Centre for Internet and Society

India Proposes Restrictions on Tapping Telephone Calls

praskrishna — 2011-05-06T05:53:43Z

An Indian government report has recommended that interception of telephone calls by government agencies should be limited to situations when there is a "public emergency" or "public safety" is at stake. John Riberio's article appeared in the PC World, TechWorld and CIO. Pranesh Prakash, program manager from the Centre for Internet and Society has been quoted in these articles.

John Riberio's article was published in the following publications:

PC World [April 26, 2011]
TechWorld [April 26, 2011]
CIO [April 26, 2011]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/tapping-telephone-calls

The Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation — Deadline Expires on April 30

praskrishna — 2011-04-26T06:23:02Z

The application period for the Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation is now open! The deadline for applications is April 30, 2011.

The UT Austin Portugal program is now accepting applications for the third annual International School on Digital Transformation, to be held July 17-22 in Porto, Portugal. Advanced students and emerging professionals, social entrepreneurs, and activists from around the world with an interest in digital technology and the enrichment of civil society are invited to apply.

For the past two years, this intensive residential program has brought together scholars, policy experts, community advocates, designers, and hackers to explore the potential for digital media to empower citizens, strengthen communities, and contribute to a more vibrant civil society. The School is named for Gary Chapman, an internationally renowned Internet policy expert and member of the faculty at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at UT Austin who founded this innovative program and passed away suddenly last year. His life continues to inspire the School.

The School is conducted in English and in previous years has attracted faculty and participants from Portugal, South Africa, Finland, India, the U.K., the U.S., and Brazil, among many other countries. During the week, innovators in digital communications serve as teachers and mentors, presenting current projects and engaging in discussion. Faculty and students will be regarded as peers during the School.

Participants of the School will have the opportunity to present and discuss their own projects with those having similar interests, and explore ways to further develop their work. Additionally, members will collaborate on group projects involving digital media and civil society. Consisting of approximately 40 participants and 15 faculty, the School seeks to create an atmosphere of scholarly collegiality, fostering dialogue among diverse perspectives including those of design, policy, activist, and research backgrounds. The daily schedule will include time for presentations, bar camp style meetings, and informal conversations among faculty and students.

The School’s program for 2011 will focus on these themes:

Information access and open civic discourse
Digital tools for government transparency
Evolving Internet content regulation and the public’s right to information
Digital media and the democratic process
Factors influencing the growth of online civic engagement

The School will be held at the Hotel Eurostars Das Artes, a four-star hotel near the heart of Porto’s historic district, an area renowned for its active arts culture, wine, architecture, and breathtaking views. A link to the hotel site is below.

Participant fees are:

370 Euros, which includes

Six nights of lodging in a single room at the Eurostars Das Artes
Six days of breakfasts at the hotel (Monday-Saturday)
Six dinners at a local restaurant (Sunday-Friday)
The daily program of meetings, with coffee breaks
An evening cultural activity

170 Euros for UT-Austin-Portugal PhD Program students (this includes the items listed above, minus hotel and breakfast. Students will be asked to pay an additional charge for lodging, unless they are based in Porto andwish to stay at home.)

All participants should expect to pay for travel to and from Porto, lunches, and any incidental expenses such as bar tabs and outings to cafes or other Porto sites not included in the official agenda.

The Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation is organized by the UT Austin-Portugal program, a cooperative endeavor between the University of Texas at Austin and some of the top universities of Portugal. The co-directors of the School are Dr. Sharon Strover of the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Artur Pimenta Alves of the University of Porto. More details on the program will be added and updated as they are confirmed.

The Eurostars Das Artes is a deluxe hotel located near many shops, restaurants, and art galleries and about a 20-minute walk to the Praça da Ribeira, at the shores of the Douro River. More information may be found here. For more information on the broader program, please see this.

There is limited space and the final deadline for applications is April 30. For questions regarding the program or call for applications, please contact Karen Gustafson at kegustafson@gmail.com.

Read the original news here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/international-school-on-digital-transformation

Who the Hack?

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:16:59Z

A hacker is not an evil spirit, instead he can outwit digital systems to bring about social change, writes Nishant Shah in this column published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2011.

One of the most sullied words that have pervaded public discourse, with the rise of the internet, is “hacker”. The word conjures up images of a silent, menacing, technology-savvy young man, who, with his almost magical control over the digital realm, manipulates systems, changes the laws, rewrites the rules and takes complete control. We hear stories about criminals hacking often enough — people who break into national security systems and retrieve sensitive information, teenagers who crash servers by spamming them with unnecessary traffic, users who commit credit fraud by phishing or breaking into bank accounts, or shutting down entire systems by erasing all the code.

Hackers v/s Crackers

As many of us know, the term hacker has a different origin and meaning than its abused application. In fact, people who perform maleficent activities using their technological prowess are called “crackers” — these are people who use their ability to interact with a system in order to make personal gains or to harass others. A hacker is a person who has extraordinary technology skills and is able to manipulate digital systems and makes them perform tasks which were not a part of their original design. Which means that a geek who can hack into a server and uses the free space to host a free website, aimed for public good, or a techie who writes a programme that can use the idle computing time of your machines to run peer-to-peer networks, or a teenager who can break the constraints of an existing software to integrate it with other programmes, are all hackers. A hacker is defined by his ability to play around with the basic elements of a system (not necessarily digital and internet-based) and perform actions, sometimes for social good, but often, for fun and to explore the digital world’s frontiers. They are not the evil spirits that we often imagine them to be.

Hackers can be suffused with a spirit of civic good and of social beneficence. Around the world, hackers have used their technology skills to make public interventions to resolve a crisis in their environments. From the now notorious Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks platform to more positive efforts like Ipaidabribe.com, a civic hackers have emerged as our new heroes. Ipaidabribe.com is a civic hacking website, which allows users to use digital storytelling as a method by which they can start discussions on corruption and what we can do to change the systems.

Many digital natives are civic hackers. Aditya Kulkarni, one of our earliest participants with the “Digital Natives with a Cause” programme, is a digital native civic hacker. Like many young people in India, Aditya, from Mumbai, found the field of electoral politics opaque. He found it difficult to understand why good people voted for bad leaders and why large sections of the society shirk their responsibility to vote, thus leading to flawed governments. He, with his friends, started VoteIndia.in, a website where they collected information from public domain sources about electoral candidates in their local constituencies, so that voters could make informed decisions. The website was an instance of civic hacktivism.

I talk about hacking because I want to draw your attention to the phenomenon that started with Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stance and the series of public interventions that surrounded it. Hazare has emerged as a hero for many. He has been trending on Twitter, there are pages dedicated to him on Facebook, Tumblr blogs have been spreading his word, text messages have urged people to come out in support. While there is much speculation about Hazare’s politics and the media spectacle that it has created, little attention has been given to Hazare’s almost exclusively off-line campaign and the way in which social media tools have been able to capture his momentum and turn it into a series of civic hacktivist interventions.

Flashmobs with people bearing candles and chanting against corruption emerged in cities. Public consultations organised by young people saw critical engagement with questions of corruption. The interwebz have been abuzz with people expressing opinions and calling for public mobilisation. Anti-corruption convictions have found resonance with people who, otherwise, despite having access to these technologies, would not necessarily have engaged in these kinds of civic hacktivities. This, for me, is not only a sign of hope but also a moment of understanding that digital activism is not always restricted to the digital domain.

As in the case of Aditya, and that of Hazare, the germ of an idea is often offline. The processes of protest and demonstration towards social change travel across the physical and the digital world. The idea of a digital native as a civic hacktivist reminds us that the young person behind the computer, in a virtual reality, is not dissociated from the embedded contexts of everyday life. Their skills with the computer often help them make critical interventions to mobilise social change.

See the original article published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/who-the-hack

Learning from Fukushima

praskrishna — 2011-08-30T12:47:25Z

Take remedial steps and demystify the unreasoning dread of nuclear power, says Shyam Ponappa in his latest column published by the Business Standard on April 7, 2011.

Official statistics report over 22,000 deaths related to fires, 27,000 by drowning and 144,000 in traffic accidents annually in India[1]. By contrast, the number of deaths resulting from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is about 10,000 in total, estimates Frank von Hippel, a nuclear physicist at Princeton, who is co-chairman of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (other estimates: World Health Organisation 4,000; International Agency for Research on Cancer 16,000; Belarus 93,000 plus 270,000 cancer patients; and Ukraine 500,000). Against this, he estimates the number of deaths owing to pollution from coal plants in the US alone at 10,000 each year [2].

In this context, what are we to make of a top Indian scientist’s demand for stopping nuclear power production in India pending a transparent safety audit of all nuclear plants? Why not stop all traffic because of traffic accidents, to paraphrase another leading scientist? Should we shut down all our cities and towns until the sewerage systems work? A conscious effort should be made to demystify nuclear power.

To consider this rationally, let’s begin with some reported facts. The Fukushima accident happened after the earthquake, after the plant shut down. The plant was designed to withstand waves of six metres, but was struck by an eight-metre high tsunami, according to the US’ National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (other estimates range between 6.71 and 14 metres).

The reactor core takes several days to cool after being shut down and requires external cooling. The cooling system lost power from the grid because of the earthquake. The backup diesel generators worked for an hour, then stopped (there are conflicting reports on the reasons). The backup batteries then powered the pumps until they ran out. There are also conflicting reports of alternate diesel generators that were either of insufficient capacity or could not be connected for reasons that are unclear (flooded connectors, incompatible plugs and so on). The tsunami devastated the surroundings even as it hampered assistance from elsewhere. The failure appears to have been in the supply of power and water, that is , ancillary services.

Japan has 55 nuclear power reactors and it experiences frequent earthquakes. Though there have been instances of plants being shut down after earthquakes (2007: electrical transformer fire at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, and some leaks of slightly radioactive water reported; 2004: one unit at the same plant was shut down), there has been no failure of nuclear plants because of earthquakes. So, no new facts relating to earthquakes or tsunamis seem to have surfaced to cause India to shut down its nuclear plants arbitrarily.

An increase in energy use in India is inescapable, given the correlation between growth and energy consumption. On balance, we need all the energy we can get staying within reasonable risks and costs. Objectively, what can we expect from our government and related agencies such as the Department of Atomic Energy and the Atomic Energy Agency?

Remedial Action

One could be to expect action to reduce risks based on experience.

After the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, a 3.2-km wall was constructed at Kalpakkam, which was in the path of the tsunami, fortified with sandbags, rocks and embankments. (The plant is situated at over 9 metres above the sea, with the reactor floors at a height of nearly 10.7 metres.)
The backup generators are located some distance away from the plant, out of the reach of tsunamis.
Mangroves and casuarinas along the coast helped diffuse the impact of the waves in 2004. News reports indicate the Department of Atomic Energy plans to augment these after its recent review of coastal nuclear plants.
News reports also mention that portable generators will be acquired for backup and tsunami alarms will be installed at coastal sites.

Other remedial measures based on experience may have been incorporated at Indian plants, or if not, could be incorporated now. For instance, referring to Fukushima, Dr von Hippel describes a filtered vent system designed to reduce radioactivity before releasing pressure from the containment building in the event of a meltdown (see diagram). Though it was ignored in the US, Sweden adopted it and so did France and Germany. Presumably, a benefit of Areva’s partnership with the Nuclear Power Corporation of India for constructing India’s new reactors will be the inclusion of filtered vents, if appropriate and not already in our design.

Costs, Benefits and Risks

Another issue is educating people on the risks, costs and benefits of different fuels. Life-cycle emissions capture one aspect of these costs (see figure for Europe).

A similar study is available for the US: “Life-Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation Systems and Applications for Climate Change Policy Analysis” by Paul J Meier, University of Wisconsin-Madison, August 2002 (http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/pdf/fdm1181.pdf) Besides, there are costs such as population displacement and environmental effects associated with hydroelectric plants, land requirements and the environmental impact of manufacturing for solar generation, noise levels for wind farms, or pollution and the higher risk of accidents associated with coal [3].

Open Information and Communication

A third issue is easy access to accurate and relevant information. After the tsunami in 2004, the information sharing with the public was exemplary, with open and transparent briefings at Kalpakkam. This approach needs to be instituted as a standard operating procedure for governance by all departments and agencies, displaying integrity in systems, thereby instilling confidence in the public.

Prompt and accurate information about safety features including design and remedial measures could be compiled for ready access on websites, with pointers during press briefings. Regular and effective communication of systems and procedures, and measures to mitigate risks, could reduce our unreasoning dread of nuclear energy. Such steps would help assess risks reasonably and provide a good framework for governance and crisis management.

Notes

[1]."Table 38.1 Incidence of Accidental Deaths", http://mospi.nic.in/...38%20ACCIDENT%20STATISTICS/Table-38.1.xls [2008: latest available data].

[2].“It Could Happen Here”, Frank N von Hippel, New York Times, March 23, 2011: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/opinion/24Von-Hippel.html.

[3].“Nuclear power is safest way to make electricity, according to study”, David Brown, Washington Post, April 2, 2011: http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nuclear-power-is-safest-way-to-make-electricity-according-to-2007-tudy/2011/03/22/AFQUbyQC_story.html.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/telecom/blog/fukushima

Iraqi delegation in Bangalore to study e-governance projects

praskrishna — 2011-04-21T09:41:45Z

A 20-member delegation from Iraq, led by its Science and Technology Minister Abdul Kareem El-Samarai, is in this tech hub for a firsthand account of the e-governance projects used for community development and as an interface between the government and citizens. This news was published in the Economic Times, April 20, 2011.

The delegation, on a three-day study tour since Tuesday in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Centre for Internet & Society, visited multi-specialty hospital Narayana Hrudayalaya to learn about tele-medicine services, which provide healthcare in remote villages using information and communication technology (ICT).

"The e-governance projects and ICT practices employed for citizen services and community development in India could be a useful guide in developing a strategy for e-governance in our country," Deputy Iraqi Science and Technology Minister Samir Salim Raouf said in a statement late Wednesday.

The delegation, comprising officials and experts from various fields, also visited the Azim Premji Foundation , a not-for-prof IT organisation set up by IT bellwether Wipro's chairman Azim Premji. The delegation wanted to gain insight into the foundation's efforts to reform school education across the country through ICT and modern management practices.

"What is interesting is that the civil society and the private sector innovate and contribute to governance in India and everything is not left for the government to deal with," Raouf noted.

After interacting with officials and experts in-charge of the e-governance projects in Karnataka, the delegation went to mobile and wireless communications firm Geodisc Ltd to study its innovative product GeoAmida, an open source handheld device for e-governance and banking solutions.

"The mobile device, which can be used in diverse domains such as e-governance, banking, healthcare, transportation and retail, is a unique solution to address various societal problems faced by the Iraqi government, which is set to formulate a policy for e-governance and use ICT for social reform and development," the statement added.

The delegation, which is a part of the 'Building e- Iraq National e-Governance Strategy' of the Iraqi government, will go to New Delhi Friday for studying similar projects of the central government.

"Our objective is to increase transparency and accountability in Iraq through ICT and provide citizen services through e-governance initiatives," Raouf added.

Read the original in Economic Times here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/iraqi-delegation-in-bangalore

Dark waders

praskrishna — 2011-04-20T05:22:10Z

Akhila Seetharaman finds out why a group of artists and researchers are preoccupied with chasing shadows. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru, Vol. 3, Issue 20, April 15 - 28, 2011.

The New Bharat Brass Band from Kalasipalayam performed an unusual ditty at the Chitrakala Parishat last month. In a typical concert, the band plays raucous renditions of the latest hit Hindi film songs, but the music at this gig had its origin in a database of photographs of the city. These images had been taken by a group of student-artists, who converted the visual data into binary codes of 0s and 1s, and then transcribed the codes into musical notation, which they asked the band to perform. The result: strange, random, almost robotic music which represented a uniquely distilled experience of the city, peppered with the band’s characteristic filmy flourishes.

This performance was one among the several experimental art projects developed by participants as part of the Space the Final Frontier project, an initiative by the Dutch Art Institute and Centre for Experimental Media Arts at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology to get students to – as described in a introduction to the project – articulate “spaces of flux” and “index the shadow worlds” of the city.

“When we speak about mapping the city, we immediately think in terms of physical geography. We don’t usually approach it in an aesthetic or theoretical way,” said Deepak DL, an art student from Chitrakala Parishat who participated in the two-week programme. His group chose to map shadow sounds – birds, buses on the street, sounds from a bar, and pressure cookers whistling in homes – piecing together an aural landscape of the city. “This project was about mapping the non-spaces. For instance when you go to a restaurant, you rarely see what’s going on behind the wall in the kitchen. We tried to do just that using sound,” said Deepak.

“Wherever there is light, there is also shadow. For all the spaces getting attention, there are many more spaces not getting attention, but surviving and often thriving,” said Prayas Abhinav, faculty member and researcher at CEMA and one of the organisers of Space the Final Frontier. In collaboration with Renée Ridgeway, founder of an online platform for art activities called n.e.w.s., and a third collaborator Stephen Wright, Abhinav is currently working on a book which examines the distribution of human attention in the art world, based on a concept known as “attention economy”.

The trio’s fascination with the theme also led them to hunt for shadow art activities on the internet. In the course of their search they found themselves wondering how to find art online without necessarily limiting themselves to work that described itself as “art”. For Abhinav and his colleagues this became more than a technical problem, since search engines assume that users are looking for what others are looking for and throw up the most popular or valid entries first, leaving the vast majority of less popular entries in the shadow. “Lesser known artists don’t refer to themselves as ‘lesser known artists’, so finding them online via Google isn’t all that easy,” said Abhinav. “Everyone is operating in the same space with established hierarchies. Shadows exist, but how do we look for them?”

“In the 1990s we used to have a culture of community web sites that looked really bad, but were thriving hubs,” said Abhinav. He pointed out that over the decade, with the advent of search engines, the larger databases gained priority among users. To democratise search results, Abhinav and Ridgeway, along with the Centre for Internet and Society, launched the Shadow Search Project with an open call for entries in early 2010 to find an algorithm that could bring up entries that otherwise exist under the radar, through search.

“If the new currency is attention – that is, if users are supposed to pay not money but time –, certain kinds of priorities are set up and vast amounts of information will always remain invisible,” said Nishant Shah, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society. The Shadow Search Project is intended to serve as a platform to look for these shadows and give them visibility.

The winning entry, a search engine called Narcissus, which will be demonstrated this fortnight, takes the search results of a regular search engine like Google and reverses it, such that the user gets the last page first. “The least popular results come up first, and as those become more popular, the new least popular results come up. This continues in a cyclical manner,” said Ridgeway.

Data gathered and indexed by students during the Space the Final Frontier programme will be used to test the Narcissus algorithm. “If one of the strengths of the Internet is serendipity – stumbling upon a small, but great find by chance – the idea of a search engine plug in like Narcissus that scrambles Google results and presents it in a democratic manner, definitely has appeal,” said Shah.

Read the original in Time Out Bengaluru here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/chasing-shadows

Beyond Clicktivism

praskrishna — 2011-04-20T04:33:53Z

Moral support Hazare has in plenty. Count the missed calls, writes Debarshi Dasgupta in this article published in the Outlook on April 18, 2011.

Want to commit sedition against the government?” “Join Dandi March-II.” “A Mahatma announces a fast-unto-death.” These were some of the clarion calls that organisers of the protest against corruption led by Anna Hazare were making online. And people from all classes responded in massive numbers. Possibly fed up with the scale of the CWG and 2G scams and exasperated by the petty and mundane corruption they encounter daily.

Anna Hazare and Jantar Mantar were among the top 10 global trending topics on Twitter on April 7 afternoon. “Earthquake named Anna Hazare lashes on corrupted Indian Politicians, epicenter India, it measures 1.22 Billion Richter Hearts,” said one. A disengaged youngster tweeted: “OK, enough of ignorance...time to read up on Anna Hazare.” On the ‘India Against Corruption’ page on Facebook, people from across the country left posts either announcing their local programme to support Hazare or asking for advice to organise one. Leaflets urged people to give a missed call on a Mumbai landline expressing support. With 6,00,000 missed calls, the organisers were urging more to call in to take that number to over 25 lakh.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said the organisers of this social media campaign had adopted a “funnel approach”, in which they get people involved gradually. “Clicking on the ‘Like’ function on Facebook to making a call—they are increasing the action, incrementally getting people to become proper activists from being armchair slacktivists.”

Read the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/beyond-clicktivism

Gone in a flash

praskrishna — 2011-04-20T04:58:48Z

Net-savvy crowds gather in public places for moments of wacky fun, then vanish. This article by Neha Thirani was published in the Times of India Crest Edition on April 16, 2011.

It's an ordinary day at the MGF mall in Gurgaon, when a group of fifteen people suddenly appears carrying lanterns made from discarded plastic bottles and starts passing them along in relay fashion. Starting from the plaza in front of the mall, the crowd goes into the metro station nearby and back again, and then suddenly disperses, attracting amused stares from befuddled passersby. This lantern-wielding crowd is a flash mob, a global phenomenon that has now hit India.

So is this part of a mass social experiment? Political movement? Performance art? Pointless fun? Malini Kochupillai and Kanishka Prasad, both professors at the Sushant School of Art and Architecture in Gurgaon who orchestrated the event, say it's an effort to add a modicum of vibrancy to otherwise ignored public places, reclaiming the space for public use. Along with their students, the duo has organised about a dozen such 'flash mobs'.

For the uninitiated, a flash mob appears to be entirely random - a group of people, performing an unusual and seemingly pointless act and then dispersing. For those in the know, the flash mob is mobilised by an organiser, who brings together a crowd of people at a predefined location and time via social media, viral emails or mass texting. The crowd then carries out a scripted series of actions. The participants are typically strangers and the purpose is usually satire. Their actions transform a public place for the period of the performance, and engender discussion at the unexpected.

This rather quirky social phenomenon, popular in the US and Europe, originated in 2003 when Bill Wasik, senior editor of Harper's Magazine, organised the first successful flash mob in Macy's department store. Over a hundred people converged on the store, gathered over an expensive rug and pretended to be shopping for a 'love rug' for their shared apartment. Wasik's aim was apolitical. Through amusement, he wanted to question notions of conformity and the hipster culture of wanting to be a part of the 'next big thing'. Since then, there have been hugely successful flash mobs all over Europe and America. The biggest recorded flash mob has been the International Pillow Fight Day, which took place on March 22, 2008 in over 25 cities simultaneously. More recently, Egypt has seen a series of flash mobs who left security forces befuddled by their silent protests.

While the word was officially coined in 2003, the phenomenon can be traced back to 18th century England where workers in an assembly line would stitch secret messages into garments to plan a congregation of strangers.

Nishant Shah, research director for the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, says the growth in places of globalised consumption parallels the formation of flash mobs. "We can call malls places of public consumption, but at the back of our minds is the uneasy thought that the sign reads - rights of entry reserved. The mall, then, is only for certain public, " says Shah. "What flash mobs do is abuse the space - subverting the intention of the space that they are orchestrated in. "

This social experiment that has now made its way to metros across the country has been loosely related to locations of consumerism. The first ever flash mob in India took place on October 4, 2003 when a group of over 60 people swarmed the then newly built Crossroads mall in Mumbai. The flash mobbers shocked the malls security guards when they inexplicably starting screaming into their cellphones vague directions such as: "Infosys becho ek hazaar, and SBI gheun tak don she. " This was followed by some frenzied dancing, and a moment later, they were gone.

New media professional Noel Braganza, 26, organised a flash mob in the main courtyard of Phoenix Mills, Mumbai on Independence Day last year. Along with his colleague Nicole, Braganza spread the message over social media entirely;"We didn't take any prior permission, and this was possible because we organised it around Independence Day - our concept was patriotic, not disruptive, " says Braganza. At 4 pm on August 15, 2010, a crowd of over one hundred people, dressed in tri-color, lined up in rows in the courtyard of Pheonix Mills, sang the national anthem and then dispersed. Though most were there by design, some of the shoppers present joined spontaneously. "There was a huge snaking queue outside Big Bazaar that stopped in its tracks and started singing. "

The Urban Gorillaz - as the Gurgaon group is called - has organised its events with a particular focus on reclaiming spaces that have largely been ignored, or usurped by private developers. "Most public spaces in Delhi are decrepit and in desperate need of refurbishment, " says Kochupillai. "Perhaps increased use of these spaces will push the authorities to look beyond roads, flyovers and parking lots and give pedestrians an equally deserving space in the public realm. " The group encourages people to engage with the spaces available to them so that they do not become unused and unsafe.

By studying what prevents or promotes the use of public space - such as movement patterns, active/ inactive zones and traffic interference in pedestrian areas - the group hopes to encourage architects and urban planners to create spaces where people can relax without feeling like they are trespassing or encroaching. "A flash mob says that you can create public spaces but we will decide how we will use them, " says Nishant Shah. "It gives a certain sense of power to the user who is no longer a consumer but an architect of the space. "

Started as an exercise in an architecture class at the Sushant School of Art and Architecture, the Urban Gorillaz facebook group has grown to over 400 members.

Up until now, they have orchestrated over ten flash mobs doing a variety of random acts from exercising in the main courtyard of Heritage city, flying paper planes in an office complex, sketching people passing by in a mall, creating installations for passersby to paint and building a canopy on a sidewalk with rope and bamboo. The one which attracted the most attention was during the Commonwealth Games, where they organised the 'Common Man Games' at Nehru Place to entertain Delhi citizens who were sidelined during the games. The games included track and field and pitthu.

"The first reaction of most people is what are you selling or promoting? And I reply that I am promoting public space, " says Kochupillai. "On occasions when guards have asked us to stop, we simply move into an area that is not under their jurisdiction. " The group has not encountered much antagonism, with most people amused rather than angry. Pragya Vig, 19, is a member of the group and a second year student at the college. "It set me thinking - why aren't we using the public spaces?" says Vig.

In the coming month, the Urban Gorillaz are planning flash mobs in the metro to raise awareness for a women's right to personal space.

Not all flash mobs have any apparent rationale. In the week after the death of Michael Jackson, Bangalore saw a spontaneous flash mob. At every red light signal, whenever the traffic would stop, people would suddenly come together and perform popular Michael Jackson dance moves. When the light changed, they would be gone in a flash.

Read the article in the Times of India

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/changing-tide

Iraq Delegation to Visit India for Study of E-Governance in Indian Cities ― Meetings in Bangalore and Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-08-02T07:13:52Z

An Iraqi Government delegation headed by HE Mr. Abdul Kareem Al-Samarai, Minister of Science & Technology, Government of Iraq will be in India on a e-governance tour. The study tour is organised by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA).

The Building e-Iraq National e-Governance strategic plan clearly emphasizes the need for connecting services and citizens to better access of information and services using ICTs as a leading resource/innovative force and as a contributing factor to enhancing transparency and accountability as well as facilitate the effective and efficient provisioning of essential services. In this context, and as identified by the Iraqi e-governance ministerial steering committee, community service centers (CSCs) have been identified as having a direct bearing on sustainable social and economical changes consistent with the MDGs.

As agreed within the steering committee, the community based connectivity services centres will be hosted within existing community structures throughout Iraq in order to enhance penetration levels and provide for cost-effective strategies. Post offices and youth centres would henceforth represent the point of entry for the community centres, where the Iraqi government is rehabilitating the buildings and has already provided Internet access with the hope of introducing e-governance services. The centres will also be linked with the implementation of the pilot e-services to promote access to information resources and government programmes and services. Additionally, the centres will serve to address local issues and priorities.

UNDP in partnership with ESCWA is organizing a study tour to India that would expose senior Iraqi stakeholders to e-government and e-governance as a means to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the public sector in service provision, and make them learn from India's experience in:

Harnessing ICT technologies in service of community development, inclusiveness and empowerment, particularly at the local level;

Highlighting e-governance practices in connecting citizens to the state – at both the federal and local levels – and enhancing services;
Presenting success stories and lessons learned from India’s experience in instigating and operating CSCs; and
Providing the Government of India with a frame of reference in designing an appropriate, efficient and effective decentralized planning process and service delivery.

Dr. Samir Salim Raouf, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Science and Technology, Dr. Mahmood Kasim Sharief, Director General, Ministry of Science and Technology, Zagros Fattah Mohammed Mohammed, Director General, Ministry of Planning - KRG, Najwa Saeed Fathullah, Director General, Ministry of Finance, Majeed Hameed Jassim, Director General, Ministry of Communication, Dr. Kathim Mohammed Breesam, Director General, Ministry of Planning, Majed Sadoon Jasim, Director General, Ministry of Interior, Naeef Thamer Hussien, Director General, Ministry of Education, Ismael Khaleel Murad, Chief of Information, Ministry of Higher Education, Anwer Alwan Jassim, Ministry of Higher Education, Khalaf Muhammad Khalaf, Deputy Director General, Ministry of Education, Samer Noori Taqi, Chief of Information, Ministry of Municipalities and Public Works, Safaa Mohammed Kassar, Anbar Governorates, Abdulamer Abdulwahid Mubarak, Basra Governorates, Isam Hussein Ali, Ministry of Science and Technology, Sudipto Mukherjee, Head of Economic Recovery and Poverty Alleviation, UNDP, Abeer Fawaeer, E-Governance Specialist, UNDP and Dalia Zendi, Project Associate, UNDP will participate in the meetings.

Study tour structure

The delegation will hold meetings with Deepak Menon of India Water Portal, Ashok Kamath of Pratham Books, Srikanth Nadhamuni of E-governments foundation, Dr. Subbramanya of Geodesic, Parth Sarwate of Azim Premji Foundation, Abhay Singhavi of Narayana Hrydayalaya and MN Vidyashankar and DS Ravindran of Department of e-governance, Government of Karnataka.

In Delhi, the delegation will hold meetings in the Department of Information Technology, National Informatics Centre, National Institute for Smart Government, Ministry of Urban Development and Ministry of Panchayati Raj.

Expected outcomes

The study tour will be concluded in Delhi with a brainstorming session to discuss and explore the results achieved by the study tour, and ultimately formulate an integrated framework for identifying, establishing, operating and managing CSCs in Iraq with wider national and local e-governance development plan in line with overarching public sector and modernization programme and generate a list of pilots quick-win e-services applications that can be implemented in Iraq.

Other expected outputs are:

To identify critical and relevant lessons from the Indian e-governance models, with particular emphasis on linkages between ICT and broad-based development in the areas of education, health, water and social development of rural and urban areas;
To enhance awareness on the role and operation of CSCs at various levels and their pivotal role in facilitating access to essential services and reducing service costs;
To improve understanding of the challenges in the effective application of ICTs for development and the key factors in the design and implementation of ICT for development projects and programmes;
To enhance the understanding of the measures to be undertaken by the centre and the provinces to identify and put in place e-services;
To highlight the successes and lessons learned from the Indian decentralized and local area planning and development model;
To learn about the latest development in IT industry and the infrastructure required for CSCs and e-services; and
To explore working partnerships between the Government of India and the Indian IT companies.

This study tour is in furtherance to the e-Governance Action plan prepared by the Iraq Government. The Centre for Internet and Society is assisting the delegation for the meetings held in Bangalore.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/iraqi-e-governance-india-tour

Limits to Privacy

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T10:28:59Z

In this chapter we attempt to build a catalogue of these various justifications, without attempting to be exhaustive, with the objective of arriving at a rough taxonomy of such frequently invoked terms. In addition we also examine some the more important justifications such as “public interest” and “security of the state” that have been invoked in statutes and upheld by courts to deprive persons of their privacy.

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

How Web 2.0 responded to Hazare

praskrishna — 2011-04-11T10:38:03Z

Social media often fails to give us time to form critical opinions. ‘It mirrored the spectacle that we were being fed by TV channels', says Nishant Shah in an interview with Deepa Kurup. This news was published in the Hindu on April 11, 2011.

By Day Two of the protests at Jantar Mantar, where social activist Anna Hazare was leading a fast-unto-death against corruption, most commentators were drawing fierce parallels with Tahrir Square, and other pro-democracy revolutions in the Middle-East.

Soon enough, the social media angle raised its head. After a quiet Tuesday, when television channels began to “play up” the protests, Wednesday morning saw social media platforms abuzz with chatter. Initiated by campaign organisers, the India Against Corruption team, Facebook profile badges, missed call campaigns and petitions (most notably on online campaign site Avaaz (where over 6.17 lakh have registered support) entered the scene.

In 140 characters, #janlokpal, #annahazare and the less gracious #meranetachorhain began to trend on Twitter. YouTube shows up around 2,000 video results, a lot of which are amateur videos shot by participants.

‘Causes' application requests for “brandishing corruption”, ‘Like'-this-revolution requests and Tweets on how you can indeed weed out the corruption demon with a Re-Tweet, were abound.

But did this social media buzz translate into more people on the ground? Did the Tweets and chain e-mails, that were doing the rounds fairly early on, manage to drive public opinion, or outrage, as in this case? On this, the jury is divided.

Crunching numbers

Even in the Middle-East, where we saw dictators plug social media channels, experts have downplayed the pivotal role attributed to social media. A tool for sharing information, its standalone role in triggering a revolution has been dismissed by many.

In the current context, this is even more difficult to establish because efforts appear to be all too scattered, unlike in Egypt where the ‘We are all Khaled Said' page by Wael Ghonim, appeared to be a focal point of sorts.

In comparison, a simple search on Facebook reveals over 20 pages that all have around 25,000-30,000 users on-board. Mr. Hazare's Facebook profile page has over 1.3 lakh ‘Likes'.

Gaurav Mishra, social media analyst, pegs the total support at around 15 lakh. Drawing parallels with the citizen activism campaigns that emerged between the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 and the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 (the former being when social media arrived in India), Mr. Mishra also points out that corruption did go for a Six on Friday (the final day) with IPL4 dominating conversation online.

Nishant Shah, director (research) at the Centre for Internet and Society, points out that while during revolutions, the social media has proved to be a poignant and powerful tool to mobilise resources, last week it emerged that it can not only propagate dubious opinions, but also it often (because it relies on the temporal quality of making things viral) fails to give us time to form critical opinions.

He compares a platform like Avaaz, that mobilised people ‘against corruption', with long-term Ipaidabribe project (using the same digital tools) which actually leads to debate around why corruption is so endemic.

Mirrors TV

Interestingly, as Mr. Shah points out, the social media mirrored the spectacle that people were being fed by TV channels, instead of being a true discursive space of public dialogue. It's now getting clear that they are actually playing out an interesting traction as they supplement each other in bolstering of evidence and participation, he adds.

On the other hand, blogs too were abuzz. However, many did seek to provide deeper perspective, and provided more space for debate and dissent. In fact, progressive blogs even attempted to counter the one-sided commentary provided on traditional visual media.

Click here for the story in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/web2.0-responds-to-hazare

EU Commissioner Hedegaard to deliver keynote address at consumer world congress

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:34:45Z

European Union Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, will deliver the opening keynote address to the Consumer International (CI) 19th World Congress in Hong Kong, 3-6 May, it has been announced.

With under a month to go until the event, Commissioner Hedegaard joins an illustrious list of internationally renowned speakers who will be addressing the world’s consumer movement at the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Centre (HKCEC).

Other leading speakers include Alan Jope, Chairman, Unilever Greater China; Sue Rutledge, Director, Consumer Protection, World Bank; Anwar Fazal, civil society leader and former CI President; James Guest, President, Consumers Union of the United States; and Gerd Leonhard, CEO, The Futures Agency.

The CI World Congress, which will be officially opened by Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, will be attended by leaders of consumer organisations from over 100 countries, together with representatives from industry, governments, inter-governmental bodies, and civil society. It is being co-hosted by CI member organisation, the Hong Kong Consumer Council.

Commissioner Hedegaard will address the role of consumers in the green economy, a key issue area in light of the overall Congress theme of ‘Empowering Tomorrow’s Consumers’. Other consumer issues that will feature in sessions across the four-day event include: financial services, corporate social responsibility, food safety, and consumer rights in the digital age.

Consumers International Director General, Joost Martens said:

"We are delighted to have Commissioner Hedegaard address the CI World Congress on an issue that is vital to the future of consumption patterns across the globe. Our event is about looking at ways in which consumer groups can help tackle the major challenges facing the world, and give them the tools to empower individual consumers to make a positive difference. Alongside the green economy and issues of sustainable consumption, we have an impressive array of world experts exploring issues of global importance to consumers; such as fair financial services, corporate responsibility and access to knowledge in the digital world."

Hong Kong Consumer Council Chairman, Professor Anthony Cheung said:

"Hong Kong is strategically positioned to hold this World Congress in Asia, which has witnessed some of the fastest growing economies as well as the rampant inflation affecting large populations of consumers. We are honoured to have the Congress held in Hong Kong and to have the opportunity to co-host this single most important world assembly of consumer leaders and advocates at a crucial juncture of time. Fresh ideas and new action are urgently called for to tackle the many pressing issues facing consumers worldwide."

Media accrediation for CI World Congress can be applied for here:

Notes to Editors:

Consumers International (CI) is the only independent global campaigning voice for consumers. With over 220 member organisations in 115 countries, we are building a powerful international consumer movement to help protect and empower consumers everywhere.
The Hong Kong Consumer Council (HKCC) is an independent statutory body committing itself as the trusted voice for consumer betterment towards safe and sustainable consumption in a fair and just market. Joined Consumers International (CI) in 1976, HKCC became CI Council Member in 1978 and has been the Executive Member since 1994.
Consumers International’s 19th World Congress takes place at the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition Centre, 3-6 May. Day 1 is dedicated to fringe event with Day 2 & 3 taken up with the official programme. Day 4 is the CI General Assembly. All details are at www.consumersinternational.org/congress
The CI World Congress occurs every four to five years. It includes the General Assembly where CI’s President, Executive and Council are voted in.
The last Congress took place in Sydney in 2007. The CI World Congress was previously held in Hong Kong in 1991. The co-hosts for the event are CI’s Hong Kong member, The Consumer Council.
Full list of confirmed chairs and speakers:

Alan Jope, Chairman, Unilever in China
Alejandro Calvillo, Executive Director, El Poder del Consumidor (Mexico)
Anna Glayzer, Programme Officer (Food safety and Nutrition), Consumers International
Anthony Cheung, Chairman, Hong Kong Consumer Council
Anwar Fazal, civil-society leader and former CI President
Bart Combée, President, Consumentenbond
Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, EU Commission
David Hammerstein, intellectual property advisor, Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, and former Spanish MEP
Diana Tsui, CSR Director, KPMG
Gerd Billen, Executive Director, The Federation of German Consumer Organisations (vzbv)
Gerd Leonhard, The Futures Agency
Guido Adriaenssens, Chief Executive Officer, International Consumer Research and Testing (ICRT)
H C Yang, Vice President and Secretary General, China Consumers' Association
Hassan Qaqaya, Chief, Capacity Building and Technical Assistance Section, Competition Law and Policy and Consumer Protection Section, UNCTAD
Helio Mattar, Founder, Akatu Institute for Conscious Consumption (Brazil)
Indrani Thuraisingham, Head of CI Office for Asia Pacific and the Middle East, Consumers International
Jaiok Kim, President, Consumers Korea
James Guest, CEO, Consumers Union of United States
Jami Solli, specialist on financial services in consumer protection law
Jan Gustav Strandenaes, Senior Adviser, The Northern Alliance for Sustainability (ANPED)
Jean Halloran, Consumers Union of United States
Jens Henriksson, International Officer, Swedish Consumers' Association
Jeremy Malcolm, Access to Knowledge Programme Coordinator, Consumers International
Jonathon Hanks, University of Cape Town
Jørgen Schlundt, Deputy Director, National Food Institute, Denmark
Justin Macmullan, Head of Campaigns, Consumers International
Lisa Gunn, Executive Director, Brazilian Institute for Consumer Defence (IDEC)
Luke Upchurch, Head of Communications, Consumers International
Niall Dunne, former Director, Saatchi & Saatchi Sustainability
Norma McCormick, Chair, ISO Committee on Consumer Policy (COPOLCO)
Peter Kell, Chair, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC)
Premila Kumar, Chief Executive, Consumer Council of Fiji
Rasmus Kjeldahl, Executive Director, Danish Consumer Council
Ratna Devi, Deputy Secretary General, Federation of Malaysian Consumers Associations (FOMCA)
Rehan Saiyed, Storm Corporate Design Limited
Richard Henry Kimera, Chief Executive, Consent, Uganda
Robert Welford, Chairman, CSR Asia
Robin Simpson, Senior Policy Advisor, Consumers International
Samuel Ochieng, President, CIN Kenya and Consumers International
Stefan Larenas R, President, Organisation of Consumers and Users of Chile (ODECU)
Sue Rutledge, Director of Consumer Protection, World Bank
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society, India
Thami Bolani, Chairman, National Consumer Forum (South Africa)

Press Contact

Luke Upchurch: lupchurch@consint.org [+44 796 894 9327]

Hong Kong Consumer Council

Clara Li clarali@consumer.org.hk [+852 2856 8589]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/eu-commissioner-keynote-address

One for the avatar

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:19:34Z

With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on April 3, 2011.

On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.

When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.

For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.

However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.

These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.

Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.

For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.

Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.

It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.

Read the original in the Indian Express here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar

Net cracker

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T17:11:03Z

Is Facebook taking over our lives? And if it is, so what? In email interviews with new media researcher and user control advocate Marc Stumpel who is conducting a Facebook Resistance workshop this fortnight, and artist and communication designer Tobias Leingruber, the originator of the FB Resistance idea, Akhila Seetharaman attempts to answer these questions. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011.

There’s a lot said about the role of social media in fuelling political revolutions. What do you make of the role of Facebook, for instance, in the recent uprisings in the Arab world?

Marc Stumpel Clearly, social media has been utilised as instruments by citizens in the Middle East to organise and coordinate democratic protests. They have also proven to be important sources for real-time reporting and documenting political events. The use of networked communication in political protests, however, is nothing new. In my view, it’s wrong to assume there is a causal relationship between social media and “political revolutions”. You need “the people” to instigate a revolution; they will unquestionably use any media at hand.

My interest lies more with researching and exposing the political dimension of social media, rather than questioning its relationship with the politics that we are used to talking and writing about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sites of governance themselves, as the user activities, conditions and data distribution are maintained by a particular set of rules and constraints, embedded in the software.

How do social media sites control people, while at the same time giving them more outlets for self expression and communication?

MS Proprietary social networking software like Facebook have many constraints, which means that users have to abide by the laws and strict limits as defined by the software. Where is our ‘freedom’? For example, why not let the users change their background colour or ‘dislike’ something?

There have been many changes to Facebook that have met with widespread opposition and outrage. How does one make sense of these instances?

MS Facebook’s PR communication regarding its immediate software changes has been very deceptive. They’ve repeatedly used a particular vocabulary to create images of Facebook ‘apologising’ for or ‘justifying’ rigid changes. They say, ‘Look! We ‘simplified’ privacy controls, because we care about your privacy,’ while making them more complex instead.

Can you tell us a few things that Facebook users should know but don’t, about the way Facebook uses their stuff?

Tobias Leingruber Realise the nature of the company. Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network. Facebook is not a social network – it’s an advertising network. We are the product, ‘the sheeple’. We get to be in a herd, but we pay with our most private data. They shave our wool.

MS Facebook is not transparent about its Web user-tracking activities. Via cookies it saves every website you visit outside of Facebook that has any FB social plugin implemented. We don’t exactly know what FB does with this tracking data.

What is the Facebook Resistance?

MS Our attempt is to resist from within the system by slowly undermining and questioning it. This means we’re not leaving it and building a new one. We’re accepting the fact that Facebook has already ‘won’ for now, and we’re trying to make the best out of it by bending its rules.

Critical talk about social media landscape often borrows from the lexicon of war – with online suicide, tactical media, resistance, etc. How much of a warzone is it?

TL Nice observation! Actually ‘cyberwar’ has become very real this year, as US and Israeli militants created a worm that successfully attacked and physically destroyed parts of the Iranian nuclear research programme.

But more specifically on social media I think those extreme terms are very helpful to get people’s attention. We’re overwhelmed by information, so getting people’s attention is an art form itself.

MS We are not at ‘war’ with Facebook; we are at “softwar”, fighting for internet freedom and the adoption of open standards.

What is the potential of resistance to Facebook? What can be achieved?

TL In theory we could undermine and replace their entire system. For example, the chat – to get rid of the tracking and censorship, the system behind Facebook’s chat interface could be replaced with something else, such as the Jabber protocol through an independent server.

MS Expanding your freedom on Facebook by learning how to impose new rules and features onto the system through internet browser processing (thus, not changing any code on Facebook’s server) and spreading awareness about this possibility.

Photography by Tobias Leingruber

Read the original article here

Download the article here [pdf 3.7 mb]

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/net-cracker

On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go

praskrishna — 2011-08-20T14:35:29Z

This editorial by PLoS Medicine Editors Virginia Barbour, Jocalyn Clark, Susan Jones, Melissa Norton, and Emma Veitch was published in the magazine's March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3.

It has been a couple of months now since the withdrawal of access via HINARI to medical journals in Bangladesh by several publishers caused an upset in the medical publishing world [1]. HINARI (Health Internetwork Access to Research Initiative) is a WHO-supported program [2] that partners with subscription-based publishers to allow researchers in the world's poorest countries to access some of their journals under certain conditions (for example, researchers have to access the journal in defined institutions). After much lobbying from researchers, editors, and others following the withdrawal, HINARI access has been—for the time being at least—reinstated, though with a substantial lack of clarity over the longer term plans of a number of the publishers [3]. Although traumatic for the researchers who lost access, the incident has triggered a useful debate on the value of open access (OA; immediate, permanent free access and permanently guaranteed unrestricted reuse, as enshrined in a Creative Commons license [4] and as practiced by publishers such as PLoS) versus free access with no legal rights attached. It is hard to think of a better example to demonstrate the precariousness of this latter type of free access, which can mean that access may be withdrawn for no reason.

Now that the heat of the HINARI debate has died down, it is an opportune time to consider how this dispute, and others like it, can be used constructively to move toward a position where universal OA to the medical literature becomes the norm.

On the positive side, the debate has brought many new voices into the discussion around access, particularly those on the online discussion forum HIFA2015 [5], where the diversity and strength of opinions expressed was most likely the key instrument in ensuring that the publishers' withdrawal from HINARI was not only brought to light, but also largely reversed.

The debacle also allowed constructive discussions around the substantial limitations of HINARI and its inability to provide a long-term sustainable solution to access in the developing world. It also allowed airing of many OA issues, including the difference between free and open access [4]; the logistical difficulties experienced by some researchers in accessing online journals, such as those in locations with low bandwidth; the suspicion of some researchers of online-only journals; and concerns over publication fees.

Thus the argument about how to implement such access, particularly in the developing world, is far from over. The issues above are very familiar to OA advocates. When PLoS Medicine was getting started seven years ago, we encountered many of the same questions from the (admittedly mostly developed-world) authors and readers we canvassed then. The phenomenal growth of OA since then has reassured many of those who initially questioned the model and its sustainability: submissions and publications are increasing each year at PLoS and in other open-access journals, reflecting the increased confidence of authors in this model. OA papers are also highly accessed, though our data suggest that most of this access, and most of the authors, still come from the developed world.

The HINARI incident thus highlights the fact that HINARI is, sadly, still needed both because of traditional publishers who have not yet implemented OA, even in the developed world, and because substantial gaps remain in our knowledge about how OA will work for the developing world. Hence, there is some way to go before this model of publishing can become the norm worldwide. Despite the best intentions of open-access publishers, we have failed to reach out adequately to debate with researchers and readers in the less-developed world about the potential benefits of open access. Instead, as is often the case when the developed world prescribes for the less-developed world, we have assumed that what works well in Paris, London, or San Francisco will work just as well in Addis Ababa, Beirut, or Lima.

Some examples of these active concerns about OA: first, are OA journals being delivered in the best format for readers in the developing world? If print really is better in some places, are we doing our best to ensure that the online journals are optimized for rapid downloading and printing of articles? If access to online journals will be primarily via mobile devices rather than computers, are we delivering the content in appropriate formats? Second, do we understand the reputation metrics outside of Europe or the US that will ensure that the new OA journals are trusted and meet the requirements authors face for academic promotions or other professional needs [6]? Even more importantly, are there OA journals available that cater to the needs of readers and authors across the developing world? Should publishers be helping groups to start their own journals, rather than assuming that the existing OA journals will be accepted?

Medical journals have many roles, but, above all, dissemination of medical information is key. This crucial role was stated clearly back in1997 by Neil Pakenham-Walsh (the founder of HIFA2015) and colleagues, and it is no less relevant now [7]: "Providing access to reliable health information for health workers in developing countries is potentially the single most cost effective and achievable strategy for sustainable improvement in health care."

Much therefore remains to be done in improving access to health information in the developing world. By providing a logistical framework for open access (by the adoption of appropriate licenses), and by showing what can be done in the developed world with OA journals, OA publishers have done much to make it possible more widely. The next crucial step is to engage with readers, researchers, and authors in the developing world to understand better their information needs so that we don't fall into the trap of pushing information in only one direction. Open access is about facilitating the movement of knowledge—in all directions.

References

Kmietowicz K (2011) Publishers withdraw 2500 journals from free access scheme in Bangladesh. BMJ 342: d196. doi:10.1136/bmj.d196.

HINARI (2011) HINARI Access to Research in Health Programme. Available:http://www.who.int/hinari/en/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Wise A (2011) Elsevier statement on Research4Life. Lancet 377: 377. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

PLoS (2011) Definition of Open Access. Available: http://www.plos.org/oa/definition.php. Accessed 16 February 2011.

HIFA2015 (2011) A Global Campaign: Healthcare Information for All by 2015. Available:http://www.hifa2015.org/. Accessed 16 February 2011.

Chan L, Kirsop B, Arunachalam S (2011) Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development. PLoS Med 8: 1016. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001016.

Packenham-Walsh N, Priestley C, Smith R (1997) Meeting the information needs of health workers in developing countries. BMJ 314: 90. FIND THIS ARTICLE ONLINE

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/path-2-global-open-access