Centre for Internet and Society

Kanan and the Judge

praskrishna — 2011-03-31T10:24:24Z

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Kambara

praskrishna — 2013-05-13T13:25:02Z

Kambara

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Kambara

praskrishna — 2013-05-10T18:03:31Z

Kambara

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K Gopinath

praskrishna — 2010-10-11T07:03:58Z

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Jyoti Panday

praskrishna — 2014-04-29T03:36:59Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/jyoti-panday.pdf

Jyoti Panday

praskrishna — 2014-08-12T10:24:04Z

Jyoti Panday

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Jyoti Panday

praskrishna — 2014-08-07T09:38:15Z

Jyoti Panday

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Justice Bhatt

praskrishna — 2011-03-31T09:25:51Z

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Just Where We Like It

praskrishna — 2012-01-03T10:25:08Z

The micro space for status updates might become the new public space for discussion. Nishant Shah's column on Digital Natives was published in the Sunday Eye of the Indian Express on 21 November 2010.

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting the mecca of digital native research — The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University. In a workshop on digital safety, questions were cropping up faster than fractals on a screen-saver: What are the tools that digital natives use to mobilise groups? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environment? Are they using popular social networking sites and Web 2.0 applications for mere entertainment? Are these tools helping them re-articulate the political realm? While thinking through these questions, I glanced at my Facebook feed, to find a friend, a respectable professor in Taiwan, announcing, “I like it on the table.” I blinked thrice to ensure I was reading it correctly. Soon more female friends announced how some liked it on the floor, some liked it on the couch, some liked it in closets.

On Facebook, almost all users engage in updating their status updates. These updates can be varied — capturing moods and emotions, reporting on striking things, offering political opinions, suggesting movies and books to friends, and often making public announcements of important events. The updates appear as a live feed, in almost-real time, letting people in networks know, discuss and share information about their personal lives. Often, to outsiders, these updates would appear pointless; I remember somebody asking me, “But why would I want to know what you had for breakfast?”

However, status messages are also constantly used as a form of political mobilisation to raise awareness, to spread the word or to gather people around a common cause. In the early part of 2010, we saw a colour meme, which invited women users on Facebook to have a colour as their status update — “Black!”, “Green!”, “Red!”, “White!” without any other explanation. It was a viral phenomenon, with colours appearing from across the world, spanning different languages, cultures and contexts. It created discussions and conspiracy theories. Blogs discussed it, people tweeted about it and eventually, the word came out.

It was a meme — an internet gene (because it replicates), which spreads virally by inviting people to participate in a series of actions, either to answer a question or perform a certain act, and pass it along. The colour updates were part of a breast cancer awareness campaign that invited women to update the colour of their bra in their status and pass the note across to other women in their network.

The new meme with people writing suggestive messages about “I like it on my...” is a follow-up on the older one, where “it” stands for a purse. There is much critique of these kinds of games, where it seems all fun and sometimes dissociated (the coy suggestiveness plays with the female stereotype of women’s love for purses). However, this critique misses out on how digital natives, through a gaming mode, are able to generate discussion on the prevention of breast cancer. What was just a space for personal ramblings suddenly became a place of political mobilisation and participation. Both men and women, reading these memes, took a moment to think about breast cancer and generate a buzz. Discussions that started with curiosity ended on a note of reflection.

Memes like these, whether on Facebook or any other social networking site, generate discussions, capture attention and create awareness campaigns without any apparent funding or infrastructure. Digital natives who start and participate in such memes might not think of themselves as activists in the traditional sense and yet they are making interventions that would otherwise require support from traditional organisations.

As digital natives grow with new technologies, they change the ways in which we engage with the world. The micro space for status updates becomes the new public space for discussion and engagement.

I know digital natives who raise an eyebrow at holding a public rally on the streets, because to them, these don’t seem to be effective solutions. I am not suggesting that digital natives do not engage in those forms of civic protest. They do, and often in a style and scope that is effective. They organise, not using pamphlets and petitions, but by using tools like memes which might be obscure, funny, absurd and strange, and to an outsider meaningless. However, memes are here to stay.

Read the story in the Indian Express

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/just-where-we-like

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace (PDF)

praskrishna — 2011-08-21T13:35:36Z

file

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/publications/jurisdictional-issues

Jurisdictional Analysis

praskrishna — 2016-06-17T02:31:44Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/jurisdictional-analysis

June 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-07-16T16:00:11Z

The Centre for Internet & Society Newsletter for June 2019.

Highlights for June 2019

Rohini Lakshané and Shweta Mohandas have updated their paper 'Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone SEP Litigation' which chronicles mobile device SEP litigation in India. All developments in the lawsuits filed in the Delhi High Court and complaints made to the CCI that were published in reliable sources till 20 September 2018 are mentioned in this paper. Christ University in association with CIS-A2K organized the Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019, from 20 - 22 June 2019, at Christ University, Bengaluru. Forty-nine Wikimedians from four countries (Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India) participated in the event. Subodh Kulkarni in his report reveals that the event discussed challenges pertaining to retention and quality and methodologies to evaluate and measure the work being done on Wikipedia. CIS and Internet Society organized an event on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. The round-tables focused on the policies and regulation and technical evolution of the Internet. The report by Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy. An excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives was mirrored on the website. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in May:

5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; June 6, 2019).
Staying silent about cyberbullying is no longer an option (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 16, 2019).
Facebook sees its salvation with its cryptocurrency Libra (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 30, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Plugging into India’s broadband revolution (Navadha Pandey; Livemint; June 4, 2019).
Banking on artificial intelligence: In hiring drive, Bots are calling the shots now (Anjali Venugopal; Economic Times; June 4, 2019).
Fragmenting Cybersecurity Norms through the Language(s) of Subalternity: India in the East and the Global Community (Riccardo Vecellio Segate; Columbia Journal of Law; June 6, 2019).
Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today (Abigail D. Pershing; Yale Journal of International Law; June 6, 2019).
No Fintech company meets every single privacy requirement under IT Act: CIS report (Shilpa S. Ranipeta; Newsminute; June 10, 2019).
Facebook to pay Indians to give up privacy: Experts raise questions (Geetika Mantri; Newsminute; June 14, 2019).
Chasing fame and fun 15 seconds at a time: Why TikTok has India hooked (Tora Agarwala, Surbhi Gupta, and Karishma Mehrotra; Indian Express; June 23, 2019).
Facebook’s Libra: A bit too ambitious? (Rajmohan Sudhakar; Deccan Herald; June 30, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for 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.

Copyright & Patent

Research Paper

Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone SEP Litigation (Rohini Lakshané and Shweta Mohandas; June 30, 2019).

Wikipdedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference? (Sailesh Patnaik; June 5, 2019).
Karavali Wikimedians at All India Radio, Mangaluru (Bharathesha Alasandemajalu; June 13, 2019).
Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019 (Subodh Kulkarni; June 22, 2019).
SVG translation workshop Kannada (Gopala Krishna; June 29, 2019).

Jobs

CIS-A2K team is seeking applications for the following posts:

Event Organized

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference (Christ University; Bangalore; June 20 - 22, 2019).

Openness

Innovation and creativity are fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of the Internet radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software.

Event Hosted

Discussion on Open Standards with Bernd Erk and Jiten Vaidya (CIS, Bangalore; June 20, 2019).

Participation in Event

Rootconf 2019 (Organized by Has Geek; NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore; June 21 - 22, 2019). Karan Saini participated in the event.

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Blog Entry

The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet (Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover; July 3, 2019).

Event Organized

Setting the Agenda: A Behavioural Science approach to Data Privacy (Organized by Centre for Social Behaviour Change; Ashoka University and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi). Amber Sinha attended the meeting.

Participation in Events

Pranesh Prakash as Resource Person for ITD seminar on Competition (Organized by International Institute for Trade and Development; Bangkok; June 24 - 26, 2019). Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker in the session on Consumer Protection and Digital Rights- Defining Welfare and Fair Competition.

Cyber Security

Participation in Events

The Global Nature of Cybersecurity in a Changing World (Organized by Hewlett Foundation; San Diego; June 20 - 22, 2019).
Workshop on Cyber-Ethics: Values-driven Innovative Solutions (Organized by Embassy of Switzerland; Bangalore; June 28, 2019). Arindrajit Basu moderated a discussion on Cyber-Ethics.

Free Speech

Participation in Events

ICANN Masterclass (Organized by ICANN, Bangalore; June 19, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.
ICANN 65 (Organized by ICANN; Morocco; June 24 - 27, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions.

Article

5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Organizing India Blogspot; June 6, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Essay

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers (Sadaf Khan; June 11, 2019). This was written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives.

Participation in Event

Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi (Organized by the University of Manchester, England; June 14, 2019). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon presented their research on 'Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South'.

Blog Entries

Patreon: Understanding the Intersection of Art, Artiste, and Labour (Upasana Bhattacharjee; June 1, 2019).
#ArchivesForStorytelling (Aliyeh Rizvi, Bhanu Prakash, Dinesh, Malini Ghanathe, and Venkat Srinivasan; June 1, 2019).
#DigitalIdentities (Anjali K Mohan, Harish Boya, Janaki Srinivasan, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sarita Seshagiri; June 11, 2019).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2019-newsletter

June 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-08-11T02:52:10Z

CIS newsletter for the month of June 2018.

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights

Balbharati – the Maharashtra state bureau of textbook production and curriculum research – has issued a copyright policy that forces all publishers, digital educational-content creators, and coaching classes to obtain expensive licenses for developing material directly or indirectly relating to Balbharati’s content. This is an alarming development for Indian students reported Anubha Sinha in an article in the Asian Times on June 20, 2018.
CIS-A2K has started dialogue with the publishers for the last 6 months regarding FOSS, Open knowledge and content donation to Wikimedia Projects. As a result Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Prakashak Sangh, an apex body of publishers at all India level invited us for a orientation session at their annual gathering in Pune.
Submitted comments on the Draft Digital Communications Policy which was released to the public by the Department of Telecommunications of the Ministry of Communications on 1st May 2018 for comments and views.
Submitted comments on the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations which was released to the public by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on 29th May 2018 for comments and views.
The Task Force on Artificial Intelligence was established by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry to leverage AI for economic benefits, and provide policy recommendations on the deployment of AI for India. Elonnai Hickok, Shweta Mohandas and Swaraj Paul Barooah wrote a blog entry on the artificial intelligence task force. The blog entry was edited by Swagam Dasgupta.
The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet, wrote Sunil Abraham in an article published in the Economic Times on June 10, 2018.
An essay by P.P. Sneha was published in Summer Hill, a journal published by Indian Institute of Advanced Study. In the essay, edited by Dr. Bindu Menon, Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of digital humanities and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around digital humanities in the Indian context.
The inaugural conference of the Digital Humanities Alliance of India (DHAI) was held at the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore on June 1-2, 2018. P.P. Sneha was a keynote speaker at the event. Her talk was titled ‘New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital’.

Articles

Why NPCI and Facebook need urgent regulatory attention (Sunil Abraham; Economic Times; June 10, 2018).
Digital Native: Cause an Effect (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 17, 2018).
Maharashtra's Copyright Policy Makes Education Unaffordable (Anubha Sinha; Asia Times; June 20, 2018).

CIS in the News

Allow admins to add users to online group chats only after permission: SFLC.in (Times of India; June 1, 2018).
EC disables easy access to electoral data across states (Akshatha M; Economic Times; June 5, 2018).
Draft bill proposes Rs 1 crore fine, 3 year jail for data privacy violation (Vidhi Choudhury; Hindustan Times; June 8, 2018).
Citizens’ Draft Privacy Bill Seeks To Revolutionise Data Collection, Storage In India (Arpan Chaturvedi; Bloomberg Quint; June 9, 2018).
Police to counter fake news on WhatsApp (Nilesh Christopher and Naveen Menezes; Times of India; June 14, 2018).
'Full belief in fake texts shows cops not trusted' (Times of India; June 18, 2018).
Anushka finds support for her anti-litter tirade (Nina C. George; Deccan Herald; June 19, 2018).
Jindal varsity's international affairs students shine in job market (Economic Times; June 19, 2018).
Data Privacy: Footprints on the Web (Sujit Bhar; IndiaLegal; June 21, 2018).
Death By WhatsApp (News18.com, June 25, 2018).
Tech transformation: how agriculture is being redefined through digital innovation and startups (Your Story; June 29, 2018).

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge (A2K) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. Our A2K program comprises 2 projects: Pervasive Technologies done under a grant from International Development Research Centre examining interplay between cost-effective pervasive technologies and intellectual property and encouraging development of such technologies for social good, and Wikipedia under a grant from Wikimedia Foundation to enable the growth of Indic language communities and cultivate new editors in different Indian languages.

Wikipedia

Event Organized

Marathi Publishers' orientation session on FOSS,Open knowledge & Wikimedia Projects (Co-organized by Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Prakashak Sangh and CIS-A2K; Maratha Chamber of Commerce, Tilak Road, Pune; June 17, 2018).

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and use of the internet. CIS is engaged in two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Blog Entries

NITI Aayog Discussion Paper: An aspirational step towards India’s AI policy (Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok, Amber Sinha, Swaraj Barooah, Shweta Mohandas, Pranav M Bidare, Swagam Dasgupta, Vishnu Ramachandran and Senthil Kumar; June 13, 2018).
The AI Task Force Report - The first steps towards India’s AI framework (Authored by Elonnai Hickok, Shweta Mohandas and Swaraj Paul Barooah and Edited by Swagam Dasgupta; June 27, 2018).

Submissions

Comments on the Draft National Policy on Official Statistics (Gurshabad Grover and Sandeep Kumar; June 7, 2018).
Comments on the Draft Digital Communications Policy (Anubha Sinha, Gurshabad Grover and Swaraj Barooah; June 14, 2018).

Participation in Event

Is Privacy Obsolete? (Organized by TERI; Bangalore; June 22, 2018). Pranesh Prakash was a panelist.

Free Speech & Expression

Blog Entry

Network Disruptions Report by Global Network Initiative (Akriti Bopanna; June 12, 2018).

Telecom

CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Submission

Comments on the Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations (Sandeep Kumar, Torsha Sarkar, Swaraj Barooah, and Gurshabad Grover; June 22, 2018).

Researchers at Work

Participation in Event

Digital Humanities Alliance of India - Inagural Conference 2018 (Co-organized by IIM and IIT, Indore with support from CIS; IIM, Indore; June 1 - 2, 2018). P.P. Sneha was a speaker and gave the keynote address.

Essay

New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper) (P.P. Sneha; June 25, 2018).

About CIS

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2018-newsletter

June 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-07-18T02:21:10Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for June 2017.

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS made a submission on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) that has come into force this year. In the submission assessed the impact of GST on persons with disabilities. Indian Patent Office updated the Guidelines for Examination of Computer Related Inventions. Anubha Sinha throws light on the updated guidelines in a blog post. She has clarified that the updated Guidelines take no concrete position to help clarify the ambiguity around patentability of software inventions in India. A strategic symposium on Marathi Wikipedia and its sister projects was conducted in April 2017. Subodh Kulkarni has shared the developments in a report. Compiled a compendium on cyber security from the Indian context. The document is a comprehensive source compiling all the cyber-security related regulations, policies, guidelines, notifications, executive orders, court rulings, etc. CIS commented on the renewal of the .NET Registry Agreement. CIS expressed its strong opposition to the proposed renewal. The comments were prepared by Vidushi Marda with inputs from Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash. Harsh Gupta discussed "FAT ML (Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning) for Lawyers and Lawmakers" at the CIS office in Delhi on June 29, 2017. Shyam Ponappa in an article in the Business Standard opined that broadband in India needs reforms for local manufacturing and for infrastructure expansion and utilisation

CIS in the news:

Aadhaar: Ushering in a Commercialized Era of Surveillance in India (Jyoti Panday; Electronics Frontier Foundation; June 1, 2017).
Privacy is culture specific, MNCs hit by Aadhaar, says TRAI chief (Pranav Mukul; Indian Express; June 1, 2017).
Centre brings in new safeguards following cases of Aadhaar data leaks on government websites (Nidhi Sharma; Economic Times; June 2, 2017).
New rules for govt agencies to ensure security of personal data (Komal Gupta; Livemint; June 2, 2017).
Explore money apps but watch your data (Shaikh Zoaib Saleem; Livemint; June 8, 2017).
New law to unlock data economy (Yuthika Bhargava; Hindu; June 9, 2017).
Placements at NUJS: Class of 2017 Scores 100% (Simran Sahni; Livelaw; June 10, 2017).
Why did Nandan Nilekani praise a Twitter troll? (Kiran Jonnalgadda; Indian Express; June 10, 2017).
Are biometrics hack-proof? (Shaikh Zoaib Saleem; Livemint; June 11, 2017).
GoldenEye ransomware attack hit operations at Pipavav Port, JNPT (Jyotika Sood and Utpal Bhaskar; Livemint; June 28, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Digital Native: In digiville attention is Currency (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 11, 2017).
Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 24, 2017).

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Submission

GST - A Barrier to Human Rights for Persons with Disabilities (Nirmita Narasimhan; June 24, 2017).

Participation in Events

WSIS Forum 2017 (Co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNCTAD and UNDP, in close collaboration with all UN agencies; Geneva; June 12 - 16, 2017). Nirmita Narasimhan was a speaker.
Digital Accessibility (Organized by National Informatics Centre; Bengaluru; June 17, 2017). Rakesh Paladugula, a web accessibility trainer and Nirmita Narasimhan made a presentation to scientists about digital accessibility.

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for 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.

►Copyright

Participation in Event

Fixing Copyright for Education (SCCR34 Side Event) (Communia, EIFL, Creative Commons, and PIJIP; June 7, 2017). Anubha Sinha was a speaker.

►Pervasive Technologies

Participation in Event

Preliminary Findings: Working Requirements for Complex Products under the Indian Patent System (Organized by O.P. Jindal University; New Delhi; June 10 - 11, 2017). Prof. Jorge Contreras gave a talk on a forthcoming paper.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Train The Trainer 2017 (Manasa Rao; June 5, 2017).
Thematic Edit-a-thon at J.P.Naik Centre for Education & Development, Pune (Subodh Kulkarni; June 7, 2017).
Wiki Loves Mayabazaar (Pavan Santhosh; June 7, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Symposium at Gokhale Institute Of Politics & Economics (Subodh Kulkarni; June 7, 2017).
Digitisation, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource Orientation Workshop at Vigyan Ashram, Pabal, Pune District (Subodh Kulkarni; June 7, 2017).

Note: The workshops for the above blog posts were held earlier but the reports were published during the month of June.

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Internet Governance
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►Cybersecurity

Blog Entry

Cybersecurity Compilation: Indian Context (Leilah Elmokadem and edited by Elonnai Hickok; June 18, 2017).

Participation in Events

2nd India Think Tank Forum (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; June 19 - 21, 2017). Udbhav Tiwari participated in the forum.
Second India China Think-Tank Forum (Organized by Institute of Chinese Studies, the Indian Council of World Affairs, and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Beijing; June 22 - 27, 2017). Saikat Dutta represented an Indian think tank.

►Free Speech and Expression

Submission

Comments from the Centre for Internet and Society on Renewal of .NET Registry Agreement (Vidushi Marda, Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash; June 6, 2017).

Participation in Events

ISEA 2017 (Organized by the University of Caldas, Manizales; Columbia; June 11 - 16, 2017). Sharat Chandra Ram was a panelist.
Freedom of Expression on the Internet : Possibilities and Challenges (Organized by Bolivar Technological University; Cartagena; June 29, 2017). Sharat Chandra Ram was a speaker.

►Privacy

Participation in Events

BIS LITD 17 Privacy Panel meeting (Organized by National School of India University; Bangalore; June 21, 2017). Udbhav Tiwari attended the meeting.
DSCI Best Practices Meet (Organized by Data Security Council of India; Bangalore; June 22 - 23, 2017). Udbhav Tiwari attended the meeting.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Newspaper Column

Broadband Reforms for Local Manufacturing (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; May 31, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; June 5, 2017).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Event Organized

CISxScholars Delhi - Harsh Gupta - FAT ML for Lawyers and Lawmakers (CIS; New Delhi; June 29, 2017). Harsh Gupta gave a talk.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

► Request for Collaboration

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2017-newsletter

June 2016 Report

praskrishna — 2016-07-04T14:29:24Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/june-2016-report