Centre for Internet and Society

Facebook, Google tell India they won’t screen for derogatory content

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T05:25:52Z

In the world’s largest democracy, the government wants Internet sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google to screen and remove offensive content about religious figures and political leaders as soon as they learn about it. But those companies now say they can’t help.

India’s minister of communications Kapil Sibal began discussions with the online companies in September. On Tuesday, he told reporters the government will have to create new guidelines to disable such content from the Internet sites on its own.

"We will not allow intermediaries to say that ‘we throw up our hands, we can’t do anything about it,’" Sibal said.

Sibal had shown company executives derogatory images of the Prophet Mohammed and morphed pictures of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi that appeared on their platforms. Sibal said these images would offend "any reasonable person" and also hurt religious sentiments of Indians.

But on Monday, according to Sibal, the company executives said they cannot do anything.

Soon after Sibal’s news conference, Facebook said in a statement: “We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service.” Those parameters are unlikely to include all the images the government of India wants screened out.

Sibal’s move did not come as a surprise for some observers in India, which has the third-largest Internet-user community in the world--more than 100 million people. Earlier this year, India introduced new rules that called on Web sites, service providers and search engines to not host information that could be regarded as “harmful, “blasphemous” or “disparaging.” The rules also called on Web sites to remove offensive material within 36 hours of a complaint.

"I can’t believe a democracy is doing this," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of India’s Center for Internet and Society. He said recent, unpublished research conducted by the group showed that "such rules have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression on the Internet." Researchers sent mock take-down notices to seven sites, complaining about their content. Abraham said six sites immediately deleted content. "They did not even verify the validity of our flawed complaint. They over-complied," he said.

Sibal’s announcement also sparked a debate on Twitter, where Member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor and Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah weighed in:

The Streisand effect is an online phenomenon in which an attempt to censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information further. (It is named after Barbara Streisand, who attempted in 2003 to hide pictures of her giant home; that only created more interest.)
But a blogger who calls himself the “Pragmatic Desi” argued that India had its own constraints:

But Member of Parliament Varun Gandi said that’s precisely why the Internet shouldn’t be censored:

The article written by Rama Lakshmi was originally published in the Washington Post on 6 December 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this. Read it here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/facebook-google-tell-india-they-won2019t-screen-for-derogatory-content

FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?

praskrishna — 2011-12-08T05:32:41Z

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met the representatives of Facebook, Google and others seeking to device a screening mechanism. Sunil Abraham was on CNN-IBN from 10.00 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. speaking about freedom of expression in India.

VIDEO

Watch the original video on IBN Live here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/censor-social-networking-sites

Govt wants to scrub the Internet clean

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T04:07:03Z

Web advocacy groups, experts say govt’s move to evolve content guidelines amounts to censorship. This article by Surabhi Agarwal & Leslie D’monte was published in Livemint on 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.

India, the world’s largest democracy, may force companies such as Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Facebook Inc. to take down online content that it deems offensive because they haven’t been able to come up with an effective self-censorship mechanism governing millions of users.

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government had no option but to "evolve guidelines" to ensure that "blasphemous content on the Internet or television is not allowed", with Internet and social networking sites such as those above "failing to respond to and cooperate with" the government’s request to keep "objectionable" content out of their websites, Kapil Sibal, minister of communications and information technology (IT), said in New Delhi on Tuesday.

His comments unleashed a firestorm of criticism by Internet advocacy groups and experts, who said the move amounted to censorship and was anti-democratic, impractical and unwarranted since existing laws were comprehensive enough to remove "objectionable" content. The move, they argued, would also stem the growth of user-generated content sites, and thus the Internet itself.

The government has been battling a series of corruption scandals and criticism of its inability to move forward on policy reforms. A campaign against corruption fuelled by online support has also challenged the government’s authority to legislate, forcing its own version of an anti-graft legislation onto the agenda.

The latest move by the government follows the introduction of new rules to the Information Technology Act, 2008, that were published earlier this year, also heavily criticized, that called on Internet service providers (ISPs) along with other entities to police online postings, including blogs.

Sibal referred to what he considered objectionable content as a "matter of grave concern", which affects the "sensibility of our people and is against our cultural ethos".

Once the new policy framework is implemented, companies “will be duty-bound to share information about those who post content, even if it (the content) is posted outside India”. He didn’t say by when the policy would be put in place.

Discussions with executives from the firms mentioned above had begun in September, Sibal said. They had been asked to come up with solutions to address the perceived problem in a month’s time and had failed to do so, he said.

According to local media reports, the move follows posts about some senior Congress leaders, including party president Sonia Gandhi. The minister, who is also one of India’s top lawyers, did not refer to any specific "objectionable" material during his press briefing, but rued that “the content has still not been removed".

Google India defended the right of free speech, while saying that it didn’t condone illegality.

"Even where content is legal but breaks our own terms and conditions, we take that down too, once we’ve been notified about it," Google India said in a release. "But it also means that when content is legal but controversial, we don’t remove it because people’s differing views should be respected, so long as they are legal."

Facebook India also said that it would remove any content that crossed the line.

It "has policies and onsite features in place that enable people to report abusive content", the company said. "We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service."

While Yahoo India declined to comment, Microsoft did not respond to an email till press time.

Internet censorship is a rising trend, with approximately 40 countries filtering the Web in varying degrees, including democratic and non-democratic governments. Governments are using increasingly sophisticated censorship and surveillance techniques, including blocking social networks, to restrict a variety of types of content, says the 2010 Global Network Initiative (GNI) report. GNI seeks to protect freedom of speech online.

This August, for instance, the Centre had written to the department of telecommunications, asking it to "ensure effective monitoring of Twitter and Facebook", which minister of state for communications and IT Milind Deora acknowledged a few days later in a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha. He mentioned access to “encrypted data” on social networking sites, but did not elaborate on the subject.

Currently, the Indian Telegraph Act and the IT Act, 2008, (amendments were introduced in IT Act, 2000) give the government the power to monitor, intercept and even block online conversations and websites. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) has put up a list of 11 such websites blocked by a government order. The data was received from the department of information technology (DIT).

Moreover, under section 79 of the IT Intermediary (Rules and Guidelines), 2011, intermediaries (comprising telcos, ISPs, network services providers, search engines, cyber cafes, Web-hosting companies, online auction portals and online payment sites) are mandated to exercise "due diligence" and advise users not to share/distribute information violative of the law or a person’s privacy and rights. Intermediaries are expected to act on a complaint within 36 hours of receiving it, and remove such content when warranted.

In case the intermediary doesn’t find the content objectionable, the matter will have to be contested in a court of law.

"Currently, you need a court of law to direct a company in case something has to be removed. That takes a lot of time. So there has to be a mechanism that is faster in dealing with such content as (it) can be very damaging," said a DIT official, who did not want to be named.

"The Indian government can, and should, monitor conversations and websites if it believes the content can harm the security, defence, sovereignty and integrity of the country," said Pavan Duggal, a Supreme Court lawyer and cyber law expert. However, he wondered how the government would go about implementing the task of monitoring each and every conversation on an unstructured Internet.

Bangalore-based CIS, an Internet advocacy group, said "this pre-emptive manual screening of content, if implemented, would sound the death knell of freedom of expression in India".

"This screening is worrisome. Companies will err on the side of caution in a bid to please the government, and the courts will not be involved," said Sunil Abraham, executive director of CIS. “This is not only unconstitutional, but technically impossible too. Speech and words have nuances. Can humans decipher these with accuracy?"

The move will undermine key principles on which the Internet was built, said Nikhil Pahwa, editor and publisher of digital industry news and analysis blog MediaNama.

"It is completely impossible to enforce this. There is no way that content can be prescreened before it is placed online," he said. “It also kills the concept of immediate communication, which the Internet stands for."

Cyber law expert NA Vijayashankar, who runs cyber law information portal Naavi, said: "The government has valid reason to control anti-national activities on the Internet. But there are existing laws for it. The current proposition is impractical since pre-scrutiny of content on the Internet is not possible. It will affect the growth of user-generated content, which is helping Internet penetration grow in India."

Internet censorship happens frequently in countries such as Myanmar, Cuba, China (which had blocked keyword searches of the word "Egypt" on the Internet as well as on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. On the very day the Egyptian government set out to block Internet services in the country (in January), US Republican senator Susan Collins floated the COICA Bill, popularly called the "kill switch" Bill, which, if approved, would give the US president similar powers.

Read the original published in Livemint here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/scrub-the-internet-clean

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:54:21Z

Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these critically in order to build a better learning environment for themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.

Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.

As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction and learning.

The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:

The Costs of Belonging

Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend circles within the college environment.

It was particularly insightful for us to understand that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping ‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers, internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways, these students were digital natives if defined through access, because they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.

Based on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting, exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel excluded from the power of the digital.

The Need for Diversity

It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us. Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English, fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.

Such an idea might also help in reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find themselves tentative and intimidated online.

The breakthrough that the participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning lesson for us.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

As a part of their orientation to the world of the digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.

Working together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories, emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated special trainings with different experts in areas of language, communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure that is different from the regular classroom learning.

What would happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities, where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities, cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys, ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.

Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies. How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we organise a faculty training workshop later in December.

These three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream learning within higher education in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education

Debate: Online content row-1

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T11:06:19Z

In a debate moderated by TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, panelists Chandan Mitra, Editor-in-Chief, 'The Pioneer' & MP, BJP; Sabeer Bhatia, Co-founder, Hotmail; Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society; Ankit Fadia, Ethical Hacker; Suhel Seth, Managing Partner Counselage; Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, Cyber Media and Rajesh Charia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India discuss the issue if the Government should make clear definition of what is objectionable to internet/social media companies and draw a clear distinction between communally incitable material and political censorship.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal today (Dec 6) vowed to stop offensive and defamatory content on internet sites as a controversy raged over government's move to monitor content in cyber space. Maintaining that the government does not want to interfere with the freedom of the press, he said if the social networking sites are not willing to cooperate with the government on stopping incendiary material "then it is the duty of the government to think of steps that we need." Sibal's hurriedly-called press conference came against backdrop of government's meetings with the officials from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo over last few weeks after offensive material particularly against Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was put on the net. He said his request for cooperation from them fell on "deaf ears" and "we will not allow intermediaries to say that the throw up our hands and we cannot do anything about it."

Facebook in its reaction said it will cooperate in removing any content that violates its terms which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service. Google said it will abide by local law and take any material if it violates its policies but asserted that it will not remove any content just because it is controversial. Google said that when content is illegal it abides by local law and removes it. And even where the content is legal but violates "our terms and conditions, we take that down too, once we have been notified." However, it says, when content is legal and does not violate its policies, it will not remove just because it is controversial.

Even as Sibal defended the government's move, criticism poured in the cyber space that India should not emulate countries like China in attempting to gag freedom of expression. However, the Minister got support from Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, who is popular in cyber world. "Have to say I support Kapil Sibal on the examples he gave me: deeply offensive material about religions & communities that could incite riots," Tharoor tweeted. But his political rivals and MPs Varun Gandhi and Jayant Choudhary differed. Gandhi said Internet is the only truly democratic medium free of "vested interests, media owners & paid-off journos. Can see why Sibal wants to gag it," he said. Chaudhary said "Censorship of the internet - Forget the desirability issue for a minute, IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE??!!!"

Sunil Abraham was on Times Now from 9.05 p.m. to 9.45 p.m. on December 6, 2011 speaking about freedom of expression in India.

See the debate on Times Now

VIDEO

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/online-content-row

‘Any Normal Human Being Would Be Offended’

praskrishna — 2011-12-06T13:11:46Z

The Indian government has asked social media operators to delete information on the Internet that might offend the ‘‘sensibilities’’ of people in India, Kapil Sibal, India’s minister of communications and information technology, said Tuesday, confirming an earlier India Ink report.

"We have to take care of the sensibilities of our people," Mr. Sibal told more than 100 reporters during a press conference on the lawn at his home in New Delhi. ‘‘Cultural ethos is very important to us."

He denied such a demand was censorship.

There is some content on the Internet that ‘‘any normal human being would be offended by,’’ he said. The government has asked social media companies to develop a way to eliminate offensive content as soon as it is created, no matter what country it is created in, he said.

The news conference was called in response to an India Ink blog post Monday about private meetings with executives from Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft, in which Mr. Sibal asked the companies to prescreen content in India before it is posted. The idea caused an outpouring of criticism for Mr. Sibal on social media sites in India on Monday night that intensified after the press conference on Tuesday.

Industry analysts and activists deemed it unrealistic and unconstitutional.

"It is technically impossible and places unconstitutional limits on the freedom of expression in India," said Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Center for Internet and Society, a research group based in Bangalore, India. "Shutting the Internet hasn’t worked in China or Saudi Arabia, and it won’t work in India," he said.

India now has an estimated 100 million Internet users, the fourth largest online population in the world behind China, the United States and Japan, and over 25 million Facebook users. Those figures are well behind India’s 850 million registered mobile phone users, but Internet use is expected to mushroom in coming years as inexpensive tablet computers enter the market.

Facebook was the only company to reply publicly Tuesday. "We will remove any content that violates our terms, which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service," the company said in a statement.

In recent months, the Indian government held several meetings with social media companies, and asked them to develop a ‘‘mechanism’’ to screen out offensive content, Mr. Sibal said. So far, he said, these companies have been uncooperative.

Mr. Sibal declined to define what, exactly, was offensive content, but said he had found on the Internet "subject matter which was so offensive that it hurt the religious sentiments of large sections of the community."

Before the news conference, he showed examples of that content to some journalists, who described it as pornography combined with images of Mecca and Hindu gods. Mr. Sibal also said there were images of Congress party personnel that were "ex facie objectionable."

The Indian government has been tightening the leash on Internet freedom, and in April issued rules demanding demanding Internet service providers delete information posted on Web sites that officials or private citizens deemed disparaging or harassing. Last year, the government threatened to shut down BlackBerry service in the country unless the smartphones’ manufacturer, Research In Motion, allowed government officials greater access to users’ messages.

In a meeting Monday, executives from social media companies told Mr. Sibal they believed that American law applies to them, not the Indian government’s rules issued in April.

"Even if U.S. law applies, the community standards of India have to be taken into account," Mr. Sibal said. "We will not allow Internet companies to throw up their hands and say, ‘We cannot do anything about it."

Regulation of the Internet, particularly across country boundaries, remains a murky and hard-to-define area, said Mr. Abraham of the Center for Internet and Society. "Indian law seems to state that it has global jurisdiction," he said, "but that is not really true. An Indian court might give an order that is unenforceable in the United States or anywhere else," he said.

This article by Heather Timmons was published in the New York Times on December 6, 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article. Read the original story here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/any-normal-human-being-would-be-offended

Pathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T05:15:45Z

The third annual faculty workshop and regional facilitators meeting is being organised by HEIRA and CIS at the CSCS office in Bangalore from 8 to 10 December 2011. This is a closed event.

Day 1: December 8, 2011

Title	Moderators & Resource Persons	Timings
Introductory Session New Pathways Design Campus Projects	Tejaswini Niranjana Sneha PP	10.00 - 10.45 a.m.
Need for Curricular Reform and Innovation Changing social composition of the UG classroom Alternative sites of knowledge production New curricular objectives	S.V. Srinivas Milind Wakankar Maithreyi Mulupuru	10.45 - 11.30 a.m.
Exploring the Potential of Curricular Innovation in the UG Space Curricular experiments at the UG level	Initial Inputs by Nishant Shah & Tejaswini Niranjana, followed by Group Discussion	11.30 - 12.30 p.m.
Lunch		12.30 p.m. - 1.00 p.m.
Group Activity: Designing a certificate course/module		1.30 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.
Group Reports and Discussion		3.00 p.m. - 4.00 p.m.
Meeting at IIMB		5.00 p.m. - 6.30 p.m.

Day 2: December 9, 2011

Title	Speakers/Moderators	Timings
Issues for a New Pedagogy Social and linguistic barriers in the classroom Lack of emphasis on critical and analytical skills Need for student-driven learning	Ashwin Kumar Tejaswini Niranjana Nishant Shah	10.00 a.m - 11.00 a.m.
New Teaching Resources for the UG Space Local Context & Resources – the language issue Building research capacity	AK Milind Wakankar (Discussants: SB,TH & AJ)	11.00 a.m. - 11.45 a.m.
Innovative Teaching Methods -New methods of classroom teaching -Digital media in teaching -Assessing classroom practices (Questionnaire)	S.V. Srinivas Nishant Shah MG Hegde & Geethika G. (Discussants) Tanveer Hasan	11.45 a.m - 12.45 p.m.
Lunch		1.15 p.m. - 2.00 p.m.
Group Activity: Developing New Teaching Methods for the new course developed on Day 1		2.00 p.m. - 3.00 p.m.
Group Discussion: Pathways Campus Projects		3.00 p.m. - 4.30 p.m.
Final Round-Table Discussion and Concluding Remarks		4.30 p.m. - 5.00 p.m.

Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants

Abhilash J (Regional Facilitator -Kerala)
Ashwin Kumar (Initiative Head – Regional Language Resources, HEIRA)
Maithreyi Mulupuru (Research Associate, HEIRA)
Milind Wakankar (Initiative Head -Social Justice in HE, HEIRA & Fellow, CSCS)
Nishant Shah (Director – Research, CIS)
Shrikant Botre (Regional Facilitator – Maharashtra)
Sneha PP ( Programme Associate, HEIRA)
S.V. Srinivas (Senior Fellow, CSCS & Lead Researcher, CIDASIA)
Tanveer Hasan (Regional Facilitator – Karnataka)
Tejaswini Niranjana (Senior Fellow, CSCS & Lead Researcher, HEIRA)
Dr. MG Hegde (Dept. of English, Dr. A.V Baliga College, Kumta)
Geethika G (Dept. of Political Science, Union Christian College, Aluva)

Day 3: December 10, 2011

Title	Speakers/Moderators	Timings
HEIRA and Knowledge Potential	Tejaswini Niranjana, Milind Wakankar	10.30 a.m. - 11.30 a.m.
Facilitators' Cases: Steps to Conduct a Survey in Ahmednagar College Kumta Ethnographic Project	Shrikant Botre Tanveer Hasan (Discussant: Abhilash J)	11.30 a.m. - 1.00 p.m.
Lunch		1.00 p.m. - 2.00 p.m.
Relays between Current and Future Projects	Ashwin Kumar, Nishant Shah (Feedback: Arun Kumar)	2.00 p.m - 2.45 p.m.
Possible Convergences between HEIRA projects	(Feedback: Arun Kumar)	2.45 p.m - 3.30 p.m.
Final Round of Discussion & Concluding Remarks		3:30 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants

Abhilash J
Ashwin Kumar
Maithreyi Mulupuru
Milind Wakankar
Nishant Shah
Shrikant Botre
Sneha PP
S.V. Srinivas
Tanveer Hasan
Tejaswini Niranjana

College and Participants

1	SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai	Rupal Vora Archana Sanil	Counselling Business Management
2	St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai	Rashmi Lee George Girja Balan	English Life Science
3	Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar	B. Eshwar Gouda A.Y Raikwad	Commerce Commerce
4	St. Aloysius College, Mangalore	George Rodrigues Praveena Cardoza	Librarian Sociology
5	Vidhyavardhaka First Grade College, Mysore	Manoj Kumar R. Arvind	Commerce English
6	Dr. A V Baliga College of Arts and Science, Kumta ( North Kanara)	MG Hegde Pratibha Bhat	English English
7	Farook College, Kozhikode	Muhammed Rasheed P Haris P	Economics Economics
8	Union Christian College, Aluva	Geethika Seena Mathai	Political Science Psychology
9	Newman College, Thodupuzha	Louis. J. Parathazham Saju Abraham	Physics Botany

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways-third-faculty-workshop

Why this ‘kolaveri di' is India's coming of age

praskrishna — 2011-12-05T10:03:40Z

In the last two weeks, two videos have gone viral on the Internet in India. One, the catchy Tanglish-folksy ‘Why this kolaveri di' video, and two, the flash mob at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) in Mumbai where a few hundred Mumbaikars were seen shaking a leg to the Bollywood hit, ‘Rang de basanti'. Nishant Shah, Director-Research has been quoted in this article by Deepa Kurup which was published in the Hindu on 4 December 2011.

If you logged on to any social avatar of the World Wide Web, these videos, the ‘shares', the ‘likes' and the instantly-trending tweets were unmissable. While the flash mob at CST, a tribute to those who lost their lives on 26/11, has around 11.45 lakh views on YouTube, ‘Kolaveri di', a promo for Tamil hero Dhanush's upcoming film 3 uploaded by Sony Music on November 16, has been viewed 1.43 crore times.

On the Web, a world that is constantly on the look out for the ‘next cool thing', that Kolaveri's viewership continues to grow by the day, has made commentators christen it the first viral marketing campaign in India. Perhaps more interesting than the song itself are the over two dozen versions of it that you will find on YouTube. There's an anti-inflation version featuring Sharad Pawar; a group of boys from Kerala using the song to appeal to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa on the Mullaperiyar dam issue; a talented young girl presenting a “female version” reply to the song that's arguably gender-biased, and many others have done remix versions and videos of the song. Like the song's appeal, the rip-offs too are pan-national.

While Bollywood trailers and content have always been popular online, film-makers have not actively tapped into this medium. Earlier this year, the makers of the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Ra.One became the first film to have its own YouTube channel, featuring songs, promos, footage, ‘behind the scenes', and cast interviews, supplemented by a fairly effective social media campaign. Add to this, the potential of revenue generation offered by music downloads and caller ring-back tone subscriptions; this form of marketing is cheap, easy, instant and a potential recipe for success.

Indeed, mobile value-added service provider, Techzone, which holds the exclusive rights for music tracks, videos and digital entertainment formats for the ‘Kolaveri' movie 3, has seen a “phenomenal” number of subscriptions, downloads and ‘live-in' requests. Techzone reportedly saw 22,000 downloads of the song in the first five days. While refusing to share numbers, marketing representatives from Techzone told The Hindu that the response has been overwhelming. TechZone deployed the content through its entire distribution network, which includes all telecom operators.

“Generally, for Tamil songs, 90 per cent of the demand comes from Tamil Nadu, but with this song we have received a sizable amount of requests from different parts of the country. This is a first for us,” the Techzone representative said.

A Vibrant Medium

So are we witnessing a change in cinema's relationship with cyberspace, asks Nishant Shah, a researcher from the Centre for Internet and Society. A campaign like Ra.One does not compare to ‘Kolaveri' because a movie trailer simply offers people a chance to be spectators, unlike the simple and catchy ‘Kolaveri', which has people remixing, editing the footage and using the video to create their own narratives.

Mr. Shah feels that indeed this is the first viral online video campaign that India has had. Most viral videos so far, he points out, were invariably pornographic or even voyeuristic in nature. “Like the Delhi MMS video — that was perhaps one of the earliest videos to go viral — to other pornographic clips of movie stars. Later on, we saw interesting remixes or spoofs, mostly regional; this is the first time that we have home-grown content that has gone viral simply because it is fun, simple and addictive. In that sense it's an intelligent campaign,” he explained. He also feels that this could be the coming of age of video as a medium, particularly so because the campaign has become a pan-India phenomenon.

Tried and Tested

Viral marketing is quite big abroad. In that sense, this has all been ‘tried and tested' abroad — from commercials for beer and sunglasses to selling computers and even presidential campaigns; online videos and viral marketing plans are indeed the mainstay of many publicity strategies.

Marketing campaigns can no longer ignore the Internet. Neither can they treat it as an also-ran, says Prashanth, a social media junkie and marketing professional. “Campaigns now have to start thinking of making promotional content for the new media. Currently, a shorter version of regular campaigns are edited for the Web; there are some successful ones in this category too. But a campaign such as the ‘Kolaveri' has the industry sitting up and taking notice. In some sense, the logic is simple: you have your audience cut-out, and the reach is pretty much pan-national,” he explains.

Read the original story published in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/kolaveri-di

On the net, red herring

praskrishna — 2011-12-05T09:49:30Z

They are often the first clue in cyber crimes.But IP addresses may not be totally foolproof, writes Javed Anwer. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article published in the Times of India on 4 December 2011.

It was one morning that changed the life of Lakshmana Kailash K forever.In the wee hours of August 31,2007, Kailash,a techie in Bangalore,was woken up by cops from Pune.They told him he had posted images derogatory to Chhatrapati Shivaji on Orkut,and whisked him away to Maharashtra.The police had used the IP address provided by the internet service provider and information from Google,to find that the image was posted from a computer owned by Kailash.

It was one morning that changed the life of Lakshmana Kailash K forever.In the wee hours of August 31,2007,Kailash,a techie in Bangalore,was woken up by cops from Pune.They told him he had posted images derogatory to Chhatrapati Shivaji on Orkut,and whisked him away to Maharashtra.The police had used the IP address provided by the internet service provider and information from Google,to find that the image was posted from a computer owned by Kailash.

The Maharashtra cops are not the only ones to get it wrong.There is a widespread belief that IP addresses are akin to a smoking gun in most cyber crime cases.Tracing the IP address is also considered one of the easiest ways to crack a case.The result: even four years after what Kailash went through,investigators,internet service providers,private companies filtering web traffic and social networking websites,continue to jump to a conclusion on the basis of IP addresses.

There is a tendency to oversimplify the process, says Sunil Abraham,executive director of Centre for Internet and Society.While I have seen that courts have been always careful in cases where IP addresses are involved as a tool of investigation,I cant say the same about the local police.

In theory,IP addresses can be useful since they provide a link to individual computers.The address is a numerical string for example,192.168.1.1 that is assigned to any computing device connected to a network.However,given the dynamic and interlinked nature of the internet,using them as clinching evidence is fraught with dangers.

The second reason,according to Patnaik,is the presence of open wi-fi networks.Most people have no clue about technology.This means unsecured or poorlyconfigured wi-fi networks are common.The result: someone may park his car in a residential colony,scan for open wi-fi networks and use the open connection for sending a threatening or abusive email to his boss before leaving, he says.If the mail is traced,it will lead to the person who owns the wi-fi network and not the guy who used it illegally.

But police officers say that,to start with,the IP address is often the only clue thats there.Investigating cyber-crime is difficult because its all virtual, says Ranjit Narayan,special commissioner (crime).There are no clues other than the IP address.The investigation starts with it. Now,though,after their widespread abuse,there is a growing realization about the fallacy of the IP approach.A judge in the US recently said there was a very real disconnect between an IP address and a copyright infringer.Organizations like Electronic Frontier Foundation,which deals with matters related to cyber liberty and free speech on the web,have also taken up the issue in earnest. Perhaps,there is hope for the Kailashs of the future.

The original story was published in the Times of India, it can be read here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/red-herring

All India Privacy Symposium

praskrishna — 2012-02-27T11:08:32Z

Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, Privacy International, UK and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is organizing the All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre, New Delhi on Saturday, February 4, 2012.

Since June 2010, Privacy India has been engaging in discussions with policy makers, the public and sectoral experts about privacy in India. The discussions have ranged from topics of identity and privacy, to minority rights and privacy, and consumer privacy. The findings of our research show that privacy was a neglected area of study for India in the past, however, this is changing. Advancements in technology, the introduction of e-governance initiatives like the National Fibre Optic Network, the introduction of new legislations, and debates surrounding national security, have brought privacy debates to the forefront in India. Although currently sectoral legislation deals with privacy issues, e.g., the Telegraph Act or RBI guidelines for banking, India has just begun to consider a horizontal legislation that deals comprehensively with privacy across all contexts. This conference is an opportunity to look forward to what could be the future scope of privacy in India.

Privacy India was set up in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, under the auspices of an international organization ‘Privacy International’. Privacy International is a non-profit group that provides assistance to civil society groups, governments, international and regional bodies, the media and the public in a number of countries. For more info, visit its website.

This is a public meeting. For participation in the event, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org)

Symposium Advisors

Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet &Society (www.cis-india.org)
Rajan Gandhi, Society in Action Group
Phet Sayo, IDRC (www.idrc.org)
Gus Hosein, Privacy International (www.privacyinternational.org)
Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bangalore (www.clpr.org.in)
Vickram Crishna, Privacy International (www.privacyinternational.org)

Agenda

09:30- 10:00	Registration
10:00- 10:15	Welcome & Introduction to Privacy India Elonnai Hickok (Policy Advocate, Privacy India)
10:15- 10:30	Tea Break
10:30- 11:30	Panel I: Privacy and Transparency Moderator: Sunil Abraham (Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society) Panelists: Prashant Bhushan (Senior Advocate, New Delhi), Simon Davies (Director General, Privacy International, UK), Ponnurangam K (Assistant Prof, IIIT New Delhi), Chitra Ahanthem (Journalist, Imphal), Aruna Roy (Social & Political Activist), Deepak Maheshwari (Director Corporate Affairs, Microsoft) Poster:Srishti Goyal (Law Student)
11:30- 12:30	Panel II: Privacy and E-Governance Initiatives Moderator: Sudhir Krishnaswamy (Professor, Azim Premji University) Panelists: Anant Maringanti (Independent Social Researcher), Usha Ramanathan (Advocate&Social Activist), Ram Sewak Sharma (Director General, UIDAI), Gus Hosein (Executive Director, Privacy International, UK), R K Singh (Union Home Secretary, New Delhi), Apar Gupta (Advocate, Supreme Court of India) Poster: Adrija Das (Law Student)
12:30- 13:30	Lunch
13:30- 14:30	Panel III: Privacy and National Security Moderator: Justice A P Shah (Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court)* Panelists: Menaka Guruswamy (Advocate, Supreme Court, New Delhi), Amol Sharma (Journalist, Wall Street Journal)*, Saikat Datta (Journalist, DNA), Eric King (Human Rights and Technology Advisor, Privacy International, UK), Prasanth Sugathan (Legal Counsel, Software Freedom Law Center) and Oxblood Ruffin (Cult of the Dead Cow Security and Publishing Collective) Poster: Suchithra Menon (Law Student)
14:30- 15:30	Panel IV: Privacy and Banking Moderator: Prashant Iyengar (Associate Professor, Jindal Law University) Panelists: M R Umarji (Chief Legal Advisor, IBA), N A Vijayashankar (Cyber Law Expert), Sucheta Dalal (Managing Editor, MoneyLife Magazine)*, Malavika Jayaram (Advocate, Bangalore) Poster: Malavika Chandu (Law Student)
15:30- 15:45	Tea Break
15:45- 16:45	Panel V: Privacy and Health Moderator: Ashok Row Kavi (Journalist & LGBT Activist) Panelists: K K Abraham (President, Indian Network for People with HIV), Shri Sayan Chatterjee (Secretary, National Aids Control Organization), Dr V M Katoch (Secretary, Department of Health Research), Dr B S Bedi (Advisor, CDAC & Media Lab Asia) Poster: Danish Sheikh (Alternative Law Forum)
16:45- 17:00	The Way Forward Elonnai Hickok (Policy Advocate, Privacy India)

Bios of Speakers

Usha Ramanathan

Usha Ramanathan is an internationally recognized expert on the jurisprudence of law, poverty and rights. She writes and speaks on leading issues like the Bhopal gas leak tragedy, mass displacement, civil liberties, criminal law, environment and the judicial process. She is involved in the UID project and has written and debated extensively on it. She is a member of Amnesty International's Advisory Panel on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and has been called upon by the World Health Organisation as a expert on mental health on various occasions. Her writings can be found at http://www.ielrc.org/.

NA.Vijayashankar

NA.Vijayashankar, more popularly known as Naavi, is a Techno Legal Information Security Consultant based in Bangalore, India. Naavi is a pioneer in the field of Cyber Law in India. He is the author of the first book (1999) and first E-Book (2003) on Cyber Laws in India. He has also authored a book titled “Cyber Laws, Corporate Mantra for the Digital Era”, “Cyber Laws Demystified” and “Cyber Laws for Engineers” as well as a book on Cyber Crimes in Kannada.

Naavi is the founder of www.cyberlawcollege.com which is the pioneering virtual educational institution in India dedicated to Cyber Law Education. Cyber Law College presently conducts offline and virtual courses on Cyber Laws. It has conducted several courses in association with law colleges in Karnataka such as KLE Law College, Bangalore, JSS Law College, Mysore, SDM law college Mangalore and KLE Law College Hubli.

Naavi is also the founder of www.naavi.org the premier Cyber Law Portal in India. Naavi has been engaged in the training of Police in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and conducts several courses in Cyber Laws for different audiences. He has been a guest faculty in a number of institutions including NPA, IDRBT, DTRI, ISACA, NADT, LBS National Academy, Judicial Academies, NALSAR, etc., as well as several law, engineering and management institutions.

Naavi has over three decades of senior Corporate executive experience behind him. He has been an ex-Banker and Consultant to several Companies in IT Services. He has conducted hundreds of training sessions to professionals of various disciplines such as bankers, lawyers, chartered accountants, engineers, software professionals, police and judicial officers through workshops and in-house training programmes in cyber laws, cyber crimes, information security and related areas.

Chitra Ahanthem

Chitra Ahanthem is a features writer with Imphal Free Press, published in Imphal, Manipur. She is also a freelance writer and researcher on issues around HIV/AIDS, child rights, conflict and gender.

Baljit Singh Bedi

Baljit Singh Bedi did his B.Tech and M.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. After serving for five years in the Centre for Applied Research in Electronics (CARE) IIT, Delhi he joined the Department of Information Technology (DIT), Ministry of Communication & IT (MCIT), Government of India. The major responsibilities and contributions over the years cover conceptualizing, evolving and implementation of a number of major schemes/programmes and projects in the field of electronics and IT applications with primary role in healthcare. He was instrumental in starting an integrated programme in promoting the area of Electronics, IT and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Standards in Healthcare in India. As the head of Medical Electronics & Telemedicine division, he was looking after the activity of promotion of e-health & tele–health technology and R&D in medical electronics and launched a number of schemes in India. He was part of the National Task Force Telemedicine in India set up by the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoH&FW), Government of India and headed the Group on Standards. He was a Member of National Knowledge Commission’s Working Group on India-Health Information Network Development (I-HIND) and is part of the Advisory Group for follow-up implementation program under the consideration of MoH&FW. He is actively involved in policy, development and deployment programmes of IT in Health initiatives of DIT, MoH&FW, and Media Lab Asia. He is a member of the National Committee set up by MoH&FW for EMR Standardization and Heading its Task Group on Interoperability. He is also International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Expert for e-Health Standardization. He is Executive Member of Indian Association of Medical Informatics (IAMI) and President, Telemedicine Society of India (TSI). At present, he is an Adviser to the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), Scientific Society of MCIT, Government of India.

Deepak Maheshwari

Deepak Maheshwari is Director – Corporate Affairs with Microsoft in India and responsible for interactions with the policymakers & regulators as well as with industry associations & the civil society organizations. An active participant and a keen observer of the interplay between technological innovation and socio-economic development, he has been closely associated with development & evolution of Information & Communication Technology policy, law & regulation for more than a decade and is often invited as a speaker and a contributor of articles & opinions in the media.

He has been active in several trade associations and served as committee chair & co-chair. He served for two consecutive terms as the elected secretary in the ISP Association of India and co-founded National Internet eXchange of India (NIXI) as well as the ITU-APT Foundation of India. He is also a member on the academic board of the IIM Ahmedabad- IDEA Telecom Centre of Excellence.

At times mistaken as a lawyer, he was actually awarded degree in engineering by one of India’s leading technical institute IT-BHU. His professional experience of more than 2 decades spans functional responsibilities across sales, marketing, operations and last but not the least, corporate affairs.

*Participants to be confirmed

Download the poster here
Download the agenda here (PDF, 755 KB)

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/privacy-symposium

The High Level Privacy Conclave

praskrishna — 2012-02-01T06:29:20Z

Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon and Privacy International, UK is organizing the High Level Privacy Conclave at the Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens in New Delhi on Friday, February 3, 2012.

Since June 2010, Privacy India has been engaging in discussions with policy makers, the public and sectoral experts about privacy in India. The discussions have ranged from topics of identity and privacy, to minority rights and privacy, and consumer privacy. The findings of our research show that privacy was a neglected area of study in India during the past, however, this is changing. Advancements in technology, the introduction of e-governance initiatives like the National Fibre Optic Network, introduction of new legislations, and debates surrounding national security, have brought privacy debates to the forefront in India. Although currently sectoral legislation deals with privacy issues, e.g., the Telegraph Act or RBI guidelines for banking, India has just begun to consider a horizontal legislation that deals comprehensively with privacy across all contexts. This conference is an opportunity to look forward to what could be the future scope of privacy in India.

Privacy India was set up in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, under the auspices of an international organization ‘Privacy International’. Privacy International is a non-profit group that provides assistance to civil society groups, governments, international and regional bodies, the media and the public in a number of countries. For more info visit its website.

This is a closed-door meeting. For participation get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).

Conclave Advisors

Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet &Society (www.cis-india.org)
Gus Hosein, Privacy International (www.privacyinternational.org)
Phet Sayo, IDRC (www.idrc.org)
Rajan Gandhi, Society in Action Group (sag.delhi@gmail.com)
Sudhir Krishnaswamy, Centre for Law and Policy Research, Bangalore (www.clpr.org.in)
Vickram Crishna, Privacy International (www.privacyinternational.org)

Agenda

February 3 (4:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.)

Registration and Tea (4:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.)

Welcome &Introduction to Privacy India (4:30 p.m. - 4:45 p.m.)

Rajan Gandhi (CEO, Society in Action Group)

National Security and Privacy (4:45 p.m. - 5:45 p.m.)

Moderator: Malavika Jayaram (Advocate, Bangalore)
Gus Hosein (Executive Director, Privacy International, UK)
Vakul Sharma (Advocate, Supreme Court, New Delhi)
Justice AP Shah (Former Justice, Delhi High Court)
PK Hormis Tharakan (Former Chief of Research and Analysis Wing, Govt of India)
Saikat Dutta (Journalist, DNA)
Manish Tewari (Member of Parliament, Ludhiana)
Eric King (Human Rights and Technology Advisor, Privacy International, UK)

Internet and Privacy (5:45 p.m. - 6:45 p.m.)

Moderator: Sunil Abraham (Executive Director, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore)
Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Member of Parliament, Karnataka)
Simon Davies (Director General, Privacy International, UK)
Vinayak Godse (Director- Data Protection, DSCI)
Deepak Maheshwari (Director Corporate Affairs, Microsoft)
Amitabh Das (General Counsel, Yahoo! India)
Talish Ray (Board Member, Software Freedom Law Center)
Pria Chetty (Associate Director, Technology and Innovation Law, PricewaterhouseCoopers, South Africa)*
Floriana Fossato (Center for Media and Society, Russia) *

The Way Forward (6:45 p.m - 7:00 p.m.)

Elonnai Hickok (Policy Advocate, Privacy India)

Dinner (7:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.)

Conclave Advisors

Phet Sayo
Rajan Gandhi
Sunil Abraham
Sudhir Krishnaswamy
Vickram Crishna

*Participants to be confirmed

Amol Sharma (Journalist, Wall Street Journal)
Col Alok Mazumdar (COO, Hans Foundation)
Vibodh Parthasarathy (Associate Professor, Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Milla Islamia University, Delhi)

See the Paharpur Business Centre in Nehru Place here

Download the agenda here

Download the event poster here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/high-level-privacy-conclave

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes

praskrishna — 2011-12-01T13:31:39Z

Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J), the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant is taking place on December 1, 2011. Amateur scanning of books often raises a lot of questions, around the issue of copyright. For this V/J13 is scanning George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes. The essay is in public domain in Russia, India and South Africa, but not in Europe and America due to copyright issues. CIS is hosting the scanned pages of the essay in public domain.

During the morning session DIY-made book scanner and OCR-software will be used to transform the scans into text files and in the afternoon session the digital material generated in the morning will be remixed.

The main sessions can be followed online at the home page of VJ13

About VJ13

Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J) is the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant. Since 1997, Verbindingen/Jonctions combines high, low and no-tech strategies from utopian, contemporary, traditional and tribal cultures, free software, feminism and queer theories. V/J is an occasion to explore the space between thinking and doing, and the festival is always a mix of activities. It is an occasion to invite radio makers, artists, programmers, academics, Linux users, interface designers, urban explorers, performance artists, technicians, lawyers and others to experience each other’s practice, and to share their interests with a broad public of visitors.

V/J13 has been developed in collaboration with Le P’tit Ciné, Recyclart, Hacker Space Brussels (HSB), QO2, Renovas, Boutique de Quartier and Yves Poliart, Myriam Van Imschoot, Piet Zwart Institute: Networked Media.

Download the scanned version (Zip files, 28091 kb)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/books-vs-cigarettes

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T11:10:08Z

The Centre for Internet and Society announces the launch of its dialogue cafe, where every month, we approach seminal thinkers, scholars and practitioners to help explore knowledge paradigms that help us understand and research techno-social realities through innovative thought, concepts and frameworks.

The dialogue cafe draws upon different disciplines, histories, perspectives and intellectual legacies in order to respond to a seminal piece of writing that has changed, challenged and shaped the contours of interdisciplinary science and technology studies.

The dialogue cafe initiates several strands of dialogues — between critical thinkers and canonical texts, between different paradigm of knowledges that interact with digital and internet technologies, and between interlocutors located in different disciplines, to initiate critical thought/work for new and innovative research in the field of Internet and Society.

For its first brew of conversations, the Dialogue Cafe serves you...

Computation and the Humanities: Revisiting a Silent Revolution

Steve Jobs’ comments on how “technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities” made Apple hearts sing is today widely re-circulated, but not fully comprehended. We often take this to be the mark of one man’s genius, rather than the symptom of a broader interdisciplinary history. Noted Artificial Intelligence scholar Philip Agre recalls, “When I was a graduate student in artificial intelligence, the humanities were not held in high regard. They were vague and woolly, they employed impenetrable jargons, and they engaged in "meta-level bickering that never decides anything".

What happened, in the formative decades of Jobs and Agre’s generation, to bring technology and the humanities into conversation? What have the results been, other than well-designed personal computational devices, and what is the significance for us? On December 2, 2011, the Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a Dialogue Cafe, where we engage in exploring what this all means and what kinds of labour it might take to ‘marry’ these disparate ways of knowing.

As a response to Philip Agre’s seminal essay on “Critical Technology Practice”, the cafe will begin with an exposition by Kavita Philip (University of California, Irvine), opening up into a critical response spearheaded by Cherry Matthew, and leading to a larger dialogue with the audience, exploring fault lines of interdisciplinary research and challenges of integrated technology studies.

For more background on these questions, audience is encouraged (but not required) to explore the materials at Agre’s home page http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/, and STSrelated links from Wikipedia’s page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_technology_and_society

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/dialogue-cafe

Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:55:16Z

The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City.

Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of the event is online.

Agenda and Program details PDF document, 1611 kb

VIDEO

Mobility Shifts 2011, Nishant Shah from The Politics of Digital Culture on Vimeo.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/mobility-shifts-2011

Move over Kolaveri di, here comes Gowda

praskrishna — 2011-11-28T06:58:54Z

Transparency is the buzzword in governance and chief minister DV Sadananda Gowda is eager to set a new benchmark. You could soon watch what the chief minister is doing at office, live on YouTube. This article was published in dailybhaskar.com on November 28, 2011.

Cameras are being installed at the chief minister's office in Vidhana Soudha and his home office, Krishna. The live footage will be uploaded to YouTube. "I always wanted to maintain transparency in my functioning. Very soon, I will put it to work, when people can watch me live at what I am doing when inoffice. Let the people see who come to meet me, what I do and how I work. This will set a new example, but there will be no compulsion for my colleagues to emulate me. It is entirely up to them whether to follow me or not," said Gowda on Sunday.

Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy has already set a precedent by installing cameras in his office. On July 1 this year, the day Chandy's experiment went 'live', one lakh visitors logged in. Talking to The New York Times earlier this year, Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, said "He applauded Chandy's webcams, even if the effort amounted to no more than tokenism."This type of tokenism is also quite useful," The NYT reported Abraham as saying.

In Karnataka, the much-hyped Citizens' Charter would be implemented after the state legislature, which begins on December 6, ends. The cabinet had already cleared the proposal and the bill on time-bound delivery of public services would be introduced in the session, added Gowda.

The proposed bill will make it mandatory for officials in government offices to deliver public services within stipulated period of time and failure to do so would make them liable for penal action and fine to be computed for every day of delay.

Already, Bescom chief P Manivannan has installed a webcam in his office. The NYT earlier reported Manivannan as saying that "he was installing a 'hemispheric' camera that would capture the goings-on in his entire office rather than just show his visitors."

Read the original published in dailybhaskar.com here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/here-comes-gowda

Centre for Internet and Society

Facebook, Google tell India they won’t screen for derogatory content

FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?

Govt wants to scrub the Internet clean

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The Costs of Belonging

The Need for Diversity

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

Debate: Online content row-1

‘Any Normal Human Being Would Be Offended’

Pathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS

Day 1: December 8, 2011

Title

Moderators & Resource Persons

Timings

Day 2: December 9, 2011

Title

Speakers/Moderators

Timings

Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants

Day 3: December 10, 2011

Speakers/ Moderators and Discussants

College and Participants

Why this ‘kolaveri di' is India's coming of age

A Vibrant Medium

Tried and Tested

On the net, red herring

All India Privacy Symposium

Symposium Advisors

Agenda

Bios of Speakers

Usha Ramanathan

NA.Vijayashankar

Chitra Ahanthem

Baljit Singh Bedi

Deepak Maheshwari

The High Level Privacy Conclave

Conclave Advisors

Agenda

Conclave Advisors

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes

About VJ13

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society

Computation and the Humanities: Revisiting a Silent Revolution

Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit

Move over Kolaveri di, here comes Gowda