Centre for Internet and Society

Time to bury e-mail?

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:30:10Z

Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, had a simple message to the world: email is outdated since it can no longer handle the sort of digital communication that we’ve got used to. Facebook Messages, which integrates email, SMS, instant messaging and social networking, is the way forward, he claimed.

Zuckerberg isn’t the first one to point out the limitations of email. Last year Google too said that email, a technology invented in the ’60s, was not equipped to serve our current needs. “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today,” Google proclaimed during the launch of Google Wave.

As it turned out, Wave was a great product but served an entirely different purpose — collaboration. While this made sense at the enterprise level, it didn’t offer much added value to email users engaging in one-to-one conversations. Google Wave today is defunct since users didn’t buy into Google’s argument. Will Facebook Messages suffer the same fate?

The answer depends a lot on whether users face the problem that Zuckerberg claims they do. “A lot of people are trying to solve the problem of email. But I don’t know what that problem is,” says Mahesh Murthy, CEO, Pinstorm, a digital marketing agency. According to Murthy, there are three main issues with email: storage space, spam filtering and prioritising messages. And modern email services such as Gmail have evolved to address these concerns.

Facebook obviously thinks otherwise. According to the company we need one inbox for all our digital communication, which includes emails, chats and SMS. Second, messages from your Facebook contacts will be considered more important and will go into Social Inbox. All other messages will go into a separate folder. Third, messages will be threaded according to people and not subject lines as is the case with Gmail and other email services.

According to Gaurav Mishra, head, social media practise, MS&L Group, these are compelling reasons to start using Facebook Messages. But enough to ditch your email account? Not quite, say experts.

“Integration is a marketing myth,” says Nishant Shah, director, Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based research organisation, “Many of us like to keep our information in different silos. We have heard of young people getting fired from their jobs because they were not able to keep personal information compartmentalised.”

Secondly, giving greater priority to messages from people in your contact list may be misplaced. “The nature of conversation on Facebook is casual and the criticality of a message and hence the need for an immediate response may not be that high,” points out Murthy. An email from, say, a client or a prospective recruiter who may not be on your friends list, may be more critical.

There’s no doubting that Facebook Messages could change the way we conduct our casual conversations. But email serves basic and universal needs. For example, while introducing the new service, Zuckerberg pointed out how school kids felt email was too slow. According to Shah, however, it is important to understand what the kids found email slow for. A movie plan can be made quicker through SMS, but the same kids might submit their assignments via email.

Of course, Zuckerberg has not claimed that Facebook Messages will be an email — or more specifically Gmail — killer. But Facebook’s PR machinery would have known how the media would react. By undermining the very concept of email — one of Google’s strongest products — Facebook has managed to make Google look like the hero of yesteryears.

Analysts agree that Facebook Messages is really about retaining users on its website — if Facebook can give its users a reason to spend more time on its website rather than that of an email service, it can serve more ads. “It is about economics. But Facebook is trying to turn it into a cultural argument,” says Shah.

Still, one thing is certain; Facebook Messages will not suffer the same fate as Google Wave, partly because it is simply an update (and a rather good one) to an existing feature within Facebook. But it is far from a replacement to email. As Mishra puts it, “I will not close down my existing email ids. But I will start using Facebook to message my relatives and friends. It is going to be the future of messaging, not the future of email.”

Read the original in DNA

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/bury-email

Mobile banking set to get a boost from IMPS

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:38:54Z

Customers will now be able to transfer money from their accounts to any other account in the country using their cellphones, through the National Payment Corporation of India's Inter-bank Mobile Payment Service (IMPS). The facility allows transactions without the need for a computer or an Internet-enabled phone.

Experts say the service introduces a new form of customer-friendliness that a developing ICT nation like India requires. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India records more than 670 million registered mobile subscribers; with the penetration of Internet technologies through mobile phones being higher than the spread of the Internet through broadband connections, the service, they reckon, is expected to boost banking transactions better than Internet banking.

“Though the Internet banking services are user-friendly, they are actually restricted to a limited number of tech-savvy, English-speaking Internet users in the country. With the IMPS, the mobile phone, which is ubiquitous, becomes a handier device for the average user,” says Nishant Shah, director (research), Centre for Internet and Security.

The service provides an inter-operable infrastructure for banks to offer a real-time money transfer facility to customers through mobile phones in seven seconds, says A.P. Hota, CEO and Managing Director of the NPCI. The mobile fund transfers offered by banks and technology providers take 24 hours, and are allowed only if the sender and the receiver hold accounts in the same bank, a hiccup the IMPS seeks to overcome.

With mobile phone-based applications popular and more inclusive in their reach, Mr. Shah says, it might be not only more far-reaching to have banking services available through encrypted SMS systems, because it is a medium that people are familiar with, but also the application-based systems are going to benefit a lot of people, especially who live in areas with inadequate access to banking systems.

Citing South Africa and the Philippines where the IMPS has been successfully launched, experts say the banking and telecom sectors are equipped with the latest security measures for launching the service. With most banks now using a Java-based robust system which works on some kinds of phones and is supported by a limited number of Operating Systems, the system is said to have tried-and-tested security features with double layers of encryption. Hence, the responsibility of caution is more on the side of the user than on technology, experts say, citing cases of sharing of passwords, leaving phones unlocked and sharing of sensitive information with strangers as causes for financial crimes online.

Seven banks have already been offering the IMPS. Seven more are linking up through this network. Gradually, all 50 banks licensed by the RBI are expected to offer the service, which will be free of cost till March 31, 2011.

Read the original in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/mobile-banking

November 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T11:46:10Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society!

News Updates

The internet’s new billion: New web users — in countries like Brazil and China — are changing the culture of the internet.
http://bit.ly/hKUb5n

‘Piracy is now a mainstream political phenomenon': “Piracy has become a mainstream political phenomenon,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in the city. The piracy that he was referring to was not the piracy of the high seas but the piracy of intellectual property.
http://bit.ly/gMC1Br

Open standards policy in India: A long, but successful journey: Last week, India became another major country to join the growing, global open standards movement. After three years of intense debate and discussion, India's Department of IT in India finalized its Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, joining the ranks of emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa and others. This is a historic moment and India's Department of Information Technology (DIT) deserves congratulations for approving a policy that will ensure the long-term preservation of India's e-government data.
http://bit.ly/dGo6Qo

Information, the world's new capital - Digital Natives: Information is the new capital and currency of the world, Nishant Shah, of the India-based Digital Natives with a Cause, told Bizcommunity.com yesterday, 10 November 2010, as the three-day workshop on digital and internet technologies that brought together young delegates from nine African countries ended in Johannesburg, South Africa. "If the 20th century was the age of the industrial revolution, the 21st century is now actually the age of the knowledge information," Shah said.
http://bit.ly/dpXIKY

What it means to be a child today: They move seamlessly between reality and virtual reality. The digital landscape they inhabit comprises generations — not of family — but of technology such as Web 2.0, 3G, PS4 and iPhone5. Their world has moved beyond their neighbourhood, school and childhood friends to encompass a 500-channel television universe, the global gaming village, the endless internet. These are the children born in the last decade and half — possibly the first generation that has never known a world without hi-tech.
http://bit.ly/cz3nBJ

Report: Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, 23 Oct 2010, Doha, Qatar: A summary of the event "Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum" held in Doha.
http://bit.ly/catHoi

DOC 2.0: A Resources Sharing Mela by NGO Documentation Centres: A Resource Sharing Mela and Meet of DCM (Document Centres Meet) at the Centre for Education & Documentation in Domlur, Bangalore.
http://bit.ly/dnwQMf

Wi-Fi Direct promises range, bandwidth higher than Bluetooth: Sharing, printing and connecting for Wi-Fi devices is going to be more convenient than ever with soon-to-be-launched technology Wi-Fi Direct, which enables devices to connect to each other without a conventional Wi-Fi hub. This article by Ramkumar Iyer was published in the Hindu on 31 October 2010.
http://bit.ly/aUul9f
Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property: Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, a movement in which Open Society Foundations have played a key role. It maps the vast terrain of legal, cultural, and technical issues that activists and thinkers aligned to the movement negotiate every day.
http://bit.ly/9nkQFM

Social Mashup!: Save the Date Join us to meet India’s most passionate, innovative, and curious start-up social entrepreneurs for two groundbreaking days of conversations, connections and inspiration. This event will be held on 2-3 December 2010 at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.
http://bit.ly/bKKcar

Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum: Promoting Openness in Today's Digital World
http://bit.ly/961Ieg

Crisis for identity or identity crisis?: The hurry with which the government is pushing its most ambitious project to assign a number (UID) to every citizen without any feasibility study or public debate has raised many questions. http://bit.ly/8Zt9mf

Upcoming Event

Identity, Identification and Media Representation in Video Game Play: An Audience Reception Study: Adrienne Shaw from the Annenberg School of communications, who is a visiting fellow at MICA is giving a public talk on research on representation in video games on 27 November 2010 at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.
http://bit.ly/909xkU

Research

My Bubble, My Space, My Voice Workshop - Perspective and Future
The second workshop for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” research project named “My Bubble, My Space, My Voice” took place at the Link Center of Wits University, in Johannesburg, South Africa from 6 November 2010 to 9 November 2010. Samuel Tettner, Digital Natives Co-cordinator shares his perspective on the workshop.
http://bit.ly/bPX6Xd

Archive and Access: Call for Review
The Archive and Access research project by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran and Abhijit Bhattacharya is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The project that attempts to look at the ways in which the notion of the archive, the role of the archivist and the relationship between the state and private archives that has undergone a transition with the emergence of Internet technologies in India has been put up for public review. http://bit.ly/d4o809

Just Where We Like It
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.
http://bit.ly/96cK8q

Taking It to the Streets
The previous posts in the Beyond the Digital series have discussed the distinct ways in which young people today are thinking about their activism. The fourth post elaborates further on how this is translated into practice by sharing the experience of a Blank Noise street intervention: Y ARE U LOOKING AT ME?
http://bit.ly/ciyiiR

Talking Back without "Talking Back"
The activism of digital natives is often considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with The Blank Noise Project and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level – how young people today are thinking about their activism.
http://bit.ly/bHAvDE

The 'Beyond the Digital' Directory
For the past few months, Maesy Angelina has been sharing the insights gained from her research with Blank Noise on the activism of digital natives. The ‘Beyond the Digital’ directory offers a list of the posts on the research based on the order of its publication.
http://bit.ly/b3TK3C

First Thing First
Studies often focus on how digital natives do their activism in identifying the characteristics of youth digital activism and dedicate little attention to what the activism is about. The second blog post in the Beyond the Digital series reverses this trend and explores how the Blank Noise Project articulates the issue it addresses: street sexual harassment.
http://bit.ly/cM1HFf

Change has come to all of us
The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native.
http://bit.ly/9J82YY

Accessibility

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities
The Centre for Internet and Society is proud to announce the launch of its first publication, the “e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities" in collaboration with the G3ict (Global Initiative for Inclusive Information Communication Technologies) and ITU (International Telecommunications Union), and sponsored by the Hans Foundation. The handbook is compiled and edited by Nirmita Narasimhan. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union has written the preface, Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D has written the introduction and Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict has written the foreword.
http://bit.ly/gfKNYO

Intellectual Property

Statement of CIS on the Work of the Committee in the 21st SCCR
The twenty-first session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights was held in Geneva from 8 to 12 November 2010. Nirmita Narasimhan attended the conference and represented the Centre for Internet and Society.
http://bit.ly/fJVNPI

We’ve All Got Some Baggage
America’s newest trade agreement is not going to kill only iPods. The article appeared in the Tehelka Magazine Vol 7, Issue 45, Dated November 13, 2010
http://bit.ly/cVrpWd

Internet Governance

Consumer Privacy - How to Enforce an Effective Protective Regime?
In a typical sense, when people think of themselves as consumers, they just think about what they purchase, how they purchase and how they use their purchase. But while doing this exercise we are always exchanging personally identifiable information, and thus our privacy is always at risk. In this blog post, Elonnai Hickok and Prashant Iyengar through a series of questions look through the whole concept of consumer privacy at the national and international levels. By placing a special emphasis on Indian context, this post details the potential avenues of consumer privacy in India and states the important elements that should be kept in mind when trying to find at an effective protective regime for consumer privacy.
http://bit.ly/eEs5Qx

CIS Responds to Privacy Approach Paper
A group of officers was created to develop a framework for a privacy legislation that would balance the need for privacy protection, security, sectoral interests, and respond to the domain legislation on the subject. Shri Rahul Matthan of Tri Legal Services prepared an approach paper for the legal framework for a proposed legislation on privacy. The approach paper is now being circulated for seeking opinions of the group of officers and is also being placed on the website of the Department of Personnel and Training for seeking public views on the subject. The Privacy India team at CIS responded to the approach paper and has called for the need for a more detailed study of statutory enforcement models and mechanisms in the creation of privacy legislation.
http://bit.ly/eVTwVC
Privacy and Banking: Do Indian Banking Standards Provide Enough Privacy Protection
Banking is one of the most risky sectors as far as privacy is concerned due to the highly sensitive and personal nature of information which is often exchanged, recorded and retained. Although India has RBI guidelines and legislations to protect data, this blog post looks at the extent of those protections, and what are the areas that still need to be addressed.
http://bit.ly/flq09V

Privacy and Telecommunications: Do We Have the Safeguards?
All of you often come across unsolicited and annoying telemarketing calls/ SMS's, prank calls, pestering calls for payment, etc. Do we have any safeguards against them? This blog post takes a look at the various rules and regulations under Indian law to guard our privacy and confidentiality.
http://bit.ly/hnTwKp

Privacy, Free/Open Source, and the Cloud
A look into the questions that arise in concern to privacy and cloud computing, and how open source plays into the picture.
http://bit.ly/awpCyF

Privacy Concerns in Whole Body Imaging: A Few Questions
Security versus Privacy...it is a question that the world is facing today when it comes to using the Whole Body Imaging technology to screen a traveller visually in airports and other places. By giving real life examples from different parts of the world Elonnai Hickok points out that even if the Government of India eventually decides to advocate the tight security measures with some restrictions then such measures need to balanced against concerns raised for personal freedom. She further argues that privacy is not just data protection but something which must be viewed holistically and contextually when assessing new policies.
http://bit.ly/9rvQPt

American Bar Association Online Privacy Conference: A Report
On 10 November 2010, I attended an American Bar Association online conference on 'Regulating Privacy Across Borders in the Digital Age: An Emerging Global Consensus or Vive la Difference'. The panelists addressed many important global privacy challenges and spoke about the changes the EU directive is looking to take.
http://bit.ly/dy41zc

Telecom

3G Life
You can video chat, stream music and watch TV on your phone. Offering high-speed internet access, 3G would change the world of mobile computing. Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on 14 November 2010.
http://bit.ly/gyxaW2

Ideology and ICT Policies
For better policies, decision-makers need to know their own and others’ biases, and consider what others are doing, writes Shyam Ponappa in an article published in the Business Standard on 4 November 2010.
http://bit.ly/dbl3Ai

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The internet’s new billion

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:31:19Z

New web users — in countries like Brazil and China — are changing the culture of the internet.

The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice.

New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. Registering online was the only way.

“If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. “Nowadays, internet in Brazil is a necessity.”

Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. The newest billion people to venture online are doing so in developing countries rather than North America or Europe.

And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. For businesses nimble enough to serve markets as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, the shift promises a staggering number of new customers.

But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. The new users are changing the culture of the internet itself. Researchers say the web as it was originally, if idealistically, conceived — a largely free, monolingual space where a shared digital culture prevailed — may soon be a distant memory. And it’s happening remarkably fast.

“Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth. He’s a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group’s Sao Paulo office who co-authored a report released in September called “The Internet’s New Billion.” It concludes the number of web users in developing-world “BRICI” countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia — will jump from 610 million this year to 1.2 billion by 2015.

When the internet crossed the billion-user threshold just five years ago, the developed world commanded a 60-40 majority online, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. Today, that proportion has roughly reversed.

The new users are younger, poorer and more numerous than ever before, BCG’s analysts said, and increasing numbers will need web access and won't be able to afford broadband in their living room.

As Fabina da Silva pecked away on a keyboard to register her sons for school, she was in many ways typical of low-income Brazilian users. Those who don’t have web access at home often pay small fees to use ad hoc cybercafes known here as “LAN houses.” Many began as rooms full of connected computers, or local area networks, for multi-player gaming, but their customer base has since broadened.

In India, those following the trend say a huge portion of the new billion will enter the web via mobile devices.

“If you look at our broadband figures in India, it’s quite pathetic,” said Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. “And less than 1 percent of the population has ever accessed the internet.”

But recently, many Indian telecommunication firms have begun giving out free data plans with their mobile devices — a move Sunil said will instantly send millions of Indians onto the internet. “The moment an end user acquires a smart phone they become a data user because they’re not paying for it,” he said. “But they’re not coming onto the internet like you and I know.”

Instead, phone companies only provide access to a few sites, such as Wikipedia and Facebook Zero, a stripped-down mobile version of the social networking site that omits photos but allows messaging and status updates. “They’re coming onto a network that, from the beginning, is a complete walled garden,” he said.

The new walls dividing regions of the internet aren’t likely to stop there. Even as more users join the web worldwide, they are increasingly separated by language. What the nearly 400 million users in China experience as the internet is vastly different than the web surfed by Americans. Much of the software and websites on the Chinese web are produced domestically in the local language. That’s also how it works in Russia and Indonesia.

Some observers say this difference has political consequences. “Many of the local companies provide far better service than the likes of Google and Facebook in those markets,” said Evgeny Morozov, a digital technology researcher at Stanford University. “But also those local websites are much easier to censor because the corporate entities behind those sites all have some domestic presence.”

Morozov is author of an up-coming book “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” and he said there’s a dark side to be found in the internet’s new billion, too. Because poorer users resort to more centralized methods for getting online — cybercafes, cell-phone towers — their activity will be much easier to monitor.

“The fact that so much of this is happening in cybercafes and mobile devices actually empowers the government because those two things are much easier to control than a desktop computer in your house,” Morozov said.

Morozov is also skeptical of notions that greater diversity of cultures online will lead to more cultural dialogue. “There is very little interaction between communities and it’s not because the tools are lacking. It’s just that modern-day Indians and modern-day Russians have nothing to talk about most of the time,” he said. “There may simply be no demand for joining that global village.”

More optimistic web scholars argue there will be cultural conversations, but bridging the gaps between communities will take effort. “The internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “There’s some interface between them but there’s a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.”

Instead of becoming the world’s biggest tool for cultural exchange, Zuckerman said the web could become its principal medium for mutual misunderstanding. “We’re mostly talking to people like ourselves rather than talking across cultural boundaries,” Zuckerman said. “And when we do cross cultural boundaries, it’s often in a way where we’re overhearing something that really pisses us off.”

Take for example the 2005 scandal after a Danish newspaper posted cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, sparking riots across the Muslim world. Zuckerman said such incidents may become routine. “It’s a problem of unseen audiences,” he said. “We always have to be aware there are other audiences out there listening, and they’re particularly listening for mentions of themselves.”

For a more amusing and recent online snafu, Zuckerman prefers citing a topic that went viral on the micro-blogging site Twitter this summer. The topic, the Brazilian Portuguese phrase “Cala boca, Galvao,” was mysterious to many English-speaking users. Asked to explain, a few mischievous Brazilians claimed the Galvao was a rare Amazon bird being slaughtered to extinction for its colorful feathers. For everyone who re-tweeted the phrase, so the pranksters claimed, 10 cents would be donated to a global effort to save the bird.

The encouragement helped catapult the phrase into the ranks of Twitter’s top-trending topics, or most-repeated phrases worldwide last June. But in reality, Galvao was the first name of Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian sports commentator on the Globo network, whose pronouncements during the World Cup had irritated many of his compatriots. In Brazilian Portuguese, “Cala boca” roughly means, “shut up.”

“There’s an entirely different conversation going on that’s so incomprehensible to Americans that the Brazilians make fun of us when we try to understand,” Zuckerman said. “In many ways that sort of characterizes for me what’s going on with the contemporary ‘net.'”

But Zuckerman still believes virtual borders can be crossed. In 2005, he co-founded Global Voices, an aggregator and translator of blogs from around the world, in part to help the next billion web users communicate.

“These billion users are sort of proxy for the global middle class,” he said. “They’re an increasing economic force, an increasing cultural force, and they are the people we need to negotiate with and have a conversation with if we want to address problems like climate change.”

In the run-down Engenho da Rainha neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, some of the LAN house customers seemed more interested in using the web to play games than solve the world’s problems.

One wiry teen in a blue baseball cap barely glanced away from his screen to answer questions. “I’ll spend all day, all night on the internet if I’m allowed,” said Carlos Wallace Cruz, 16. “I’d say I’m 98 percent addicted.”

Cruz’s drug of choice isn’t likely to ring a bell with Americans his age. It’s a video game available only on Orkut, a Google social networking site, wildly popular in Brazil and India but less so in the United States.

When a visitor asked if he ever spent time on Orkut’s much more famous rival site, Cruz responded with earnest puzzlement.

“What’s Facebook?” he asked.

Read the original in the Global Post

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-new-billion

‘Piracy is now a mainstream political phenomenon'

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:44:40Z

“Piracy has become a mainstream political phenomenon,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in the city. The piracy that he was referring to was not the piracy of the high seas but the piracy of intellectual property.

Mr. Abraham was speaking at the ‘Resource mela and meet of documentary centres' at the Centre for Education and Documentation (CED). The three-day mela ended on Sunday.

He argued that the process of documentation was a political matter. The theme of his talk was on the tussle between knowledge in the public domain versus its restriction by copyright. Mr. Abraham explained that documentation centres can have four positions vis-à-vis intellectual property restrictions.

The first position could be to agree with the existing law on intellectual property and defend the interests of those who own those rights.

A second position could be to acknowledge the usefulness of copyright laws while balancing it with the interests of the creator, entrepreneur, consumer and the general public. This balancing act is being further pushed by three important global campaigns — the right of persons with disabilities to read, the right of student communities to bypass certain copyright restrictions, and the necessities of archivists and librarians.

Moving to the other side of the spectrum, a third position that documentation centres can have is a ‘position of openness' by supporting only freely licensed intellectual property material. The extreme position that can be taken is to dismiss all the laws that exist around intellectual property and freely “pirate” knowledge.

‘No longer shameful'

Arguing from this position, Mr. Abraham said that it was no longer shameful to be known as a “pirate” today. “There are elected members of parties advocating piracy in certain European countries such as Sweden and even in the European Union.”

Mr. Abraham openly advised documentation centres not to greatly concern themselves with copyright issues in their work, as in India no two lawyers would agree on copyright laws while very few cases of copyright infringement actually came up in Indian courts.

He concluded his talk by indicating that there was no global model that could be applied to intellectual property rights “as there is no model that works for everyone everywhere”.

The resource mela was intended to be a multi-dimensional sharing centred around a national network of documentation centres called DCM. The programme was organised by Akshara, Aalochana and CED.

Read the original article in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/piracy-political-phenomenon

Open standards policy in India: A long, but successful journey

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:40:53Z

Last week, India became another major country to join the growing, global open standards movement. After three years of intense debate and discussion, India's Department of IT in India finalized its Policy on Open Standards for e-Governance, joining the ranks of emerging economies like Brazil, South Africa and others. This is a historic moment and India's Department of Information Technology (DIT) deserves congratulations for approving a policy that will ensure the long-term preservation of India's e-government data.

A major victory for the Open Source community is that the policy now says, "4.1.2 The Patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard shall be made available on a Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard."

This victory is really important to the open source community because open source and open standards have a symbiotic relationship. While open source is the freedom to modify, share and redistribute software source code, open standards refer to the freedom to encode and decode data and network protocols. One freedom without the other is a limited freedom.

In the Indian policy, proprietary software vendors wanted to define open standards in such a way that even royalty-based standards would be included. Due to stiff opposition from the free and open source software community, Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), academia and others, this proposal was rolled back.

Under the National e-Government Action Plan, the Indian government is spending more than 10 billion dollars on e-governance. Some of the largest greenfield e-governance projects are in India. For example, one project aims to give a unique ID to more than 700 million Indians. Given the scale and scope of e-governance in India, the storage, archival and retrieval of e-governance data is a critical state responsibility. The standards selected by India also have global implications because the sheer volumes of usage in India, could make those standards the most popular standards in the world.

It must be remembered that while software changes every few years, the underlying data (birth and death records, census data, tax data etc.) is fairly static and might have to be preserved for centuries. If the government stores its data in a closed format, it could permanently lose access to that data if the owner of that format goes out of business or refuses to provide access to that format. If the government stores its data in proprietary formats that require royalty payments, the negotiation power of the vendor goes up as more and more data is stored in that proprietary format; a situation that no sovereign power should tolerate.

The Indian policy also states that a single open standard will be used for e-governance. This clause is also extremely important. For example, if a Central Government Ministry requests a certain set of information from state governments in India, and each state government submits the data in a different format, enormous amounts of time will be wasted in converting the data into a common format. There is also risk that data could be lost in the process of converting data from one format to another. Therefore, the usage of a single, open standard for an application area is the backbone that will unify these applications and enable the sharing of data across different applications. This will drive more efficiency in e-governance enabling policy makers and e-government practitioners to quickly pull together data from different government departments and take more informed decisions.

It was a very tough fight and the proprietary vendors used their market clout and strong field presence in their attempts to subvert open standards. For example, in the previous draft policy dated 25/11/2009, the wordings of the key section read,

"4.1.2 The essential patent claims necessary to implement the Identified Standard should preferably be available on a Royalty-Free (no payment and no restrictions) basis for the life time of the standard. However, if such Standards are not found feasible and in the wider public interest, then RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND) or Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND) could be considered."

Commenting on the final policy, veteran journalist, Glyn Moody said, “As you can see, there is no room for doubt here, no quibbling with 'RF on Fair, Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (FRAND)' or 'Reasonable and Non Discriminatory terms and conditions (RAND)' as the earlier version suggested: just a clear and simple 'Royalty-Free basis for the life time of the Standard'.”

So how did the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community succeed against tremendous odds? Some key actions that helped us succeed are:

   1. We worked long and hard to educate the public and the media. At first, some journalists shied away from writing on this subject because they found it too arcane and complex. It took over six months of talking to mediapersons before one of the mainstream publications carried an article on open standards. Once that happened, the dam broke and other publications also started to write about this “arcane” subject.
   2. The academic community, especially in the prestigious Indian academic institutions, were very supportive of open standards. Many academicians have influential positions on government committees and their support helped.
   3. India has a very vibrant set of Civil Society Organizations. The FOSS community worked with leading CSOs like IT For Change, Center for Internet and Society, Knowledge Commons and others that are founded by people who have tremendous experience in working on technology policy issues. A loose-knit coalition was formed under the title of FOSSCOMM and some excellent representations were made to the Indian government.
   4. Many sections within government itself were firmly in favor of open standards and the community worked closely with them.
   5. The community made common cause with sections of industry that supported open standards. This helped counter the pressure from industry associations that were supporting proprietary standards.

It was a long but extremely rewarding issue to be involved in and I am documenting this in the hope that other countries can benefit from the experiences we gained in fighting for open standards in India. Jai Ho! (May you be victorious!)

Read the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/open-standards-policy

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

Information, the world's new capital - Digital Natives

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:41:31Z

Information is the new capital and currency of the world, Nishant Shah, of the India-based Digital Natives with a Cause, told Bizcommunity.com yesterday, 10 November 2010, as the three-day workshop on digital and internet technologies that brought together young delegates from nine African countries ended in Johannesburg, South Africa. "If the 20th century was the age of the industrial revolution, the 21st century is now actually the age of the knowledge information," Shah said.

The workshop, hosted in collaboration with the Netherlands-based Hivos Centre for Internet and Society, aimed at analysing how young Africans use the digital tools and platforms at their disposal to create social change in their environments. Delegates came from countries such as South Africa, Morocco, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Egypt, Uganda, Nigeria and Kenya.

Youth need to be more involved

However, despite the power of this newly-found capital and currency, there is a general impression out there that not everyone is getting access to the information or being part of the discussion of how that information is produced. Fieke Jansen, of Hivos, said research shows most of the young people growing in the south are not being part of the discussion, as policymakers, academics and practitioners act on their behalf, thus influencing their lives.

Jansen said: "We told ourselves we should break this cycle and include them in this discussion, as we strongly believe that there is a need for young people to grow up and intersect with technology in the aim to create social change."

Shah said: "Look, worldwide there is a huge pressure on young people to become economically active. You can see how governments all over the world are putting more resources into pushing populations to get access to the digital.

"Excluding the youth by, for instance trying to censor the internet, could only mean that there is a lack of understanding of how internet works.

"Older people can no longer ignore the youth in this age of digital revolution because exposing young people to digital technology can give them more voice that could help bring change, for example they can get involved in issues such as government accountability and transparency."

Gap between academic, practice

Furthermore, Jansen said research also shows that a huge gap exists between academic and practice, something she said her organisation and its partners were working hard to address. "We need to bridge that gap because academic and practice need each other," she pointed out.

Digital Natives with a Cause, which is based in Bangalore, is a research company specialised in the intersection of internet into society. The two organisations organised another workshop in August this year in Taipei, Taiwan, attended by young delegates from several Asian countries. A third workshop is due to take place in early December in Santiago, Chile's capital city.

It is estimated that the global youth population now stands at 1.2 billion this year, 85% of which live in developing countries.

Jansen said: "There is no limit on what young people can do with digital. And age doesn't matter in technology, it is the way you approach technology that matters."

Youth, agents of change

Shah said nobody can produce change in isolation. "It is time the world saw young people not only as beneficiaries of change, but also as agents of change. So it is time we start listening to them. While the older generation needs to teach the youth, young people also need to tell them if you don't build a new army, society will be in trouble."

The Johannesburg workshop was also made possible with the help of their local partner, South Africa-based The African Commons Project.

Download and read Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report.

For more information, contact the Hivos Centre for Internet and Society at www.hivos.net, the African Commons Project at www.africancommons.org or go to www.digitalnatives.in/africa.

Read the original article here

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

Archive and Access: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

The Archive and Access research project by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran and Abhijit Bhattacharya is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The project that attempts to look at the ways in which the notion of the archive, the role of the archivist and the relationship between the state and private archives that has undergone a transition with the emergence of Internet technologies in India has been put up for public review.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.

The monograph has emerged out of the "Archive and Access" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 15 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archive-and-access

What it means to be a child today

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:42:34Z

They move seamlessly between reality and virtual reality. The digital landscape they inhabit comprises generations — not of family — but of technology such as Web 2.0, 3G, PS4 and iPhone5. Their world has moved beyond their neighbourhood, school and childhood friends to encompass a 500-channel television universe, the global gaming village, the endless internet. These are the children born in the last decade and half — possibly the first generation that has never known a world without hi-tech.

These tweens and teens were born with dial-up internet, learnt to crawl alongside the PC and practiced writing the alphabet on the desktop. To them, a world without keypads, joysticks, digicams, headphones and LCD is unimaginable. For them, the Dark Ages are the time when television was black and white.

Nishant Shah, director of research at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, says, "We are living with digital natives — populations that do not know the ins and outs of analogue technologies but they do often instinctively take to the world of digital and internet technologies. They view the world differently, connect with each other in unprecedented fashions and often question the authority structures developed by analogue technologies."

But no one is born into or with technology, Shah points out, and it's still the older generation that is shaping the new technologies.

Even so Indian childhood in 2010 is markedly different from ever before, he says, in that "the younger generations growing up with digital and internet technologies are using them for things that were not integral to the technologies. For example, Facebook was only meant to be a social networking site. Twitter was merely a microblogging platform. And yet, we now see the young users using these spaces for political participation, social transformation and mobilization of resources."

A survey of 14,000 children aged between 12 and 18 in 12 Indian cities by Tata Consultancy Services last year found that 63% of urban students spend an hour online daily; more than 80% have access to mobile phones and one in four have laptops. They do their homework and assignments online, access report cards, chat, blog, game, download, SMS and send photos via Bluetooth. The internet is becoming friend, philosopher and guide for the 'screenagers', supplying them with endless friendship requests, enlisting them for social causes and sometimes offering emotional solace.

Delhi student Manil Chhabra, 13, who swears by his mobile, desktop and PS2, supports many causes on Facebook, including the welfare of street dogs and gay rights. He also bonds with friends online. "My mother gets angry that I 'waste' too much time on the cell phone and online but I do try to make family time. It is not like I don't want to go out with my parents anymore. But I have a busy schedule and have free time only on Sundays. I would rather spend it with friends than my parents who I meet every day."

That said, this doesn't always translate into 'real' friendship of the physical sort. Mumbai businessman Anoop Sharma says of his 14-year-old daughter Aruhi, "My daughter has friends she chats with on Facebook but does not even say 'hi' to when she meets them!"

Admittedly, many young Indians today limit their friendships to the slightly antiseptic interaction possible on the Net. In Mumbai, Amara Mustan, 10, is constantly busy with his iPhone, an iPod with a "state-of-the-art" docking station and a Macbook. She says, "I don't think I have the time to be in touch with any of my friends except on Facebook."

Does this change social interaction? Clinical psychologist and student counsellor Dr Etishree Bhati agrees that the way children now use technology redefines the way they judge themselves and interact with everyone else. "Earlier, children turned to parents and siblings for emotional support. Today, they are checking up personality, IQ and other tests online themselves. Coming to me is the last option. Sometimes, they even crosscheck whether what I tell them tallies with these test results," says Bhati.

So yes, children in 2010 are more knowledgeable and aware. The downside is the "superiority complex and stress" says Bhati wryly.

For urban children then, if both parents are at work, the school day ends with returning to an empty home and the 'human' contact of the internet. Manil's mother, Simar Chhabra, says she is sad to note that today's children "do not understand and realize the joy of solitude. My son has absolutely no time for himself. Even when he is in bed, he is messaging till the time he falls asleep. They are disconnected from themselves and with their families."

Bhati says the impact of increasing exposure to technology is yet to be understood. "Cognitive learning can get affected. Some schools have barred students from joining Facebook. But what do you do when teachers are themselves interacting with the whole class on Facebook?"

As children routinely Google for answers to class quizzes, skipping books and encyclopaedias altogether, scientists worry that they are in danger of developing 'magpie minds' — flitting between web pages and losing the ability to analyze.

Is technology at fault? No, says Nishant Shah. "Technology in itself cannot be good or bad. It is we, the users, who make the decisions on our usage of it and what we can do with it. Children as young as two are also getting introduced to books. Is exposure to books at much younger ages necessarily bad?"

Shah believes that young users of technology are exactly like the generations that went before — only different. "Each generation has used the technologies that they are most familiar with, in order to bring about change."

He believes that the era of individualism seems to be ending and the future lies in networks and how we work, live and play within networked societies.

Is the 'twitch speed' or the rate at which networked children adapt to newer technologies the number every parent and school teacher needs to know? Keeping pace may be the only way to stay connected with the networked generation.

Read the news in the Times of India

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/a-child-today

Report: Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, 23 Oct 2010, Doha, Qatar

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:43:25Z

A summary of the event "Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum" held in Doha.

Although I arrived in early morning of Saturday, 23 October 2010, I managed to attend Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum, held at Sharq Village, Doha Qatar. Here is below a summary of the event.

The welcoming speech was given by Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. Al Jaber spoke about the importance of open digital environments for the region, and outlined specific initiatives that ictQATAR is leading to embrace it (establishment of incubation center, drafting policies that encourage open source in government and arabizing content). She noted that "The Arab world has a strong and important voice that must be heard. Embracing a digitally open world will put us at the forefront of innovation and help propel us towards being a knowledge based economy." The full speech of Dr. Al Jaber is available here.

Michelle Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation provided her insights of openness. She described elegantly openness as “a state of mind” and is about spreading innovation. To Baker, if you want to be effective on the internet, you need to have “scale”. Openness is important for “scale”. Creative Commons is a framework of how to work with a copyright system and share ideas. Mozilla intends to build a layer of the internet designed for individuals to make civil and social value. According to Baker, there are many degrees of “openness” and it up to the users contributing to open projects and the companies to choose between the various levels. She argues that openness does not mean “free” and believe that in certain areas this might hold some truth, but the matter is far from being settled.

Joi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons gave an interesting presentation entitled “Innovation and Digital Content Rights”. He described from his own experience while working for Japanese IT companies how innovation was perceived pre the internet era and afterward. He also compared between the traditional style of IT innovation (governments, large companies, experts) and the new style of innovation with the arrival of the internet (users contributing to open source and open content projects). To joi, the internet is made of various layers and stacks. Creative Commons is the next stack. It basically lowers the costs and creates an explosion in knowledge and innovation. He gave examples of organizations that are using Creative Commons including Wikipedia, Aljazeera, and Governments in New Zealand and Australia.

Chris Dibona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google, spoke about open source. He outlined the motivations behind releasing code by developers. He described how Google practices open source projects such as “Chromium”. One audience member asked Dibona about Google’s attention in the region in relation to open source. He replied that Google needs to learn more about the region and the culture of the Middle East. His full presentation is available here.

Professor Michael Nelson, a visiting professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University spoke about “open clouds”. He emphasised that we are living in new world where small countries can make big impact in technology world. Estonia is the most “wired” country in Europe. Skype changed the way we do business. Qatar can provide the seed for the magic cloud. This can be achieved by having the right policies in the right time.

The second panel entitled “Openness in Science and Technology” was moderated by John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science, Creative Commons. He gave introductory remarks to the use of CC in science. His full presentation is available here.

Shaikah Al- Jaber, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel International gave a presentation entitled “Open Innovation for Telecom Companies in the Middle East”. She mainly spoke about innovation in the telecommunication sector and how it can be achieved. Her full presentation is available here.

Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat, gave a presentation entitled “From Linux to Beyond”. He went through the history and development of “open source”. Redhat was the first cooperation to take “open source” into the commercial arena. It was founded in 1983 and it currently employs 3500 employees with offices in 29 countries. He also discussed other issues related to open source community and open source adoption. His full presentation is available here.

Habib Hadid, the founder of Yalla Startup and Yamili.com did not give a presentation, but instead spoke spontaneously about business and how innovation and openness can help it. He recommended at the end to consider “innovation as a human right”.

Lucio Rispo, a strategic research director for the Qatar Science and Technology Park, spoke about the internet technological revolution and how it is changing the world. He described several initiatives that were taken in Doha, Qatar including IQRA to spread technology and innovation. His full presentation is available here.

The third panel was about “Openness in Government” that was moderated by Professor Michael Nelson. Sunil Abraham, executive Director for the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India provided interesting remarks about the internet and openness from the perspective of developing countries especially India. He also mentioned the importance of putting government funded research under open transparent and open models.

Paul Keller, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain, Knowledgeland, Netherlands, discussed the ways to promote openness in the public sector through the use of Creative Commons licensing model. To view his presentation click here. Marwan Marouf Mahmod, Executive Director of ICT Industry Development, ictQATAR spoke about his experience and the initiatives that they have taken in ictQatar.

The final panel was entitled “Culture, Creativity and Openness”. There were 3 speakers in this panel. Eric Steuer, Creative Commons Director and the moderator of the session gave an introduction to CC. He described how CC is being used in Education, music, museums, design, films and journalism. His full presentation is available here.

Addulrahman Al Qataba is a web and application developer from Qatar. He presented his philosophy on “open life”. He developed several projects that serve the open source community in mobile applications. The full presentation is available here.

Arend Kuster, Managing Director of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation (BQF) outlined the initiative that Bloomsbury Publishing is taking in Qatar to spread knowledge through printed books and journals published in Arabic and English.

Roger Mandle, spoke about museums and his experience as a director of the Qatar Museum Authority.

CC Arab World Second Meeting
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Sharq Village
12:30 p.m – 9:00 p.m.

The CC Arab world was attended by lawyers from Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and also users and enthusiasts supporting CC from across the region. The meeting was divided into two sessions. The first was for all attendees and the second was divided into two groups one for users and another for lawyers.

The first session started with a welcoming note by Joi Ito, who stressed the importance of reaching consensus decisions on important matters related to CC in the Arab world. He noted the difficulties associated with organising such an event and the efforts that CC has invested to bring all people together. Donna thanked the organizers and the supporters of the event particularly ictQATAR. She also set out the agenda for the meeting. Diane spoke about the Affiliate Enhancement Program and Michelle gave details on drafting road maps for each jurisdictions. Speakers from Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and the UAE presented their road maps to CC.

After discussion and questioning, Diane gave an introduction to CC naming policy in other jurisdictions including Spanish speaking countries. The discussion of CC naming policy started with Rami Olwan writing in Arabic suggested terms for English CC licences. There were two views in relation to the translation of the English terms to Arabic. The first view came from lawyers who want to use legal words that might not sound appealing to Arabic users of the licences. The second view came from users who want to use words that might not be legal and enforceable in courts. After discussion that lasted three hours, a decision was reached on each term. It was agreed to either to use المشاع الإبداعي (creative Commons) or use the English version alone. Attribution: نسب المصنَف; ShareAlike: الترخيص بالمثل, NoDerivatives: منع الاشتقاق; NonCommercial: غير تجاري.

I attended the second meeting of the session for lawyers. Diane and Joi were present at this session. Diane spoke then allowed each of the jurisdiction leads to speak. Hala Essalmawi from CC Egypt spoke about the A2K project in the library of Alexandria, Egypt and how it was important to start the project there.

I spoke also about the importance for CC in governments and education. Pierre El Khoury and Mohammed AL Darwish spoke about their upcoming events that will feature Lawrence Lessig as a speaker to the Lebanese Bar Association. Mohammad from CC Lebanon also spoke about his involvement in the Consumers International and the reports that he produced for A2K in Lebanon.

Omar Al Taweel presented his views to CC of how CC should proceed in Jordan. Several questions were asked by the lawyers and Diane gave answers. The meeting ended as some of the attendees had to leave for the airport.

See the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/report-digitally-open-innovation-and-open-access-forum-23-oct-2010-doha-qatar

Wi-Fi Direct promises range, bandwidth higher than Bluetooth

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:13:27Z

Sharing, printing and connecting for Wi-Fi devices is going to be more convenient than ever with soon-to-be-launched technology Wi-Fi Direct, which enables devices to connect to each other without a conventional Wi-Fi hub. This article by Ramkumar Iyer was published in the Hindu on 31 October 2010.

Previously known as Peer-to-Peer Wi-Fi, this new technology will allow the Wi-Fi Direct enabled devices to connect directly to each other anytime, anywhere.

It's much like Bluetooth except that it promises typical Wi-Fi range (up to 200 metres) and bandwidth (up to 250 mbps) much higher than what Bluetooth technology offers.

Moreover, the devices have a quick set-up mechanism, follow the latest security protocols and can easily connect to existing Wi-Fi networks.

Seamless usage

It means that the huge variety of existing Wi-Fi applications can be used with the new technology seamlessly.

The Wi-Fi Alliance — a coalition of technology industry giants that does the research and standardisation in Wi-Fi — announced on October 25 that it had begun certifying devices as being compatible with the new technology protocol.

According to the Wi-Fi Alliance Website, the technology can be implemented in any device such as cameras, mobiles, laptops and human interface devices.

Single-tech solution

“The Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available,” said Wi-Fi Alliance Executive Director Edgar Figueroa in a press release.

The technology is aimed at both consumer and enterprise applications and has a vast range of applications which aim at making gaming, sharing, printing and remote operations simpler and convenient.

While the Wi-Fi Direct's entry into the market may present new opportunities for application developers, it may be argued that such kind of range and speed can be easily misused.

Security consciousness

Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT-Madras, agrees: “This technology poses a security risk because if just one device in a group is compromised, almost all the devices in the group are at risk too. And this is especially true of organisations, because unlike in the past, wireless data transfers can now take place without the organisation being able to monitor them and particularly over a larger area.

“People will now have to be more security conscious than ever. Especially, the ones with a previous case of security breach.”

End of Bluetooth?

Wi-Fi Direct not only has all the features of Bluetooth, but boasts superior transfer speeds and range. Does this mean the demise of Bluetooth?

Experts speculate that Bluetooth will not be affected much.

“In an existing market where there are millions of Bluetooth-enabled devices, it is unlikely that any manufacturer will retire the technology just because of a new one.

“Bluetooth will not be affected much; at least in the next couple of years,” said Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

Read the original in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/wi-fi-direct

DOC 2.0: A Resources Sharing Mela by NGO Documentation Centres

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:13:51Z

A Resource Sharing Mela and Meet of DCM (Document Centres Meet) at the Centre for Education & Documentation in Domlur, Bangalore.

Programme

18th Nov: 9.30 am to 20th Nov. 2 pm

Draft 3 ( to be finalised )

For DCMers
9.30 pm to 12 noon
CED Terrace

Interaction
2 pm to 4 pm
CED Exhibition Hall

Public Session
5 pm to 7 pm
CED Terrace

18th Nov.	Multi-Media/New Media. AVs, Photos, Internet - blogs	Managing Data Akshara Class.; Mapping Data: Timbaktu experience- Anne Marie.	Knowledge in an Internet Era: Role of DCs in Info-digital Society: Avinash Jha - KICS Sharing Session: Chair: Ashish Rajadhaksha
19th Nov.	Print Media Training Manuals, Newsletters, Posters etc	Producing Data: Data generation tools used by Aalochana in PC4D, Jagori safety audit	Internet : Reclaiming Civil society on the Internet. Public domain V/s copyright: Sunil Abraham:
20th Nov.	Interactive Media: Theatre, Melas?; Yuvati Mela:	Dissemination Marketing issues: Alvito; Mobile Libraries (Aalochana)	Ends

Workshop Banner

See the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/doc-2.0

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:14:30Z

Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property charts the rise of the access to knowledge movement, a movement in which Open Society Foundations have played a key role. It maps the vast terrain of legal, cultural, and technical issues that activists and thinkers aligned to the movement negotiate every day.

Produced with the support of the Open Society Information Program, the book aims to make accessible a diverse range of subject matter, including access to medicines, software patents, food security and access to agricultural biotechnology, the public domain, remix culture, free expression, and semiotic democracy.

It features over 60 essays from leaders in the A2K movement, including influential thinkers and doers like Yochai Benkler, Peter Drahos, Lawrence Liang and James Love. The book also contains a chapter by Senior Information Program Manager Vera Franz, exploring the potential to redress the copyright balance of a new international instrument to mandate a minimum set of limitations and exceptions.

An electronic copy of the book has been made available for free download under a specially crafted Creative Commons (by-nc-nd) license which additionally allows for translations.

Date: November 2010
Source: Zone Books
Author: Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds.

Contents include:

The Emergence of the Politics of A2K
The Conceptual Terrain of A2K
Strategies and Tactics of A2K
A2K in the Future: Visions and Scenarios

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NEW

The end of the twentieth century saw an explosive intrusion of intellectual property law into everyday life. Expansive copyright laws have been used to attack new forms of sharing and remixing facilitated by the Internet. International laws extending the patent rights of pharmaceutical companies have threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries. Recently, a multitude of groups around the world have emerged to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counterpolitics of “access to knowledge” or “A2K.” They include software programmers who take to the streets to attack software patents, AIDS activists who fight for generic medicines in poor countries, subsistence farmers who defend their right to food security and seeds, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to defend the digital commons. In this volume, Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have created the first anthology of the A2K movement, mapping this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. Intellectual property law has become not only a site of new forms of transnational activism, but also a locus for profound new debates and struggles over politics, economics, and freedom. This collection vividly brings these debates into view and makes the terms of intellectual property law legible in their political implications around the world.

“It’s hard to believe that the ‘definitive’ book has already been written about a movement as new as A2K. It’s even more unusual for an edited collection of essays to have the power of a monograph. But this collection of essays is both the definitive explanation of the access to knowledge movement and a beautifully constructed conversation about the various ideas, conceptual, political and organizational, that make it up. From Amy Kapczynski’s superb overview, to Yochai Benkler’s brilliant meditation on the commons, to Lawrence Liang’s superbly titled ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book,’ the central ideas of A2K are laid out with a freshness and power that is remarkable. And the rest of the contributors in the essays gathered here are just as strong. This is a must-have for university libraries, but it is also something that will be read intently, tactically, and sometimes uneasily, in venues ranging from WIPO to the university classroom. Highly recommended.”

James Boyle, Duke University, author of The Public Domain

“This is the first book of its kind. It comprehensively describes the intellectual contours of a powerful and emerging social movement and serves as a handbook for activism. The A2K movement is disparate and diverse. So assembling a volume that takes account of its various strands and influences is no small task. Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have selected works from the most influential writers and practitioners of this new distributed politics. I will certainly assign this book to my survey course next year.”

Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia, author of The Googlization of Everything

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

Social Mashup!

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T08:15:01Z

Save the Date Join us to meet India’s most passionate, innovative, and curious start-up social entrepreneurs for two groundbreaking days of conversations, connections and inspiration. This event will be held on 2-3 December 2010 at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.

Who’s invited? Start-up social entrepreneurs, senior social entrepreneurs, funders/investors and anyone else interested in early stage social entrepreneurship.

What will you get? You’ll have direct access to resources that meet your immediate and long-term needs. You might meet your mentor or mentee, your investor or investee, and your CEO or team member. And did we mention that we'll have a selection of artists and musicians in residence, all set to spark your creativity? Believe us, you're in for a dynamic, inspiring, affordable and fun two days that truly captures the spirit of a start-up!

What will you not get? Panels that seem to be designed for the panelists, talks that fail to inspire and networking that begins and ends with an exchange of business cards.

Speakers

The speakers represent a diverse range of perspective, experience and approach. With all of these people in the same place, sparks of social change are sure to fly.

Sachin Malhan, Inclusive Planet
Prema Gopalan, SSP
Gijs Spoor, Zameen Organics
Solomon Jayaprakash, Ashoka
Sunil Abraham, Mahiti Infotech Pvt Ltd
Ravi Agarwal, http://www.toxicslink.org/
Murali Mohan, Mukteshwari Bosco
Sunitha Krishnan, Muthu Velayutham
Dr Jayaprakash Narayan, Lok Satta Party
Vipin Thekkekalathil, Ashoka's Youth Venture India
Pankaj Jain, Acumen Fund
Payal Gupta, Flow Consulting
Rob Katz, Acumen Fund
Aarti Madhusudan, Governance Counts

Download the schedule

Contact

E-mail socialmashup@unltdindia.org or call + 91 22 3222 0475 or write to us at 4th floor Candelar Bldg, 26 St John Baptist Rd, Bandra W, Mumbai 400 050.

See the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/save-date