Centre for Internet and Society

Forensic DNA Databases

praskrishna — 2012-10-10T10:57:33Z

A presentation by Jeremy Gruber

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/forensic-dna-databases.ppt

The UK DNA Database and the European Court of Human Rights

praskrishna — 2012-10-10T10:19:35Z

A presentation by Dr. Helen Wallace, Director, GeneWatch, UK

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uk-dna-database-and-european-court-of-human-rights.ppt

DML Conference 2013

praskrishna — 2013-03-04T03:54:58Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central are jointly organizing the DML Conference 2013 in Chicago from March 14 to 16, 2013.

Conference Theme: "Democratic Futures: Mobilizing Voices and Remixing Youth Participation"

The fourth annual conference - DML2013 - will explore the shifting contours of participatory democracy with a focus, for example, on the role of networked publics in mobilizing social movements; the remixing of civic engagement; and youth-driven forms of social innovation and community transformation. This conference is meant to be an inclusive, international and annual gathering of scholars and practitioners in the field, focused on fostering interdisciplinary and participatory dialog and linking theory, empirical study, policy, activism, and practice.

The Digital Media and Learning Conference is an annual event supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the UC Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine.

Nishant Shah has a featured session at the DML Conference. See http://bit.ly/13zhpmz

Feature Session: Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)

Whose Change Is It Anyway? seeks to explore new entry points into the discourse on youth, technology and change, with a specific focus on (but not restricted to) the Global South and the last decade of citizen action. This conference track seeks to fashion frameworks and structures that provide new ways of interpreting and understanding outcomes that technology mediated citizen action has to offer, as well as the future of citizen led interventions: What enables, catalyzes and moves young people to reinvent themselves as citizen actors? What are the interventions and narratives of change that fail to fit into a ‘success’ rubric, but are still significant in the processes of change they initiate? How do we understand these ‘new’ events as hybrids, connecting with existing histories, contexts, media and technologies in their regions? Is there an alternative discourse that does not necessarily adopt frameworks arising from the knowledge centers of the West? Do these discourses help challenge and rework global vocabularies by offering new ways of looking at citizen action and change? The track will invite provocative hypotheses, in-depth analyses, dialogues and contestations around these ideas, through innovative interactive presentation formats. The dialogue will be informed by experimental and new methods of information and knowledge production, focusing on the Global South and its larger transnational contexts at the junctures of youth, technology and change.

Organizer(s):

Nishant Shah

Participants:

Radhika Gajalla

Kavita Philip

Ramesh Srinivasan

Nighat Dad

Contact:
Email us at dmlhub@hri.uci.edu or subscribe to our mailing list at http://bit.ly/dmlhub-l to receive up-to-date information regarding the 2013 conference.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/dml-conference-2013

Transparency and Privacy

praskrishna — 2014-02-28T04:54:08Z

The two concepts, transparency and privacy, can be both opposing and inter related. On one level the protection of individual privacy is achieved through institutional and governmental transparency, as transparency of actions taken by the government or private sector, concerning the individuals works to inspire trust. On another level situations of privacy and transparency bring out the question of how the public good should be balanced against public and private interests.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/transparency-and-privacy.pdf

New Trends in Industry Self-Governance

praskrishna — 2012-10-04T11:37:54Z

Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK is organising this workshop on November 7, 2012 at the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan. This workshop will be held in Conference Room 2, from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. Sunil Abraham is one of the panelists at this workshop.

Concise description of the proposed workshop:
Informal rule setting still plays a significant role in Internet governance. Non-governmental governance can occur at two levels: by shared rules negotiated through bodies like ICANN, and via private ordering by individual firms with significant market power. This panel will explore these two levels drawing on research into ICANN and two recent cases: the Google Books [non-] settlement, and several governments’ demands that service providers such as Research In Motion and Facebook give local law enforcement agencies access to user communications.

Google’s project to digitize, index, and later to sell access to large numbers of out-of-print books is a leading example of an Internet-triggered shift from public to private regulation and the declining authority of copyright law. It triggered a major international controversy encompassing three class action lawsuits, a proposed and subsequently amended settlement by the litigating parties, more than 400 filings by class-members and "friends of the court" (including the French and German governments), two court hearings, various conferences, innumerous blog entries and articles. A New York federal district court ultimately rejected a proposed settlement between Google and representatives of book authors and publishers, stating that the issues would be “more appropriately decided by Congress than through an agreement among private, self-interested parties."

While almost all states allow law enforcement agencies to intercept Internet communications, the growing use of encryption has restricted access to in-transit communications and social networking data. The governments of India and several Middle Eastern nations have all pressed Research In Motion to allow police access to BlackBerry encrypted messages, threatening otherwise to shut down services. RIM has installed local servers in several countries to meet these demands. The Indian government is reportedly now looking at encrypted services provided by Google and Skype. These and other online services, often hosted in the US, receive frequent requests from foreign law enforcement agencies for user data. Such requests have no statutory force, but may be voluntarily granted under US law – raising questions about user privacy and the oversight of this access.

These cases have much wider implications for other Internet services and users around the world. The proposed workshop will facilitate a multi-stakeholder exploration of these implications.

Four researchers will give precise, provocative five-minute opening statements on the key lessons for Internet rule setting from these cases. Each speaker will pose three specific questions on the accountability, viability and efficiency of these governance structures. These questions will kick-off roundtable discussion between the panelists from government, civil society, business and the technical community. The objective will be to draw out further lessons in how the public interest can best be protected in informal Internet governance processes, with contributions and questions from workshop and remote participants.representing official positions.

Background Paper:

Name of the organiser(s) of the workshop and their affiliation to various stakeholder groups:
Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
William Drake, University of Zurich Business, technical community, Civil Society, government co-sponsors in process (TBD)

Have you, or any of your co-organisers, organised an IGF workshop before?: Yes
Please provide link(s) to workshop(s) or report(s):
http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=Workshopsreports2009View&curr=1&wr=84

Provide the names and affiliations of the panellists you are planning to invite:
Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Ian Brown, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford (Moderator)
William Drake, University of Zurich
Jeanette Hoffman, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
Emily Taylor, Independent Consultant, UK
Rolf Weber, University of Zurich
Google representative TBC
Government representative TBC

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/new-trends-in-industry-self-governance

Governing Identity on the Internet

praskrishna — 2012-10-04T09:06:59Z

Security, openness and privacy will be discussed at this workshop to be held at the IGF 2012 on November 8, 2012 from 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. Malavika Jayaram, a fellow at CIS is one of the panelists confirmed for participation.

Concise Description of Workshop:
From single-sign-on identifiers for federated websites to Whois data associated with Internet resources, countless individuals, business and government organizations have a stake in Internet identity information and its governance. While territorially-based governments have historically played a central role in their citizens' identity, it is private service providers and individual users that might be considered the de facto managers of Internet identity information. Private, rule-based arrangements (e.g., “trust frameworks”) have emerged in many industry sectors to help manage Internet identity transactions. Nonetheless, many states are actively pursuing digital identity efforts (OECD 2011), including the United States government's National Strategy for Trusted Identity in Cyberspace (NSTIC) which is standing up a governance body and the European Commission's proposed regulation on electronic identification and trusted services for electronic transactions. These efforts seek to promote greater adoption and interoperability of Internet identity solutions.

What are the appropriate roles of governments, the private sector and individuals in Internet identity? Are there benefits or risks of various Internet identity governance solutions being proposed? How compatible are they with the transnational nature of the Internet? Which stakeholders will determine the standards and policies for how Internet identity information is created, transmitted, utilized, or protected? This workshop, drawing on expertise from business, technical community, civil society and government actors, explores this active yet under examined area of Internet governance. The format of the workshop will include short position statements from the panelists followed by a question and answer session facilitated by a moderator involving the audience.

Organiser(s) Name:

Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto and Internet Governance Project, Syracuse University
Christine Runnegar, Internet Society

Previous Workshop(s):
http://www.intgovforum.org/workshops_08/showmelist.php?mem=9 http://intgovforum.org/Rio_event_report.php?mem=23 http://www.intgovforum.org/workshops_08/showmelist.php?mem=10 http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chrono... http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W...

Submitted Workshop Panelists:
The following panelists have been confirmed for participation:

Naomi Lefkovitz, Senior Privacy Advisor, National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace National Program Office, NIST, United States Dept of Commerce (government) (bio [1])
Andrea Servida, Head of Task Force "Legislation Team (eIDAS)", European Commission (government) (bio [2])
Robin Wilton, Technical Outreach for Identity and Privacy, Internet Society (technical) (bio [3])
Malavika Jayaram, Fellow, Centre for Internet & Society
Mawaki Chango, Africa Internet Policy Coordinator, Association for Progressive Communications (academic/civil society) (bio [4])
Marc Crandall, Google (business)
Bill Smith, Technology Evangelist, Paypal (business) (bio [5])
Brenden Kuerbis, Postdoctoral Fellow, Citizen Lab, University of Toronto and Internet Governance Project (academic/civil society) (bio [6])

[1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/naomi-lefkovitz/47/788/a88 [2] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/andrea-servida/0/47a/a70 [3] http://www.internetsociety.org/who-we-are/staff/mr-robin-wilton [4] http://www.linkedin.com/in/touchwithmawaki [5] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bill-smith/1/a0b/3a6 [6] http://www.linkedin.com/in/brendenkuerbis

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Frédéric Donck, European Regional Bureau Director, Internet Society

Assigned Panellists:
Smith - Bill
Servida - Andrea
Jayaram - Malavika
Lefkovitz - Naomi
Wilton - Robin
Kuerbis - Brenden
Chango - Mawaki
Crandall - Marc

Read the original published on the IGF website

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/intgovforum-cms-w2012-proposals-governing-identity-on-the-internet

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights

praskrishna — 2012-10-04T08:50:16Z

Malavika Jayaram, fellow of CIS is a panelist at this workshop to be held at the IGF 2012 in Azerbaijan.

The freedom of internet is increasingly causing heated debate . On the one hand the internet is the embodiment of freedom literally crossing all borders, on the other hand governments more and more think of curtailing e.g. social media when these are used to organize criminal activities. Governments in some countries restrict access to the internet or censor information even before their citizens go online. As a matter of fact the internet in Iran and China has already become an ‘intranet’. But also in the UK there is a growing body of public opinion that is in favor of more supervision of social media. When will the influence of this medium have become so strong that it, in certain situations, could be considered a danger to society? Will supervision then be a solution? Unique is the research carried out by D66-member of the European Parliament Marietje Schaake into internet freedom all over the world. The research should lead to a resolution on civil rights in our digital era. The report is expected to be finished sometime around the IGF in November. Subjects treated are trade, human rights, development, safety and the like. The report will contain a number of concrete suggestions both for businesses and for governments, so as on the one hand to expand opportunities with the help of technology, but also to limit possible risks.

Short program:

Introduction:

Each panelist has 2 minutes to introduce him/herself and make one statement on the topic.

Open discussion:

This is followed by an open discussion between panelist and the audience, fed and led by moderator Robert Guerra.

Recommendations:

15 minutes before the end of the workshop, recommendations, emerged from the open discussion, will be put to word.

Organiser(s) Name:

ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL (ECP | Platform for the Information Society wants to take barriers for the implementation and acceptance of ICT away to the benefit of our economy and society, and in order to strengthen our international competitive position. In addition, ECP (also at a political-governmental level) draws attention to a number of specific themes such as growth of productivity, strengthening of competitiveness and the European Digital Agenda. One of it programs is the public-private partnership NL IGF. NL IGF prepairs for the IGF and provides good embedding of the results of the IGF in national policy) Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture & innovation Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hivos, the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation

Previous Workshop(s):

NL IGF organized : 2010: Public-private cooperation on Internet safety/cybercrime http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W... 2011: Parliamentarian Challenge: a Round Table between Parliamentarians and other Stakeholders http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=W...

Submitted Workshop Panelists:

Marietje Schaake (Euro parliamentarian D66)
Lionel Veer (Dutch Human Rights Ambassador)
Hanane Boujemi (Diplo Foundation and upward of this autumn she will work for Hivos on it’s program 'Internet Govenance for the Mena region'.)
Malavika Jayaram (Fellow of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore (India), assisting on projects and matters relating to IT law, data protection and privacy. She is also working on a Ph.D. on data protection and privacy laws, with a special focus on the new identity project launched in India. Malavika has over 15 years experience as a lawyer with a focus on technology and intellectual property.)
Emin Milli (an Azerbaijani writer)
Moderator: Robert Guerra (a Canadian independent consultant specializing in issues of Internet Freedom, Internet Governance and Human Rights)
Front row: two Dutch students (both male and female)

All speakers mentioned above have confirmed their participation.

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Sophie Veraart, NL IGF – ECP

Assigned Panellists:

Schaake - Marietje
Veer - Lionel
Boujemi - Hanane
Jayaram - Malavika
Milli - Emin
Guerra - Robert

Read the original published on the IGF website

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/intgovforum-cms-w2012-proposals

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues

praskrishna — 2012-12-09T00:50:46Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is coorganizing this workshop along with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., at the seventh Internet Governance Forum 2012 in Azerbaijan. The workshop will be held in Conference Room 4, from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m. Pranesh Prakash is a panelist for this workshop.

Workshop Theme:
Other
Theme Question:
It is a workshop on national level IG mechanisms, and does not directly address any main theme questions

Concise Description of Workshop:

Such is the unique nature of the Internet that its governance often calls for institutional innovations. The proposed workshop will look at a range of national level IG mechanisms across the world. While the discussion will refer to good models and practices in different countries, it will not be organized around simple show-casing of different national IG mechanisms. The discussion will centre around key contexts, requirements, challenges and possibilities. It will be directed towards examining key institutional design issues, functions and outcomes with regard to national level IG mechanisms with the purpose to help countries make appropriate decisions in their specific contexts. Some of these are; - How should the national commons of Internet resources be managed?- What kinds of mechanisms are appropriate for technical matters, what for those that are partly technical and partly social, and what for larger public policy matters, requiring more political responses? - Should there be a common single mechanism to address all the above kinds of issues, or different ones? How to coordinate different mechanisms, and different parts of the national governance machinery dealing with different aspects or kinds of IG issues? - How to ensure meaningful participation of all stakeholders in a manner that focuses on public interest?- How can the surplus from domain name registration fees etc collected by national IG agencies be employed for public interest purposes, especially, for taking up Internet related research.

Organiser(s) Name:

Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore - Civil SocietyBrazilian Internet Steering Committee - National level governance bodyInstitute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences - Academic InsitutionCentre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training (CCIRDT), Vancouver, BC CANADA - Civil Society Instituto NUPEF , Rio de Janeiro - Civil SocietyIT for Change, Bangalore - Civil Society.

Previous Workshop(s):

See in the workshops section in IGF 2011IG4D Workshop 183: A Possible Framework for Global Net Neutrality.

Submitted Workshop Panelists:

Carlos Afonso, Insituto NUPEF, Board Member, Brazilian Steering CommiteeEmily Taylor, Independent Consultant, Formerly with NOMINETAlice Munya, Chairperson, Kenya Internet Steering CommiteeVictor Tishchenko, Institute of Advanced Systems, Russian Academy of Sciences,Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society,Moderator, Micheal Gurstein, Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development and Training, Canada.

Name of Remote Moderator(s):

Ginger Paque

Read the original published on the IGF website here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/national-ig-mechanisms

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan

praskrishna — 2012-09-30T13:25:14Z

Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) an established non-profit organisation working in India whose own goals and objectives are in close alignment with that of the Wikimedia movement.

Context to the CIS A2K programme plan

Between 80 to 120 million Indians have Internet access, and by 2015 that number is expected to increase to 237 million. Correspondingly, between 400 and 700 million Indians have mobile phones, and the number that have mobile-data access to the Internet is increasing exponentially. India is a country with tremendous knowledge resources to contribute to humankind. While the majority off Indians face income-related technological barriers against accessing and contributing to the global storehouse of knowledge, there are a significant number of people in the country who have both the capacity and ability to do both.

For the Wikimedia movement, India represents a largely untapped opportunity to dramatically expand our impact and move toward our vision of a world where everyone can freely share in – and contribute to - the sum of human knowledge. Although the Indian population makes up about 20% of humanity, Indians account for only 4.7% of global Internet users, and India represents only 2.0% of global pageviews and 1.6% of global page edits on Wikimedia's sites. Despite such a disproportionately small presence on Wikimedia, English Wikipedia, our flagship project, ranks in the top ten of the most visited websites in India. We also have Wikipedia projects in 20 Indic languages, which will become increasingly important as the next 100 million Indians to come onto the Internet, given that they are likely to be increasingly using the Internet in languages other than English. Demographically, Indic languages represent a good growth opportunity since estimates suggest only about 150 million of the total Indian population of 1.2 billion have working fluency in English.

In 2010, the Wikimedia movement developed its first strategic plan and set India as a priority geography for growth and investment. At the conclusion of the strategy process, the Wikimedia Foundation created a Global Development team that immediately started laying the groundwork for the India Program. In 2012, the strategic plan was updated and revised to reflect experiences from the initial phase of the India Program and changed realities on the ground.

Objectives

Support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects (e.g. donations of encyclopaedias and other useful texts, education partnerships and other institutional partnerships) Support India-focused efforts to improve quality of India-relevant content on Indic language and English Wikimedia projects (e.g. university outreach, institutional partnerships and India-relevant thematic contribution campaigns) Drive and complement access to free knowledge across India through alternative technological means (e.g. mobile-based Wikipedia and offline Wikipedia) Help the Indian community and chapter share experiences and tell their stories to the wider Indian and global communities within the Wikimedia movement Generate and document lessons from activities in India that can inform the work of Indian communities and similar programs in other countries Support the Wikimedia community on an on-going basis as and when needed and possible, and by cross-pollinating ideas, encouraging volunteer initiatives and transferring best practices. Partner with formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement in India, for example, the Wikimedia India chapter, language communities, WikiProject India, etc.

Impact

In measuring impact, it is important to differentiate between outputs and outcomes. Desired outputs of the CIS-A2K programme are described in more detail in the sections that follow, and are likely to be re-callibrated, given the customised, changing and experimental nature of the work. Outcomes, on the other hand, relate to expected/desirable impacts that the work seeks to achieve. Both outputs and outcomes can only be achieved through a cooperative effort involving the CIS-A2K programme team, the Wikimedia India chapter, the Wikimedia community, and the other important community groupings that exist online and offline. In other words, the goals can be met if

Desired outputs:
To expand the Indian editing community to 5,000 active editors by June 2015, with at least 1,000 active editors in the Indic language projects. To enable the building of Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) while keeping in mind reasonable quality, and have 5 Indic language Wikipedias reaching 50,000 articles, and 5 more reaching 25,000 articles, while also enabling 5 Indic language communities to have 100 active editors, and 5 more to have 50 active editors. To expand Wikipedia readership to 100 million unique visitors per month by June 2015. To ensure Wikipedia is accessible to all literate Indians through mobile and/or offline platforms. To expand the base of India-related articles on English Wikipedia from 115,000 to 165,000 by June 2015, and to halve India-related stubs in the same period.

Desired outcomes:
Foster a strong relationship with and within the Indian Wikimedia community through transparency and communication, and by providing support for community-led activities and facilitating community participation and ownership Expand the Indic language editing community and build interest in Indic language Wikimedia projects Grow high-quality Wikipedia projects (and sister projects such as Wiktionary and Wikisource) Expand Wikipedia readership in India including on mobile and offline platforms Grow India-focused articles across Wikimedia projects.

Program goals

Catalyst Project Approach

The India Program started out as a partnership with the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter. The initiative was intended as a means through which the Wikimedia Foundation can help the community grow, improve and expand the projects. This was an experimental effort, as the Wikimedia movement does not have a set of proven programs that can guarantee the growth of a community or project and the India Program was the first catalyst project being undertaken by the movement (further efforts have since got underway in the Middle-East and Brazil). Subsequent to the India Program becoming a project of CIS' A2K program, the aim is to identify pilots that work in achieving impact goals. This will be useful for sustaining the long-term success of the projects and will provide guidance for the development of other languages.

Catalyst Project Approach

Specifically, the A2K Team will focus on testing pilots that tackle the following challenges:

Building editor communities of sufficient critical size to accelerate and sustain growth in Indic languages
Connecting the Wikimedia community to new networks, building awareness of the Wikimedia projects and how they work
Building partnerships with educational and other groups to encourage new users to join the community as editors and content contributors
Encouraging editors of English Wikipedia in India, and strengthening coverage of India-relevant topics therein
Reaching communities with limited Internet connectivity to create access to Wikipedia's educational content

The A2K team will answer the following general questions in its pilot work that will help inform program design in India and in other geographies where the Wikimedia movement is active:

Editing growth: Are there certain types of proactive programming that work well in garnishing editorship in India? Indic languages and English: Is there a difference in strategies/opportunities for growth between Indic language communities and the EN:WP community in India? Program evaluation: Why are the programs in India successes or failures? Pilot testing and learning: Why do some program pilots succeed and others struggle? Community partnership: What is the best way to partner with the community in the individual pilots and the overall program? Ability to replicate in India: What are the features/programs that have succeeded and can succeed elsewhere in India? Ability to replicate internationally: What is replicable from the India experience? What are the cultural factors that should be accounted for before expanding? Capacity: Is it possible to maintain the program's activities within the volunteer community or is staff capacity needed? Return on Investment: Is the financial investment justified by the results of the program? Scale: Are pilots that are being tested scalable within a particular community, and adoptable by other language communities?

Current year plan - July 2012-June 2013

General community support and communications

The A2K team will provide support to the Indian Wikimedia community, which includes the Wikimedia India chapter, on various community-led activities, including outreach events across the country, meetups, contests, conferences, and connections to GLAMs and other institutions. This support will extend to all formal and informal groupings within the Wikimedia movement. Henceforth, requests of support from the community and the chapter will be managed transparently and publicly so that the A2K team can meet expectations, keeping in mind that not all community events will seek A2K program support, and that the A2K program will not always be able to support all requests made. In general, community support is intended to solve a problem or help or add to an existing community or chapter initiative; the A2K team will provide any level of reasonable help as needed.

The A2K team will also provide services to the community with regard to intra- and inter-community communications--most visibly through the quarterly Indian community newsletter, Wikipatrika, and also through direct efforts to cross-pollinate ideas and make connects between projects. The team will support the community to tell its story on the global Wikimedia blog, Wikimedia.in, Wikipedia Village pumps and use all available channels to reach out to the community. The team also will build a formal public relations plan that will advocate the values of the movement and encourage new editors. In all cases, the communication efforts will be such that they stay in facilitation/support mode, allowing full ownership and participation by the community.

Indic language community building

The India Program began work on Indic language community building in October 2011. This area is a top priority of the A2K team, as Wikimedia's reach in India will always be limited by language barriers. The Indic language projects remain small, with the most successful having fewer than 50,000 articles and fewer than 100 active editors on a monthly basis. The primary challenge is to strengthen communities to build and sustain each Indic language project. To date, community building has focused on working closely with some really small but promising project communities (some with fewer than five editors) to help them take the initial steps to expand their communities. This will entail supporting the organization and design of outreach events, projects and pilots to aid the community in catalyzing activity. See Indic Language projects for more info on recent and current activities.

Over the next year, Indic community building will continue to focus on deep engagement with 7-10 Indic project communities, with the addition of systematic digital outreach pilots focused on encouraging new editor engagement. Digital outreach represents a powerful channel to invite and encourage new editors, especially given the increasing readership of various projects in India. The current reader base is the most logical place to foster new editors. A combination of geo-targeted banners, linking to online tutorials and other training material, supported by online help points such as the Teahouse, will be piloted in an Indic language and then rolled out to other languages as well as the English Wikipedia community in India. Digital outreach will be conducted in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation's newly established Editor Growth and Contribution Program.

Community building will be done by:

Encouraging communication between editors through establishing connections between editors, facilitating meet-ups and encouraging on-wiki discussions on talk pages or forums such as village pumps
Organising collaboration amongst editors through Wikiprojects that are either subject-specific or task-specific (an example of this process can be seen in the Wikiproject to create and improve articles of the 80 most-read medical topics on English Wikipedia that is now active in 5 different Indic languages--Assamese, Bangla, Odia, Telugu and Marathi)
Cross-pollinating ideas across communities by sharing experiences and success (or otherwise) stories in relevant forums such as the various village pumps, as illustrated in this example for Hindi
Supporting Indic language community events such as the Malayalam conference, Sangamothsavam, held at Kollam in May 2012. The A2K team will also offer support to larger events such as Wikiconference, the national conference of Wikimedians in India, but this will be a secondary focus as priority will be placed on Indic-specific activities.

Content addition/donation in Indic languages

Though the A2K team will work with Indian content in all languages, particular emphasis will be placed on generating and improving content in Indic languages. The team will work to find content that is relevant and useful to the Wikimedia movement that is (a) already in the public domain and (b) contributed to the movement under an acceptable copyright license. Such content will include, but not be limited to, dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias and any other encyclopedia-like compilations. The rationale for making content addition/donation a key part of the A2K program work (with the full consent and engagement of the relevant Wikimedia communities involved) is that many smaller Wikipedias need a 'shot in the arm' of content to create sufficient momentum in the projects. In English and other European-language Wikipedias, bot-created content (an integral part of the growth of these Wikipedias in their early years) was possible because sufficient electronic/digital resources existed at the time outside of Wikipedia. For many Indic languages (and indeed, India-related topics in any language), the same is not necessarily true, and content addition/donation may be seen as a necessary intervention--it can be likened to performing the work of a bot in the physical world, with physical texts.

A precedent for content addition/donation exists in the gift of an encyclopedia that the government of the state of Kerala contributed to the Wikimedia movement in December 2008. The gift was received by Jimmy Wales on behalf of the movement and is in the process of being integrated to Malayalam Wikipedia.

New editor cultivation with campaigns on Indian topic areas on English Wikipedia

English Wikipedia is a global resource of nearly 4 million articles. However, only around 115,000 articles (or less than 2.9%) of all articles directly cover topics of relevance in India, and 60,000 of those articles are stubs or articles of poor quality. There is a tremendous opportunity to deepen contributions on India-related topics including areas such as Indian history, geography, law, public policy, politics, art, culture, contributions to the sciences, popular culture, etc.

Over the coming year, in partnership with the Indian Wikipedia community, the Wikimedia India chapter, other groupings (such as WikiProject India) and appropriate national or regional institutions, the CIS A2K team develop campaigns to promote contribution to Wikipedia on specific topic areas. The initial campaigns will involve focused pilots to develop approaches to supporting and cultivating new editors with strong content knowledge. Partnerships will be explored with interest groups outside the existing Wikimedia community to document and celebrate these interests, which could be anything Indian, from efforts that fall under the work of Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs), like handicrafts and art, to movies, cricket, history, etc.

Pilot programs

In general, the bulk of the work of the A2K program team will be to run controlled and well-designed pilot programs with the full engagement of the communities involved. These will be developed and carried out in addition to projects focusing on goals A to D. The A2K team will actively design and implement new pilots on the basis of desired impacts and stated goals as outlined through this document. To borrow a phrase from the software development world, the idea behind these pilots will be to continually ensure better design, better engagement and therefore greater chances of success, and to maintain a healthy degree of innovation and experimentation that will allow us, in some cases, to 'fail fast, fail early'.

Built in to the program structure is a speedy evaluation of these pilots that will enable us to document learnings from less successful projects and expand and scale-up more successful attempts. For instance, the India Program, in partnership with the Global Education Program, conducted a pilot project between June-November 2011 with three universities in Pune. The pilot aimed to generate useful content for English Wikipedia and provide lessons for the future growth of education programs within India. The project failed to generate useful content and created significant costs for a variety of reasons, but a thorough evaluation of the pilot was conducted and reported on publicly, and many lessons were learned that will inform future strategies of projects in the same genre. For example, in the coming years, subsequent phases will identify scalable approaches to working with professors and students while taking into account the limitations that were evident in the first attempt; focus will be placed on shifting the design away from English Wikipedia toward Indic languages; work will only be added to Indic language Wikipedias or English Wikipedia if it is of an acceptable quality; students’ training will be made more rigorous; greater and more consistent support from Campus Ambassadors will be provided; and any subsequent project phases will be discussed with the community/ies involved in order to ensure greater community participation in the project right from the outset.

In another instance, the India Program team began two small projects on Facebook in April focused on supporting new editors in English and cultivating community connections and new editors in Odia, as part of a social media pilot. Through these projects, we have learned that social media requires considerable efforts on the part of not just a program team, but instead a whole community. Consequently, in order to succeed, the A2K team will continue to actively engage in the space, and work towards making a cohesive, productive social media space across platforms that is driven and populated by community members, including the chapter, who are already using social media as an extension of their Wikimedia work. One potential pilot project that can work with broad community involvement is an India-focused virtual apprenticeship, building on the Teahouse project.

Approach to measuring results and evaluation

As the work that is being done by the A2K team is of an experimental nature, it is critical that there are clear objectives, robust program design, strong measurement techniques, rigorous documentation, ongoing performance improvement, constant community capacity building and periodic rigorous outside evaluation. Every substantive initiative of the A2K team will have associated pilot designs which will be publicly and regularly developed with and reported to the community. These measures will serve to achieve five objectives:

Increased transparency with the community and chapter so that there is both visibility as well as ownership (and more active involvement of as wide a cross-section of community members as possible)
Discipline of detailed program design to improve the odds of success--especially in the context of the uncharted waters of virtually everything the India Program will be undertaking--with a clear understanding that for any set of experiments, there will be failure and success, though effort will be put towards decreasing failure and increasing success
Facilitation of transfer of capability and best practices within a community, across Indic languages and with communities beyond the India-centric ones
Accountability to community and donors so that a prudent balance is maintained between impact and resources
Fostering of a spirit of learning and continuous improvement, which can only happen if there is detailed and public documentation, communication and training, and an understanding and acceptance that failures will happen with any given set of experiments and that the important thing is to minimise them as well as learn from them.

The A2K team will be supported by a team of five people who will be employees of CIS out of offices in Delhi and Bangalore. The team will be managed by a Programme Director, and consist of individuals working on participation, Indic languages, communication and community and programme support.

Budget

The first year of operations will be supported by a grant from WMF to be administered by CIS for a total of INR 11,000,000. The budget will be spent on team salaries, travel, community events, merchandise for volunteers, and other services as needed.

Read the original published by the Wikimedia Foundation.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan

September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-10-09T06:48:33Z

Welcome to the newsletter of September 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features a second analysis by Snehashish Ghosh on the latest list of sites blocked by the Indian government from August 18, 2012 to August 21, 2012, a research on the issues of internet governance by Smarika Kumar, publication of a report on Accessibility of Government websites in India by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, the Access to Knowledge programme plan and updates from the Wikipedia community in India on Indic languages, updates from the Habits of Living workshop organised in Bengaluru, the events connected to the visits of international DNA experts, Helen Wallace and Jeremy Gruber in India, and introduce you to our Access to Knowledge team members.

Announcements

Office in Delhi
CIS now has an office with a five-member team for the Access to Knowledge programme in Delhi at G 15, top floor, behind Hauz Khas G Block Market, Hauz Khas, New Delhi 110016, Ph: + 91 11 26536425.

New Team Members

Nitika Tandon: Nitika Tandon is a Program Officer with CIS. She has an MBA from Rotterdam School of Management, Netherlands and is a recipient of Dean's Fund Scholarship Program, Erasmus University.
Shiju Alex: Shiju Alex is a Consultant. His background is technical writing and he is interested in Indic language computing and community building for Indic language Wiki projects. Presently he works out of CIS office in Bengaluru.
Subhashish Panigrahi: Subhashish Panigrahi is a Programme Officer to CIS's Access to Knowledge programme and works out of CIS's Delhi office. His background is Business Development in Corporate Communications. He works on designing and implementing programs to provide on-wiki and off-wiki support for new editors.
Noopur Raval: Noopur Raval is working as Consultant - Communications for the Access to Knowledge team at CIS. Having previously worked in the media, she is currently pursuing her M.Phil in Cinema Studies from JNU, New Delhi.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications from interested candidates for the posts of Research Manager, Researcher/Editor, and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply for these posts send your resume to Sunil Abraham (sunil@cis-india.org) with three references. Archives of our bulletins can be found here. Click to read the newsletter on our website.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies:
Featured Research

Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report (by Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal, September 26, 2012): This is a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. It was published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The report consists of an executive summary, introduction, methodology, findings and recommendations and interpretation and recommendations. Examples of errors are given as appendices.

Project

Creating a National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities: An Introduction (by Anandhi Viswanathan, September 28, 2012): CIS is engaged in a two-and-a-half year project starting from August 2012 to create a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. This project is supported by the Hans Foundation. The Resource Kit will be brought out in both English and Hindi and disseminated to policy makers from panchayat to ministry levels throughout India. Anandhi gives an introduction to the project in this blog entry.

Blog Entries

WIPO Treaty for the Visually Impaired — Moving from a Treaty on Paper to a Treaty that is Workable on the Ground (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): After many years of hard lobbying by the World Blind Union, it appears that the WIPO Treaty on limitations and exceptions for visually impaired persons/persons with print disabilities (TVI) could become a reality next year.
Breaking News on Electronic Accessibility (by Rahul Cherian, September 28, 2012): The Parliamentary Standing Committee constituted to study the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill has in its report explicitly recognized the concept of electronic accessibility and reasonable accommodation. This is the first time in the country that these two concepts have been reflected at the level of a Parliamentary Standing Committee in relation to a non-disability specific law.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Submission

Feedback to Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 (by Pranesh Prakash, September 29, 2012): submitted its written comments on the Draft Copyright Rules, 2012 to Mr. G.R. Raghavender, Registrar of Copyrights & Director (BP&CR), Ministry of Human Resource Development. Pranesh does a detailed analysis and provides recommendations on Rules 8,9,10, 29(6), 34(2), 37, 71(3), 72, 74(1), 74(6), 75, and 79 (3) and (4).

Projects

Access To Knowledge/Programme Plan: Pursuant to the announcement made on July 30, 2012 of a 22 months ‘grant’ (beginning from September 1, 2012 to July 31, 2014) of upto INR 26,000,000 and as reflected in the FAQ accompanying the announcement, the Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program will become a project of the Access to Knowledge (A2K) program of CIS. The prime objective is to support the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects and supporting India-focused efforts to improve the quality of India-relevant content on Indic languages and English Wikimedia projects.
Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace (by Jadine Lannon, September 25, 2012): Jadine Lannon gives an introduction to the new A2K research initiative. Pervasive technologies have flooded the Indian market and are changing the ways in which the average Indian accesses knowledge but very little is understood about these technologies, particularly when it comes to their legality. CIS hopes to do a research that aims to understand how pervasive technologies interact with Intellectual Property laws and what can be done to protect these technologies from being labelled “illegal” and eradicated from the Asian market.

Event Participated

Meeting of the Global Network on Flexible Limitations and Exceptions (organised by American University Washington College of Law, Washington D.C., September 12 to 15, 2012).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Featured Research

An Introduction to the Issues in Internet Governance (by Smarika Kumar, September 23, 2012): Smarika provides a detailed analysis to the issues that we face in Internet Governance today. She tries to canvass the controversies in the areas of internet governance that broadly focus around the institutional structures to govern the internet, discusses the evolution of these models against the historical background of internet governance and then proceeds to present the criticisms of each of these models with an emphasis on the interests of the regular internet user.
Analyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II (by Snehashish Ghosh, September 25, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”). This analysis was re-posted by Medianama on September 26, 2012.

Columns

The Five Monkeys & Ice-cold Water (by Sunil Abraham, Deccan Chronicle, September 16, 2012): “The Indian government provides leadership, both domestically and internationally, when it comes to access to knowledge.”
SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech (by Chinmayi Arun, Hindu Business Line, September 1, 2012): If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.

Media Coverage

Censorship makes India fall two places on global internet freedom chart (by Dilnaz Boga, Daily News & Analysis, September 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Pitroda seeks to put govt information in public domain (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 25, 2012): “One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media…they (government) should be available all the time.” — Sunil Abraham.

Govt plans inter-ministerial panel on Internet policy (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 19, 2012): ““The thumb rule with governance, be it international or national, is that coordination policy formulation bodies is a good idea, but we can’t damn or praise them over the process...We have to see what coordination results out of the body.” — Sunil Abraham.

Mind of the millennium teen (by Atul Sethi, The Times of India, September 16, 2012): “We live in accelerated times...The breathlessness of our times is evident in everything — from the kind of movies we make to the ways in which our news and information travel. At the end of the day, our younger generations are also products of our times.”— Nishant Shah.

China outranks India in world’s first ever web index (First Post, September 6, 2012): ““The Internet today doesn’t work according to the idealistic principles of openness, and democracy of information that Berners-Lee envisioned for it, and in India in particular, although the Internet has helped us rethink what the government can do, the attitude is that that Internet can only be used in ways that the government sees fit.” — Nishant Shah.

Need a standard strategy to deal with Web issues: Chandrasekhar (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

Political war on the web (by Kunal Majumder, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “The fact remains none of the blockings were politically motivated.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Government to hold talks with stakeholders on Internet censorship (by Shalini Singh, The Hindu, September 4, 2012). Pranesh Prakash’s analysis on blocked websites is quoted.

The state. And the rage of the cyber demon (by Shougat Dasgupta, Tehelka, Vol 9, Issue 36, September 8, 2012): “While some people may see Twitter as akin to friends talking in the pub, others use the service as a bulletin board.” — Pranesh Prakash.

Watch out for fettered speech (by Rohit Pradhan, Business Standard, September 1, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

Events Organised

DNA Profiling Bill
International DNA experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States visited Bengaluru and Delhi and shared their experience in DNA sampling and gave feedback to the DNA Profiling Bill. Meetings were conducted with lawyers and the plaintiff in the Pascal Mazurier's rape case and with VR Sudarshan and Hormis Tharakan. There was a coverage of the event in Kannada media. Public lectures were organised in Bengaluru and Delhi:

UK DNA Database and the European Court of Human Rights: Lessons that India can Learn from Its Mistakes (organised by CIS and Alternative Law Forum, September 24, 2012): Helen Wallace from GeneWatch, UK and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics in the United States gave a public lecture.
The DNA Profiling Bill: Developing Best Practices (India International Centre, New Delhi, September 27, 2012): International experts Helen Wallace from GeneWatch UK, and Jeremy Gruber from the Council for Responsible Genetics from the United States gave a public lecture. Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.

Blog Entry

A Public Meeting on DNA Profiling Bill in Delhi (by Elonnai Hickok, September 29, 2012): Elonnai has blogged about the public lecture delivered by Dr. Helen Wallace, Jeremy Gruber and Dr. Anupuma Raina.

Upcoming IGF Events
At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop:

National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m.

Sunil Abraham will be a panelist in the following workshop:

New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m).

CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops:

Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.).
Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.).

Events Participated

Second Freedom Online Conference (organised by the Ministry of Information and Communications, Republic of Kenya in partnership with the government of Netherlands at UN complex in Gigiri, Nairobi, September 6 and 7, 2012). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on Access to Internet: Challenges and Opportunities.
Multi-stakeholder Discussion on India’s Position in UN for Internet Governance UN Committee for Internet Related Policies (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce & Industry, New Delhi, September 19, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a panelist.
Seventh Meeting of the Group of Experts on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Committee Room No. 228, Yojana Bhawan, Sansad Marg, New Delhi): Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting. This was the final meeting of the series.

Talk

Talk at Yale University (New Haven, September 19, 2012): Pranesh Prakash gave a talk on censorship, intermediary liability, and the way forward.

Video

Internet Governance Plenary (August 28, Tokyo, Japan): Sunil Abraham was a panelist along with Ang Peng Hwa, Paul Wilson, Duangthip Chomprang and Raul Echeberria at this event organised by APNIC on August 28, 2012. Kuo Wei Wu, CEO, National Information Infrastructure Enterprise Promotion Association (NIIEPA) was the moderator.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:
Featured Research

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex, September 25, 2012): Shiju Alex provides a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. He provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.

Workshop Reports
Although most of the following workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the report for all of these was written in the month of September, and hence, we are featuring these.

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): This post is about the first Punjabi Wikipedia workshop held in Ludhiana, Punjab on July 28, 2012. Surinder Wadhawan, a Mumbai based Wikipedian played an important role in designing this workshop and introducing Punjabi Wikipedia to the Punjabi speakers. Long-term Punjabi wikipedian G.S.Guglani also joined this workshop. The event was covered in the Tribune, Hindustan Times, Punjab Infoline, and YesPunjab.com.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized at the Punjabi University's Punjabi Department on August 16, 2012. Veteran Punjabi wikipedian G.S. Guglani came forward to spread the message of Punjabi Wikipedia among Punjabi speakers.
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012): The workshop was held at the Spring Dale Senior School, Amritsar on August 17, 2012. Nearly 50 participants including students and teachers from eight different schools apart from the students and teachers of Spring Dale School attended the workshop. One of the active and long-time Punjabi Wikipedian Guglani Gurdip Singh led the workshop with the active support from Shiju and Subhasish.
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012): A Wikipedia workshop was organized in Chandigarh by the British Library over two days on August 24 and 25, 2012. Bipin Kumar, Head of British Library and Christina, Deputy Manager had pivotal roles in designing this workshop with support from Piyush, a wikipedian. The session on Day 1 was conducted by Subhashish Panigrahi and the session on Day 2 was conducted by Subhashish and Piyush.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012): This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur. Prof. Ashwin Kumar from the Department of English, Tumkur University and Kannada wikipedians, Om Shiva Prakash, Hareesh, Tejus and Pavithra played vital roles in organising this workshop. Shiju Alex participated in this workshop. About 30 participants including students and teachers participated in this workshop.

Blog Entries

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012): Nitika Tandon tells us about the Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telegu Wikipedia, how it will run, its necessity and the future steps.
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012): A series of Wikipedia meetings were organized in Hyderabad on September 29 and 30, 2012. These workshops were a part of the larger effort to help Wikipedia contributors in the same city to meet each other and strengthen the local community. There was coverage about this event in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Event Organised

Thinking with Data@CIS (CIS, Bengaluru, September 16 – 18, 2012): The course offered at the National Institute of Advanced Studies was screened in CIS office.

HasGeek HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of September: Cartonama Conference (TERI Complex, Bengaluru, September 22, 2012). The event was organised by HasGeek with support from CIS.

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Newspaper Column

One. Zero. (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, September 16, 2012): “The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak.”

Pathways to Higher Education

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society and CIS. The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India. Training workshops were organised in the month of September at Xaviers in Mumbai on September 6, 2012 and in Newman College, Thodupuzha from September 17 to 20, 2012. Each workshop had 25-30 undergraduate students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They were trained to use digital technologies in order to think through problems of social justice.

Researchers at Work

From 2012 to 2015, the RAW series will build research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects is a global collaborative project to renew the conceptual power of networks. It concentrates on changing the habits of living. The Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University is an important locus.

CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Jadine Lannon and Alok Vaid-Menon live blogged about the event:

Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s) (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 2 Live Blog: Radhika Gajjala Lectures on e-Philanthropy (by Jadine Lannon, September 27, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos (by Jadine Lannon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses (by Alok Vaid-Menon, September 26, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space
(by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).
Habits of Living Thinkathon - Day 4 Live Blog: Namita Malhotra on Amateur Pornography (by Jadine Lannon, September 30, 2012).

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India

Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 2,00,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The knowledge repository deals with these modules: Introduction to Telecommunications, Telecommunications Infrastructure and Technologies, Government of India Regulatory Framework for Telecom, Telecommunication and the Market, Universal Access and Accessibility, The International Telecommunications Union and other international bodies, Broadcasting, Emerging Topics and Way Forward. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers.

The following are the new outputs:

Associations Regulating Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): Broadcast regulation in India is currently an intricate web, with multiple agencies involved in formulating and implementing policy, drafting and enforcing legislation.
Optical Fibre (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 11, 2012): This unit tells us what is optical fibre, the types of optical fibres, how does an optical fibre work, fibre-optic relay system, and why are optical fibres uses in telecommunication systems.
Direct to Home (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit tells us about Direct to home television, its history, how it works, the programming, its advantages and disadvantages are discussed in this module.
Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 18, 2012): This unit brings you the history and evolution of cable television in India, talks about other cable based services, cable television digitization rule and the end consumer in India.
Private FMs (Commercial, Campus and Community Radios) (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 24, 2012): This unit introduces us to AM and FM, tells us the role of private FMs including what is a community radio and what is a campus radio.
Types of Radio Broadcasting in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 28, 2012): This unit tells us what is radio broadcasting, takes us through the history of radio broadcasting in India, explains what is AM and FM in the Indian context.
A History of All India Radio and Its Operations (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, September 29, 2012): This module gives us a picture of the history of All India Radio and its operations.

Newspaper Column

Changing Our Game (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, September 5, 2012): “Adopting 'co-ordination models' like the Stag Hunt could reduce contention and improve outcomes.” This was re-posted in Organizing India blogspot.

Event Participated

Insights India 2012 (organised by MACH, Bangalore, September 26 – 28, 2012): Snehashish Ghosh and Srividya Vaidyanathan participated in this event.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. Over the last four years our policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos. With the Government of India we have done policy research for Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc.

CIS is an accredited NGO at WIPO and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

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CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2012-bulletin

Access to Knowledge — September 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T06:18:01Z

This is the first newsletter from the Access to Knowledge team of CIS in Delhi. The issue introduces you to the CIS Access to Knowledge program, the team members in Delhi and reports from Workshops conducted by the Wikipedia community.

Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of upto INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India:

Access to Knowledge Programme

The Wikimedia Foundation’s India Program has become the Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS.

CIS Office in Delhi

The A2K team consists of four members: Nitika Tandon, Shiju Alex, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

Statistical Report

Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report (January – June 2012) (by Shiju Alex). The data for this report and analysis are based on the statistical data published at http://stats.wikimedia.org.

Wikipedia Workshops

Note: Although most of these workshops were conducted prior to the grant period, the reports for all of these were written during September, hence we are featuring these:

The First Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Punjabi University, Patiala (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 28, 2012).
Punjabi Wikipedia Workshop at Amritsar (by Shiju Alex and Subhashish Panigrahi, September 30, 2012).
Wikipedia Workshop in British Library, Chandigarh (by Subhashish Panigrahi, September 27, 2012).
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University (Tumkur, Karnataka, September 15, 2012).
Wikipedia comes to Hyderabad! (by Noopur Raval, September 30, 2012). There was coverage in the Hindu on September 28, 2012.

Blog Entry

Editor Growth & Contribution Program on Telugu Wikipedia (by Nitika Tandon, September 29, 2012).

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For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/access-to-knowledge-september-2012-bulletin

Habits of Living: Surrogate States, Bodies and Networks, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2012-09-28T12:40:30Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is organising the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012.

Schedule

26^th September, Wednesday

9:30 – Registration and Tea

10:00 – Introduction – Wendy Chun, Nishant Shah

11:00 – Pecha-kucha presentations followed by Q&A from all the participants

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Akansha Rastogi, Shiv Nadar Museum, New Delhi

16:00 – Oliver Lerone Schulz, Post Media Lab, Lueneburg

19:00 – Welcome Banquet @ Jaymahal Palace with other invitees

27^th September, Thursday

10:00 – Radhika Gajalla, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green

11:30 – Saumya Pant, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Deepak Menon, India Water Portal, Bangalore

14:00 - Joshua Neeves, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:30 – Eivind Rossaak, National Library of Norway, Oslo

19:00 – Trip to down-town Bangalore (optional)

28^th September, Friday

07: 30 – Bangalore Heritage Walk (optional)

11:30 – Maya Ganesh (via Skype), Tactical Technologies, Berlin

13:30 – Lunch

14:30 – Rijuta Mehta, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:00 – Wendy Chun, Brown University, Rhode Island

19:00 – Dinner at South Indies, Infantry Road

29^th September, Saturday

09:30 – Maesy Angelina, AusAid, Jakarta

11:00 – Renee Ridgway, NEWS, Amsterdam

12:30 – Lunch

14:00 – Gita Chadha, SNDT Women’s College, Mumbai

15:30 – Open Board: Habits of Living

17:00 – Wrap up and next steps

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/habits-of-living

Censorship makes India fall two places on global internet freedom chart

praskrishna — 2012-09-27T10:37:47Z

A recently released global report on the internet freedom rated India 39th in 2012, a slip from two places last year.

The article by Dilnaz Boga was published in DNA on September 27, 2012.

The report titled, Freedom on the net 2012 (FOTN): A global assessment of internet and digital media by Freedom House, a Washington-based monitoring group conducted a comprehensive study of internet freedom in 47 countries.

Quoting Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, the report said 309 specific items (URLs, Twitter accounts, img tags, blog posts, blogs, and a handful of websites) have been blocked by the government. But officially, the government has admitted to blocking 245 web pages for inflammatory content hosting of provocative content.

Ketan Tanna, India analyst for Freedom House told DNA, “A reflection of the downward spiral in the freedom on the net that Indians enjoy is evident in the upward revision of scores for India in the FOTN 2012 report. India was one of the only 4 of the 20 countries that “recently experienced declines” and are democracies. The other three are Mexico, Turkey and South Korea.”

Internet usage in India continues to increase, with tens of millions of new users getting online each year. According to the International Telecommunications Union, internet penetration was 10% — or about 120 million people at the end of 2011. Among internet users, 90 million were ‘active,’ accessing it at least once a month (70 million urban and 20 million rural).

The report has mentioned that in India, “amid several court cases regarding intermediaries’ responsibility for hosting illegal content, much evidence has surfaced that intermediaries are taking down content without fully evaluating or challenging the legality of the request”.

Citing an example, Tanna said in December 2011, the website Cartoons against Corruption was suspended by its hosting company after a complaint filed with the Mumbai police alleged that the site’s cartoons ridiculed parliament and national emblems. “As a result of such dynamics, large swaths of online content are disappearing, and the losses are far more difficult to reverse than the mere blocking of a website,” he added.

More common than website blocking is the removal of content based on judicial orders, government directives, and citizen complaints. This phenomenon that has increased in recent years and in some cases, targeted content on political, social, and religious topics, the report said.

The Indian authorities had submitted 68 removal requests covering 358 items between January and June 2011. According to Google, 255 items related to what it categorised as “government criticism,” while 39 involved defamation and 8 pertained to hate speech.

In January, responding to a freedom of information request, the home ministry reported that the government orders 7,500 to 9,000 phone interceptions per month, the report disclosed. Criticising this practice and the government’s disregard for the Constitution, the data revealed, “Established guidelines regulate the ability of state officials to intercept communications, but India lacks an appropriate legal framework and procedures to ensure proper oversight of Intelligence agencies’ growing surveillance and interception capabilities, opening the possibility of misuse and unconstitutional invasion of citizens’ privacy.”

As another method of controlling speech and activism online, governments have imposed temporary shutdowns of the internet or mobile phone networks during protests or other sensitive times. Localised internet shutdowns and mobile phone shutdowns occurred in India due to security concerns, the report said.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dna-india-sep-27-2012-dilnaz-boga-censorship-makes-india-fall-two-places-on-global-internet-freedom-chart

Pitroda seeks to put govt information in public domain

praskrishna — 2012-09-27T05:13:05Z

In the first-ever Indian government press conference on Twitter, Sam Pitroda, adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on public information infrastructure and innovations, championed the cause of putting government information in the public domain to usher in openness and empowerment.

Surabhi Agarwal's article was published in LiveMint on September 25, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

“In India, we have the Right to Information (Act) but the information is locked up in files,” he said in a video that was uploaded on YouTube before the conference started. Pitroda said the government has various plans to build robust information infrastructure on a scale that has never been done before.

“I firmly believe that information is the fourth pillar of democracy along with (the) legislature, executive and judiciary,” he tweeted as opening remarks during the press conference titled “Democratization of information”.

	Even though Pitroda largely reiterated the government’s already announced plans in the space of digitization, the move to hold a press conference over Twitter has been largely construed as as a sign that the administration, criticised for attempting to rein in social media, is trying to come to terms with it. Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society, said too much shouldn’t be read into Pitroda holding a press conference on Twitter. One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media, he said. “They (government) should be available all the time.”

Even though Pitroda largely reiterated the government’s already announced plans in the space of digitization, the move to hold a press conference over Twitter has been largely construed as as a sign that the administration, criticised for attempting to rein in social media, is trying to come to terms with it.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society, said too much shouldn’t be read into Pitroda holding a press conference on Twitter. One government bureaucrat available on Twitter for a fixed period doesn’t make up for the non-existence of the government on social media, he said. “They (government) should be available all the time.”

The department of electronics and information technology recently issued guidelines for government agencies on improved engagement with citizens through social media. Tuesday’s press conference may spark a trend of more such engagements on social media platforms by government agencies.

Pitroda said that the public information infrastructure (PII) will include a national knowledge network that will connect 1,500 nodes for universities, colleges, research labs and libraries along with connecting 250,000 panchayats in the country through fibre optics. The information network will be operational in the next two year, Pitroda said in the YouTube video.

The government’s open data platform (http://www.data.gov.in), the beta site for which was launched some time ago, will provide access to government data and documents, he said.

Even though the government’s battles with the Internet continue over issues of regulation, which have often been construed as censorship, an increasing number of political leaders and agencies have been using the route to get their message across.

Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has sought to engage with people through video chat on Google+ Hangout. West Bengal chief minister and Trinamool Congress (TMC) chief Mamata Banerjee has been using Facebook to make public her views on recent economic and political developments.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has also been communicating over Twitter in the recent past. The authorities have sought to block accounts that style themselves as belonging to the Prime Minister. Account holders have said that some of these are satirical in nature.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/www-livemint-september-25-2012-surabhi-agarwal-pitroda-seeks-to-put-govt-information-in-public-domain

E-Governance, Identity & Privacy

praskrishna — 2012-09-26T06:17:03Z

This chapter will look at different legislations, projects, and policies pertaining to e-governance and identity that India has put in place, and examine both the strengths and the weaknesses of these, through the lense of privacy.

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