Centre for Internet and Society

Radhika

praskrishna — 2019-08-15T16:44:47Z

Radhika Radhakrishnan

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Qutub

praskrishna — 2013-10-23T11:00:31Z

Qutub

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Quo Vadis

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T07:06:36Z

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Quo Vadis

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T07:06:49Z

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Questions to Nishant Shah

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T08:54:21Z

Dr. Nishant Shah had a text interview with the Hybrid Publishing Lab around questions on Digital Humanities.

The interview was published on the website of Leuphana University in February 2014.

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He researches at Leuphana and in The Netherlands. His topics are cyborgs and cyberspaces.

Why do you think we are all cyborgs?
Shah: Generally, when we think of cyborgs we think of futuristic beings – things that we want to become. But that imagination pretends that we don't have an intimate and intricate relationship with different technologies. When we look at the world that we live in, we can immediately recognize that we continually live with technologies that help us live and to live together. These technologies are so natural a part of our life that we have forgotten to think of them as technologies – like electricity or think of technological products – like clothes. It is good to remind ourselves, when we think of ourselves as 'already cyborgs', that our lives are intertwined with technologies of different kinds, and that we need to think of our human, social and political conditions as mediated by the technological.
What does this knowledge mean to our society?
Shah: Thinking of ourselves as cyborgs living in cyborg societies helps us look at the role of technologies differently. We come to realize that technologies are not just something that we use in order to achieve a task. Our usage of technologies changes who we are, individually and as a society. So we need to take the politics of technology infrastructure and regulation seriously. For example, the privatization of knowledge industries, closed and proprietary publishing of research that is produced through public funding, produces societies where only a privileged elite can access this knowledge. We will have to look at questions of open access, open source, open knowledge, etc. as a part of our larger social problems instead of thinking of them as 'technology' questions. Similarly, technologies of access define how different identities and groups are shaped and consumed and we need to now start looking at intersections of technology and society rather than imagining them as separated domains.
Does the Digital Change bring about advantages or disadvantages for our society?
Shah: I feel that this is a wrong question to ask. It presumes that we actually have only these two options, and that there is a normative, universal truth that determines what the advantages and disadvantages are. Every shift in technological development comes with a bunch of possibilities. Some of these possibilities might offer us the promise of a just, open, inclusive and fair society. Some of them might portent a compromise of our basic human and social rights. The processes used for both are the same. In that case, the questions of power, or ownership, of accountability and transparency will need to be built into the conversations around digital. So the question is not to ask whether the digital in itself is good or bad. However, the digital does provide us with alternatives to some of the most endemic problems around power imbalance, abuse and discrimination. And it remains for us to see, how we are going to shape our societies to fulfill these promises. If we don't take these questions seriously, we might end up amplifying our problems through the very technologies that can otherwise be used to achieve these dreams.
Which advantages do you see, especially for students?
Students, for me, are the people who are going to live the science fiction futures that we imagine in the present. So while we can make a list of all the different tools and practices that students can use right now, for education, for collaboration, for sharing and for research, what is more important is to realize what these technologies help students in thinking about their futures. One of the biggest things that the digital produces for students, or any young people, is that it makes them think of themselves as agents of change. With the digital, with the ability to mobilize and connect resources and people together, the young are often able to make strategic interventions to correct problems in their immediate environments. And that is the future of our societies – to build an active civil society that is going to contribute to sustainable, relevant and nuanced solutions for the worlds that we want to live in.

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Quarterly Receipts of Foreign Contributions

praskrishna — 2018-10-15T16:34:41Z

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Quarterly Receipt for July - September 2018

praskrishna — 2018-10-15T16:35:45Z

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Quality Maternal and Child Healthcare

praskrishna — 2012-01-16T06:02:49Z

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PV

praskrishna — 2013-12-31T09:24:15Z

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PV

praskrishna — 2013-12-31T09:30:24Z

Prajavani

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Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?

praskrishna — 2011-09-22T10:03:58Z

Traditional approaches to ‘online privacy’ are often based on ‘compliance’ with a patchwork of local laws (where they exist). However, as new mobile services, applications and data flows become increasingly global, geo-graphically-bound laws appear unable to keep pace. Self-regulation has an important role to play in ensuring that mobile users’ privacy is treated consistently irrespective of the location of companies, the technologies and business models involved. A key challenge for industry is (a) to identify mobile-friendly ways of helping users make informed decisions about their information and privacy; and (b) to ensure user privacy is respected and protected by those designing and building the services and applications of tomorrow.

The aim of this proposed workshop is to foster a constructive conversation around three key issues:

Are privacy challenges on the mobile platform different to the fixed-pc environment? [Particularly in the context of:
Location privacy
Behavioural Advertising
Applications and related services
To what extent is mobile users’ privacy protected across technological and legal boundaries?
What are different stakeholders doing, what can they do and what should they be doing to address these challenges?

Which of the five broad IGF Themes or the Cross-Cutting Priorities does your workshop fall under?

Security, Openness and Privacy

Have you organized an IGF workshop before? No

If so, please provide the link to the report:

No link to this report

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:

The GSMA is working to address these privacy related challenges and is also committed to helping establish and shape a culture of privacy that respects and protects the privacy of users across the mobile ecosystem. Its work is coordinated through the GSMA Mobile Privacy Initiative. Through this Initiative the GSMA has been working closely with Industry stakeholders, Regulators, Governments and NGOs globally. For this workshop, we would propose to invite a panel of 7-8 participants (including the moderator) which could represent the following stakeholder categories:

A Representative from GSMA (Pat Walshe, Director of Privacy)
One mobile operator: Jeff Brueggeman (Vice President-Publiy Policy AT&T)
A rep from the online industry: (i) Patrick Ryan, Policy Counsel, Open Internet for Google Inc
A rep from an open source software developer: Ms Juliana Rotich, Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc

Two Civil Society/ NGO representatives:

Sunil Abraham, executive director, The Centre for Internet and Society (India)
An academic (Ian Brown, co-director of Oxford University's Information Security and Privacy Programme )

Panel Moderator: Ambassador David Gross, Partner, Wiley Rein LLP

Remote panel moderator: Yiannis Theodorou, Regulatory Policy Manager, GSMA

Provide the name of the organizer(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:

Natasha Jackson: Head of Content, GSMA and Board member of the Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI)
Pat Walshe: Director of Privacy, GSMA, Member British Computer Society, International Association of Privacy Professionals

The GSMA and its members actively participated in previous IGF workshops. GSMA has proven expertise and capacity to organise multi-stakeholder workshops and conferences – including the Mobile World Congress, Mobile Asia Congress, Government Mobile Forum every year, attended by tens of thousands of delegates and also organised a roundtable on mobile privacy at the 32nd International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners held in Israel in October 2010.

The GSMA represents the interests of the worldwide mobile communications industry. Spanning 219 countries, the GSMA unites nearly 800 of the world's mobile operators, as well as more than 200 companies in the broader mobile ecosystem, including handset makers, software companies, equipment providers, Internet companies, and media and entertainment organisations.

Organization:GSM Association

Contact Person: Yiannis Theodorou, Regulatory Policy Manager, GSMA

Workshop Number: 75

See the event details on the IGF website.

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Putting

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T09:50:01Z

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Pushing women scientists

praskrishna — 2014-10-21T15:44:09Z

Wikipedia edit-a-thon attempts to raise awareness of the contribution of Indian women to science.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on October 19, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Ask anyone to name an Indian scientist and the answer is likely to be a man, and not a woman scientist. To let more people know about the unsung heroines of science in India, a workshop called the Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2014 was held here recently. At least 15 participants added content about women scientists over two days to Wikipedia as the first step in bringing public awareness about them.

The edit-a-thon (a large number of people adding or modifying content on Wikipedia at once) concluded on October 14, which was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology and maths. The event was organised by BioScienceIndia Programme, a non-profit science outreach initiative, and Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Participants added information about at least 40 women scientists. Information on 80 more would be added in a year’s time, said Nandini Rajamani, Co-director, BioScienceIndia Programme.

The aim, however, is to go beyond edit-a-thons, to examine issues that have not received the attention they deserve. Women scientists in India are not on par with men for several reasons (see info box) and the “leaky pipeline” theory is used to describe their decreasing visibility. Vishnu Vardhan, Director, Access to Knowledge team, CIS, said the aim is to motivate a new and younger generation of women scientists.

Karthik Ramaswamy, visiting scientist at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and a participant in the edit-a-thon, said science in India has a ‘diversity problem’ with Indian women and minorities represented inadequately. “There are very few women scientists among faculty of science institutions because they have no role models. Hopefully, this (presence on Wikipedia) will provide them with role models,” he added.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/the-hindu-renuka-phadnis-october-19-2014-wikipedia-editathon-attempts-to-raise-awareness-of-the-contribution-of-indian-women-to-science

Pushing the Boundaries in Open Governance: Insights from OGP Asia Pacific Regional Conference in Bali, Indonesia (Day 1)

praskrishna — 2014-05-27T11:16:06Z

Sunil Abraham is quoted. He said that open governance is more about citizens checking on what government leaders are doing than on government coding its citizens to exercise surveillance.

This post originally appeared on the Open Data Research Network and has been republished with permission from the author. For the republished post on OGP website, see here.

The plenary room of Bali Nusa Dua Convention Center was jam-packed at 845 in the morning, with representatives from different countries in the Asia-Pacific region and all over the globe joining the first regional conference on open data hosted by the Government of Indonesia. The conference stage backdrop depicts a million colourful cranes moving in one direction towards the OGP logo, perhaps signalling an unprecedented wave of aspirations, commitments, plans, and actions towards a more ‘open’ governance within the region. Then a few minutes later, President Yudhoyono arrived and the two-day gathering (6-7 May 2014) of roughly 500 people started.

The program was impressive. It tried to cater to the different voices of what ideally should make an open government community – government leaders, journalists, right-to-information activists, business representatives, academia, researchers, civil-society groups, funding agencies, programmers, among others. The over-arching theme of the conference “Unlocking Innovative Openness: Impetus to Greater Citizen Engagement” speaks to both the supply side and the demand side of open data where governments can make openness more innovative to which citizens can proactively engage. The people in attendance reflected this multi-dimensionality and the kind of discussions on open governance that happened in Day 1 reflects the several, differentiated, yet somehow united view and interests of the many people that were there.

The first day of the conference brings me to four main realisations, prompted by the excellent presentations of the speakers and the lively discussion at the break-out session that I attended.

Openness is not an option but an imperative. Aruna Roy, founder of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathanaof India, and considered one of the most influential thinkers of this decade put it more vividly using her organization’s slogan – “right to know, right to live”. While bureaucrats, like Minister Francis Maude of the UK argued that openness improve transparency, enhance public service, and stimulate growth, civil society groups claimed that openness is not something the government can do, but must do, to benefit right holders by ensuring that they are not only aware of what the government is doing but by ensuring that government leaders, to whom citizens entrust sovereignty, execute the will of the governed.
Open governance is about relations, about people, not just about technology, transparency, or data provision. Ms. Nwe Zin Win, of Myanmar National NGOs Network emphasized that as Myanmar moves towards Open Government Partnership (OGP) membership, the process should create a space for civil society groups to proactively participate. In his remarks, Director General Yoon Soon-Gu of the Republic of Korea emphasized that when his government embarked on the process of crafting Gov 3.0 as a development agenda, with the end-goal of making Koreans live a happy life, citizen consultations were conducted all across government to ensure that this plan is responsive and relevant and reflects the people’s aspirations. Anne Jellema, CEO of World Wide Web Foundation highlighted the fact that open governance is not only good for vertical accountability (government-governed) but also about horizontal accountability (agencies within the same government) and ensures that systems are working with government – judiciary, legislative, audit, executing agencies – for the common good. Open governance then, is about building that relationship of trust between government and citizens, between business and government, and between agencies in the government.
Open government has many challenges, but these are not insurmountable. Malou Mangahas of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism emphasized five “I”s in her plenary speech that she said are the main challenges to the open government story in the Philippines and in the region – implementation, inclusiveness, information, institutionalisation, and interconnectedness. In the area of inclusiveness, one of the challenges is on how to ensure that people can participate in a context when there is a large digital divide, where internet penetration is low, and broadband speed is slow to a crawl. Mr. Samadhi of the Government of Indonesia emphasized that there are many examples in his country where government information is translated to accessible formats by infomediaries so that citizens without internet connection became aware, informed, and knowledgeable. In one of the coffee breaks, Redempto Parafina of the Affiliated Network for Social Accountability in East Asia and the Pacific shared to me that non-government organizations, concerned individuals, and universities translate information in the CheckmySchool portal to information materials for distribution and use by communities without internet.
Open governance narrative should focus on making governments more responsive and accountable. President Yudhoyono uses Facebook and Twitter, apart from the traditional media as text and snail mail, to listen to the demands of his constituents. The Government of New Zealand, according to Minister Peter Dunne, sets goals on basic public services as health, education, and employment and demands regular public reporting on these goals; reports that can be accessed and challenged by the people to whom the services are intended. Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society argued that open governance should not veer away from this narrative. He made an example regarding India’s Unique Identification System, where the implementation is couched within the open data narrative. He believed that open governance is more about citizens checking on what government leaders are doing than on government coding its citizens to exercise surveillance.

It was a productive day. I am thankful that I was afforded the opportunity to attend the conference. One message that profoundly affected me was Aruna Roy’s exhortation at the end of her presentation – that we should make truth powerful, and that we should make power truthful.

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Purba Sarkar

praskrishna — 2013-05-10T18:01:40Z

Purba Sarkar

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