludes by saying that there are many structural changes that both citizens and governmental officers can make to improve the system.
Archives and Access
The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.
Reviving Growth
The government needs to reduce interest rates and undertake specific reforms to revive growth. The focus needs to be on communications, specifically broadband, it would yield results. Mobile communications have grown phenomenally but the meteoric rise got stalled. However, if the government initiates reforms in spectrum policies with incentives for broadband delivery, prospects could revive and communications could go through another meteoric rise, becoming the growth engine for the economy.
Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?
Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.
Stakeholders Meeting of the USOF on Facilitating ICT Access to Persons with Disabilities in Rural Areas
The Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), a fund set up to provide universal access to telegraph services to rural and remote areas in India organized a stakeholders meeting on 7th September in New Delhi to launch a new scheme for supporting pilot projects for facilitating access to persons with disabilities in rural areas. Nirmita Narasimhan participated in this meeting and made a presentation.
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