Centre for Internet and Society

The geek shall inherit the earth

praskrishna — 2012-01-03T10:34:03Z

Demystifying the mysterious -agents changing the world around you.

I met somebody last night who called herself a digital dinosaur. She grew up in the ’80s, got her first computer in the ’90s, trained herself as a geek, found a career as a coder (moonlighted as a hacker), helped people create their personal web pages, and has worked in the IT industry for more than a decade now. In her day, she was the cyber-guru, instructing friends, families, acquaintances and people who wrote to her on the dos and don’ts of cyber-living. And now, she finds herself strangely disconnected from Web 2.0, which is expanding faster than we can understand it.

Her relationship with Internet technologies was one of creation; coding, cracking, hacking, controlling the world in binaries, in bits and in bytes, and that world is now receding.

The new wave of Internet users, who are Born Digital, relate to technologies in new ways. Coding has become the domain of the professional developer and programming is limited to a handful of geeks.

These digital natives occupy environments where it is more about game and expression. Their relationship with the internet is about creation and dissemination of information. They create networks and webs of relationships, with machines and people alike. They treat their gadgets as extensions of themselves and map their physical lives on to their virtual worlds. They are different, even from the earlier generation of technocrats, in how they relate to and understand the new technologies.

Digital natives are everywhere. They are in universities and colleges, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and tracking their online gaming avatars. They occupy offices, glued with equal passion, to dating or social networking sites, and moderating geek mailing lists.

We chance upon them in homes and bedrooms, sharing their most intimate details using live cam feeds and audio/video podcasts. If these images are familiar to you, you have encountered a digital native. It might have, recently, been a child who knows how to use the mobile phone more effectively than you do, or a teenager who can connect your machine online while thumb-typing on the cell-phone, in a language which is not very familiar to you.

It could also be the saucy colleague in office, who is always on the information highway, making jazzy presentations or playing games with his virtual avatar, or the taxi driver who has learned the power of GPS maps or even the chaiwallah who uses his mobile phone to download new music and conduct a romantic affair.

It is no surprise then that the digital natives appear mystifying, slightly frightening figures to those around them. Parents are concerned that they are losing touch with these youth who inhabit first and Second Lives seamlessly. Teachers lament that they value everyday cultural production on YouTube and blogs over canons and classics.

Policymakers are worried that they unwittingly break law and regulations through peer-to-peer sharing of information. Cultural industries are startled at how they produce as much as they consume, using easily available inexpensive tools to push the boundaries of cultural production; remixing, distorting, morphing and harvesting the potential of digital objects.

While many of these concerns are serious and need to be addressed, this column tries to focus on demystifying the digital native. Across borders, digital natives have been responsible for changing the contours of our world. They have fought repressive governments, like we saw in Iran’s Twitter revolution. They have mobilised people to challenge fundamentalism (the Pink Chaddi campaign in India). They have come to the aid of the needy and the ailing, like we saw during the recent natural disasters in Chile and Taiwan.

Digital natives are behind awareness initiatives to protect their privacy and right to information on social networking sites like Facebook.

They have changed the way knowledge is produced and consumed on online encyclopaedias like Wikipedia. They demand better education, transform their societies and show us the familiar through strange and uncanny lenses. Around the globe, in developed and developing information societies, digital natives are introducing radical changes that recalibrate our reality even as we live it.

Read the article in the Indian Express

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/geek-inherit-earth

Stiff Resistance Dogs India's ID Plan

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:59:06Z

An article about the UID project by Indrajit Basu in Asia Times Online.

Tembhali is little known beyond its neighborhood in northern Maharashtra. Yet, as Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi descended by on Wednesday, the tiny hamlet with less than 1,500 residents suddenly became the center of attraction in the global arena of e-governance.

India's prime minister and the ruling Congress party's leader were helicoptered in to officially flag India's most ambitious attempt to transform the way the state reaches its citizens - and also the world's largest identity program.

The so-called Unique Identification (UID) mission, which has been dubbed locally as "Aadhar" ("foundation"), the project will create unique biometric identification numbers for each and every one of India's 1.2 billion people.

Ambitious yet highly controversial, UID numbers will be linked to fingerprints, iris scans, personal information, a microchip for easy scanning, and more. Led by a new government agency called the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the project is spearheaded by Nandan Nilekeni, one of India's most famous techie-entrepreneurs as the co-founder of Infosys, who has been given ministerial powers and a magnanimous (rumored to be US$3 billion or more) budget to implement the grand plan.

According to Nilekeni, among the scores of advantages for the country's people, the millions of India's poor who are without access to the government's plethora of welfare schemes would benefit the most from the new identification system. Much like the mobile telephony, the UID number would connect the poor to the broader and advancing economy of India, he says.

"The government has taken up this project for two reason; one is there are large number of Indians specially those who are urban migrants and rural poor who do not have any form of acknowledged existence by the state and therefore they face the challenge of harassment in their lives. They do not get access to public services either. So the one of the main purposes of this program is to make life easier for the millions of poor, migrants and marginalized (expected to be over 300 million) people. As well as to give inclusion to them," said Nilekeni.

The other is to make all government welfare schemes far more efficient by ensuring that they reach "each and every deserving poor", he says.

Even as the impoverished tribal farming community in Tembhali - many of whom do not even own the land they till - wonder how a unique identity, as Manmohan declared on Wednesday, "can change their lives", UID is meeting stiff resistance from civil liberties groups, privacy advocates, and legal eagles.

Critics condemn the UID as a blatant intrusion to privacy, a tool that will increase bureaucracy and corruption, and say that in addition to being hugely expensive and even illegal, the UID goes against basic human values.

"This project, has been initiated without any prelude: there is no project document; there is no feasibility study; there has been no cost-to-benefit analysis and there are serious concerns about data and identity theft," said Gopal Krishna, Member Citizens Forum for Civil Liberties.

Worse, Krishna added, a project "that could change the status of the people in this country, with regard to security and constitutional rights has been initiated without any legal authorization; just on the basis of an executive order".

The strongest opposition to the project has been generated by the fact that it aims to create a huge digital database containing sensitive personal information in one central location. This is a security risk of "immense" proportions, according to critics.

"Given that the country has hardly any capability in securing its digital database, and an absence of privacy laws, UID's plans of storing its data in one centralized database is an immense risk," said Sunil Abraham, an activist at the People Union for Civil Liberties. "The trouble with a centralized infrastructure is that if it is compromised, then all of it will be compromised, which can result in the collapse of the country's information systems."

Nilekeni deflects these criticisms, saying that the UID Authority will use "the best expertise for security and we also have a policy of proactively publishing strategy policy report and committee reports on our website as well." But arguments against the project stretch on.

"The other opposition is the use of biometrics for ID," says Abraham. "Our fear is that most parts of the country do not have power and if the system mandates that every time a rural resident has to prove his identity biometrically for say collecting subsidized food, chances are that the process will be slower and more prone to failure because of lack of infrastructure."

That, according to critics, could give rise to newer complication or even manipulation of the biometric data - and hence an additional opportunity for corruption.

"A typical unlettered person does not understand the complexities of biometric data collection and verification," says Jiti Nichani, a researcher and an advocate, Alternative Law Forum. "Given the rampant bureaucracy and corruption in the country, this would give yet another reason for the corrupt to siphon off the largesse of a welfare scheme elsewhere; corruption will increase manifold as a consequence."

Still, its flip side is not really devoid of selling points; some of UID's beneficial characteristics are undeniable.

For one, experts say, for every rupee spent on the government's welfare schemes, lack of identity of a poor Indian results in just 15 paisa reaching them. UID then can really revolutionize the way government services are delivered.

Besides, inability to prove identity is not only one of the biggest barriers that prevent the poor from accessing benefits and subsidies, or stymie the government from reaching out to the deserving. It also stops the government formulating appropriate welfare polices, plugging leakages, and above all, eliminating fraud and duplicate identities.

UID, say its proponents, will no longer allow someone to represent themselves differently across a number of agencies, which could solve a lot these problems.

"A UID will enable the poor grab the right to education, get jobs on migration, get medical benefits and even open a bank account and get a mobile phone connection," said Nilekni. "The transformative capability of the UID scheme can be enormous."

Nevertheless, providing an identity to one billion plus Indians in a country so devoid of basic infrastructure is a Herculean task.

Its real challenge may not lie in the concerns that critics have raised, but perhaps in the politics of governance and its reforms. Experts say the success of the project depends on the effective use of political authority, and how Nilekeni and Manmohan manage to address corruption in the political and official systems.

Nilekeni though is undaunted. "I am aware that there are a lot of challenges and this is a humongous project," he said. "But there is a lot of political will and support, and the government is firmly convinced that this project could change the face of India."

Read the original in Asia Times Online

Note: Sunil Abraham does not work for People's Union for Civil Liberties

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

Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:59:30Z

Glover Wright of the Center for Internet and Society talks about Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India at the Innovate/Activate Unconference in New York Law School on 24 September 2010.

Video

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/data-activism-grassroots

September 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-10T07:22:30Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this bulletin we bring you updates of our research, news and media coverage and announcement of events organised in the month of September 2010.

News Updates

Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010: This conference is being held in Budapest from 20 to 22 September 2010. It is co-sponsored by Google and Central European University. Sunil Abraham and Anja Kovacs are attending the conference.
http://bit.ly/afo0WY

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project: Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.
http://bit.ly/dnJDRu
Innovate / Activate: The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School. http://bit.ly/cbICFq
Webinar: Closed for Business: A Global Panel Discusses International Copyright Laws and Their Impact on the Open Internet
http://bit.ly/a3ZFBw
The madness of software patents
India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth.
http://bit.ly/cpHd7R
Why piracy is tough to rein in
“Video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the film industry”
http://bit.ly/aDUpiY
Transparency and MDGs: the Role of the Media and Technology
Key quotes from sixth panel
http://bit.ly/b3a0YC
Copyright bill restricts Net access
Law to curb piracy may fetter creativity
http://bit.ly/cFj3rD
科技改變社會數位原生代計畫
The Chinese language press covered the Digital Natives workshop in Taipei.
http://bit.ly/bPhEO4
科技改變社會數位原生代掀波
The Chinese press published an article on Digital Natives.
http://bit.ly/bHaQor
Information is Beautiful hacks in India with David Cameron
The Prime Minister took some of the UK's top hackers and data experts with him to India this week. David McCandless was with them.
http://bit.ly/dr3AJ2

Events

International Conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT: ICT workshop in New Delhi from 27th to 29th October, 2010...Registrations open!
http://bit.ly/9flyEK
A Talk by Philipp Schmidt: Philip Schmidt of Peer 2 Peer University will be giving a lecture at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on 6 October, 2010.
http://bit.ly/aVyzMq

Research

On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop: What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed.
http://bit.ly/daE4dM
The Binary: City and Nature: A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.
http://bit.ly/b5FP5D
Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive: This post examines the concepts of state and government to lay the ground for understanding responsiveness enforced through transparency discourses and the deployment of ICTs, the Internet and e-governance programmes. It also lays the context for understanding why and how ICTs. Internet and e-governance have been deployed in India for improving government-citizen interfaces, eliminating middlemen, delivering services electronically and for introducing a range of similar reforms to institute transparency and a responsive state.
http://bit.ly/cNLKcY
The Responsive State --- Introduction to the Series: This post is an introduction to a series of posts on the concept of the 'responsive state'. In this series, I try to explain the various meanings that the term responsiveness has come to acquire when it is used in relation with the discourses surrounding transparency and the deployment of ICTs and the Internet to enforce transparency and thereby create a responsive state. Understanding the notion of responsiveness requires us to revisit and analyze certain concepts and the relations that have been drawn between concepts such as state, government, politics, administration, transparency, effectiveness, government-citizen interface, ICTs and effectiveness, among others.
http://bit.ly/agBOiq
Attentional Capital in Online Gaming: The Currency of Survival
This blog post by Arun Menon discusses the concepts of production, labour and race in virtual worlds and their influence on the production of attention as a currency. An attempt is made to locate attentional capital, attentional repositories and attention currencies within gaming to examine 'attention currencies and its trade and transactions in virtual worlds. A minimal collection of attention currencies are placed as central and as a pre-requisite for survival in MMOs in much the same way that real currency become a necessity for survival. The approach is to locate attentional capital through different perspectives as well as examine a few concepts around virtual worlds.
http://bit.ly/aaGZj8
What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least for Now: In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?
http://bit.ly/9a3I0G
Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context: This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India.
http://bit.ly/byfPye

Accessibility

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - A Conference in Delhi: The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore in cooperation with the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICT (G3ICT), a flagship advocacy organization of the UN Global Alliance on ICT and Development (UN-GAID), the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), UNESCO, Digital Empowerment Foundation, Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing and Employment and the Deafway Foundation is organizing an international conference, Enabling Access to Education through ICT in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The event is sponsored by Hans Foundation. Registration for the conference has begun.
http://bit.ly/bmrkf7

Access to Knowledge

Pre-grant Opposition Filed for a Software Patent Application by Blackberry Manufacturers: A pre-grant opposition was filed against a software patent application filed in the patent office by Certicom, a wholly owned subsidiary of Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturers of Blackberry. The opposition was filed on August 31, 2010 by the Software Freedom Law Centre which has recently expanded its operations to India. This exciting development was announced by Mishi Choudhary from SFLC on the lines of the seminar on “Software Patents and the Commons” organised on 1 September 2010 in Delhi jointly by SFLC, the Centre for Internet and Society, the Society for Knowledge Commons and Red Hat. Filing more such oppositions to software patents in India was in the pipeline and this is just the beginning of a movement to take on monopolisation of knowledge and ideas through patenting software, the organisers said.
http://bit.ly/9wE1Xs
First Post-Bilski Decision - Software Patent Rejected: In the first decision post-Bilski, the Board of Patents Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) rejected a software patent claimed by Hewlett-Packard. The ruling in this case has buttressed the fact that the Bilski decision furthered the cause of narrowing the patentability of software even though the Supreme Court of the United States totally avoided mentioning software patents or the applicability of the machine or transformation test for software patents in its decision.
http://bit.ly/cnPw7E
The Bilski Case - Impact on Software Patents: The Supreme Court of the United States gave its decision in Bilski v Kappos on 28 June, 2010. In this case the petitioners’ patent application sought protection for a claimed invention that explains how commodities buyers and sellers in the energy market can protect, or hedge, against the risk of price changes. The Court in affirming the rejection by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit also held that the machine- or-transformation test is not necessarily the sole test of patentability. The Court’s ruling of abstract ideas as unpatentable and its admission that patents do not necessarily promote innovation and may sometimes limit competition and stifle innovation have provided a ray of hope. In the light of the developments, the Bilski decision as far as patentability of software is concerned may not be totally insignificant, says Krithika Dutta Narayana.
http://bit.ly/bjrPGh

Openness

Free Access to Law—Is it here to Stay? An Environmental Scan Report: The following is a preliminary project report collaboratively collated by the researchers of the "Free Access to Law" research study. This report aims to highlight the trends, as well as the risks and opportunities, for the sustainability of Free Access to Law initiatives in each of the country examined.
http://bit.ly/9VVzkk
Open Access to Science and Scholarship - Why and What Should We Do?: The National Institute of Advanced Studies held the eighth NIAS-DST training programme on “Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Science, Technology and Society” from 26 July to 7 August, 2010. The theme of the project was ‘Knowledge Management’. Dr. MG Narasimhan and Dr. Sharada Srinivasan were the coordinators for the event. Professor Subbiah Arunachalam made a presentation on Open Access to Science and Scholarship.
http://bit.ly/ciohYy

Internet Governance

Moldova Online: An Interview with Victor Diaconu: In this interview for Russian Cyberspace, set up with the help of Sunil Abraham (Executive Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India), computer software professional Victor Diaconu explains the nature of Internet use, state control and the development of blogging and social media platforms in Moldova. Victor works at Computaris in Chisinau. He is Moldova educated, and has travelled to several western countries (including lengthy stays to US, UK) to learn about and understand what there is to be done in Moldova. Sudha Rajagopalan interviewed Victor Diaconu.
http://bit.ly/cgIvXT
Presentation of the UID project by Ashok Dalwai – A Report: On Tuesday, 7 September 2010, Ashok Dalwai, the Deputy Director General of the Unique Identification of India (UIDAI), gave a lecture at the Indian Institute for Science in Bangalore. Representing the UID Authority, his presentation explained the vision of the project and focused on the challenges involved in demographic and biometric identification, the technology adopted, and the enrolment process. Elonnai Hickok gives a report of his presentation in this blog post.
http://bit.ly/aAy5DG
Beyond Access as Inclusion: On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is co-organised in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting was to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.
http://bit.ly/cgS9py
Summary of UID Public Meeting, August 25 2010: A summary of the "No UID" public meeting that took place on Aug. 25th at the Constitution Club, New Dehli.
http://bit.ly/9epHTz
No UID Campaign in New Delhi - A Report: The Unique Identification (UID) Bill is not pro-citizen. The scheme is deeply undemocratic, expensive and fraught with unforseen consequences. A public meeting on UID was held at the Constitution Club, Rafi Marg in New Delhi on 25 August, 2010. The said Bill came under scrutiny at the meeting which was organised by civil society groups from Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi campaigning under the banner of "No UID". The speakers brought to light many concerns, unanswered questions and problems of the UID scheme.
http://bit.ly/97HwbS
Wherever you are, whatever you do: Facebook recently launched a location-based service called Places. Privacy advocates are resenting to this new development. Sunil Abraham identifies the three prime reasons for this outcry against Facebook. The article was published in the Indian Express on 23 August, 2010.
http://bit.ly/adXVjB

Telecom

What a highway can do: Despite signs of transformational change, we need more - SOPs and quality http://bit.ly/deUbmU

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2010-bulletin

Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:00:01Z

This conference is being held in Budapest from 20 to 22 September 2010. It is co-sponsored by Google and Central European University. Sunil Abraham and Anja Kovacs are attending the conference.

The conference Internet at Liberty 2010 will explore creative ways to address the boundaries of online free expression, the complex relationship among technology, economic growth and human rights, ways in which dissidents and governments are using the Internet, the role of Internet intermediaries, and pressing policy and legal issues such as privacy and cybersecurity. The event will bring together grassroots global activists alongside representatives of NGOs, academic centers, governments and corporations. The Centre for Media and Communication Studies is playing a core role in the organisation of the event.

Download the agenda

For further information, see CMCS website

Also see, Internet at Liberty 2010 website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/internet-at-liberty-conference

The Binary: City and Nature

praskrishna — 2011-08-02T06:05:53Z

A continuation of the last post wherein I am looking at various other representation of the city in both classical and popular medium, today I am writing my views on the analysis of certain Miniature paintings.

You might think why do I not come to the point of looking at the Internet and the City ? I am trying here to look at generic aspects of representation of 'cities' in other mediums as well. The aim would be to understand both historical as well as contemporary popular patterns in such representations. Other mediums such as cinema, television and print are well documented and one could look into secondary studies to understand patterns within representation of space in general and city in particular. So a first hand study of various miniature paintings, can help us tease out the issues associated around representation of space. I am assuming the conceptual basis of a representation might be same irrespective of medium or sometimes even time period. For example, I have listed out how the juxtaposing of different context in one fictitious representation in street posters is an important phenomenon that aims at lifting the present state of imagination to a different level/ world whereby creating a condition far removed from the context of its production but still very much part of us. See the first report for an elaborate account of posters and textbook representations.

Miniature paintings of various schools within India (Rajasthan, Kangra, Madhubani) have been an important documentation on the life and times of the place and its people. I have picked up the Rajasthani Miniature tradition to try and understand issues around representation of the city. Let me clarify on what I mean when I refer to a “city”.

City as a Cultural Concept: A settlement with its houses, streets, public buildings and markets, etc., is the stage for a complex social, economic and political negotiations. It is the arena where individual and groups are constantly engaged in charting, modifying and testing ideas of production in material or non-material terms. It is the place, where people with different skills, varied cultural background and divergent belief systems come together to forge a common identity and yet retaining something of their own connecting them back to their “native” town. Yes, it is still not very uncommon to be asked about ones “native” in public schools in India.. A question that tries to locate you with your region irrespective of your present identity. This meliu of different people, contradictory systems and varied aspirations creates a state of constant negotiations and flux that gives rise to what we call as the ingenuity of a city; be it arts, literature, engineering, performance or governance. So city really is not about size or spread or population. It is really about a set of relationship that shows immense complex attributes of social and material culture in a limited space.

Readings from Miniature Paintings

Imagined Geometry in a City

Cities are represented through use of geometry; a man-made system to organize and visualize the surroundings. Geometry becomes the basis to attain clarity. With the absence of perspective, the use of geometry becomes even more creative and division of paintings into various planes allows immense variation of expressions. But part of the city like streets, sidewalks, palaces, houses are all neatly placed in geometrical orthogonal planes. The character of the space is then attained not by photographic representation but juxtaposing and shifting of planes. The reliance of geometry for creation of the image is not only utilitarian but symbolic as well. It is in fact a statement on how they perceive the city and the surrounding nature. Geometry complements what is missing in nature. A visual order that is predictable and symbolic of the human will in face of harsh unforgiving surroundings.

Thus, the creative play of planes creates a sense of illusion, mystery and spontaneity usually associated with Indian cities. These paintings are a good example of non realistic expressions of the space that capture the spirit of the place from both spatial and cultural perspective. The question of modes of spatial representation and its relationship with the physical space is one that even concerns our study when we discuss how cities are represented on the Internet.

Figure 1 Geometric Clarification

Nature and the City

Similar to the search in posters, I tried to look for a very fundamental relationship of cities with nature in the Miniature painting traditions. It becomes very obvious, while pouring through different painting styles of India that city and nature were posited in a binary relationship. Nature is the anti-thesis to the city. Nature was wild with dense forests, dark clouds, water and animals whereas cities were organized by citizens.

Figure 2 Representation of Nature

Figure 3 The Binary: City and Nature

Nature was also the ground for forays by men and their army or the acetic but they all came back to the city. So city was the refuge for mankind and its civilization. Nature was wild, rich and also unpredictable. But still there are patterns in nature that humans understand; the waves of the water, the vegetation cover of the trees, the dance of the rains. Cities were the viewpoints from where nature that exists outside were seen. The dichotomy of the city and the surrounding forms the backdrop of most visual expression dealing with the space.

All pictures from Garden of Cosmos, The Royal paintings of Jodhpur. Thames and Hudson Publication.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/the-binary

UNESCO's Open Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-05T03:58:47Z

As UNESCO organized Freedom of Expression related workshops, this Open Forum will be dedicated to other key IGF topics, notably multilingualism in cyberspace, open access to scientific information, open educational resources, and accessibility for marginalized groups. In addition, UNESCO will take this opportunity to announce new initiatives and share experiences with participants. The interactive panel format will start with brief presentations from experts, followed by a moderated discussion with participants.

Organizer: UNESCO

Moderator:
Mr Jānis Kārkliņš, Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, UNESCO

Opening by Mr Jānis Kārkliņš

Introductory remarks

Mr Nitin Desai, Chair of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) will speak about: The future of the IGF and UNESCO’s opportunities
Mr Rod Beckstrom, CEO ICANN, on cooperation with UNESCO, next steps

1. Multilingualism in cyberspace

Proposed speakers:

Mr Baher Esmat, Manager, Regional Relations – Middle East, ICANN
Mr Daniel Pimienta, President of FUNREDES (Fundacion Redes y Desarrollo) Saint Domingue, Dominican Republic

Open discussion

2. Open access to scientific information and open educational resources

Proposed speakers:

Mr Indrajit Banerjee, Director, Information Society Division, Communication and Information Sector, UNESCO
Mr Abel Packer, Director of the SciELO.org Open Access (OA) initiative

Open discussion

3. An initiative on developing inclusive information policies using ICTs in education for persons with disabilities

Proposed speakers:

Mr Axel Leblois, Executive Director, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communications Technologies 9G3ict), An Advocacy Initiative of the United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development
Ms Anja Kovacs, Centre for Internet and Society (India)

Open discussion

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/unesco-open-forum

A Talk by Charlotte Lapsansky

praskrishna — 2011-04-22T07:41:20Z

Charlotte Lapsansky will give a lecture on the "Mobile Voices project" at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Thursday, 16 September 2010.

Mobile Voices is an academic-community partnership to research and design a platform for low-wage immigrants in LA to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. This low-cost, open source, customizable, and easy to deploy multimedia mobile storytelling platform will be designed in collaboration with its users, and will help recent immigrants who lack computer access gain greater participation in the digital public sphere.

In this talk, Charlotte will describe the Mobile Voices project and discuss key themes that have arisen for the Mobile Voices project team, including participatory technology design, community digital storytelling, and digital inclusion through mobile-phone based platforms. She will then describe the key technological and social issues that have arisen in the process of adapting Mobile Voices for India and the opportunities and challenges this presents.

About Charlotte Lapsansky

Charlotte Lapsansky is a PhD Candidate and American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. Charlotte has a background in development communication and mass media campaigns addressing gender and health in India. At Annenberg, her research interests include communication for social change, participatory development communications, community mobilization and strategic campaign planning. For the past two years, she has been a team member for Mobile Voices, a participatory project which has created a Drupal-based digital storytelling platform for first-generation, low-wage migrant workers in Los Angeles, allowing them to create and publish stories about their communities directly from their mobile phones. Currently, Charlotte is collaborating with organizations in India to customize and adapt the mobile voices platform social endeavours in India.

VIDEOS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/charlotte-lapsansky-talk

Software Freedom Day Inter-college Contest

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:24:09Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with Mahiti Infotech is co-organising the Software Freedom Day at Gandhi Statue, MG Road, Bangalore on 18 September 2010.

Download the poster for the event
Download the information about the competition

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/software-freedom-day

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:00:44Z

Fears about loss of privacy are being voiced as India gears up to launch an ambitious scheme to biometrically identify and number each of its 1.2 billion inhabitants.

In September, officials from the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), armed with fingerprinting machines, iris scanners and cameras hooked to laptops, will fan out across the towns and villages of southern Andhra Pradesh state in the first phase of the project whose aim is to give every Indian a lifelong Unique ID (UID) number.

"The UID is soft infrastructure, much like mobile telephony, important to connect individuals to the broader economy," explains Nandan Nilekani, chairman of the UIDAI and listed in 2009 by Time magazine as among the world's 100 most influential people.

Nilekani is a co-founder of the influential National Association of Software and Services Companies and, before this assignment, chief of Infosys Technologies, flagship of India's information technology (IT) sector.

According to Nilekani, the UID will most benefit India's poor who, because they lack identity documentation, are ignored by service providers.

"The UID number, with its 'anytime, anywhere' biometric authentication, addresses the problem of trust," argues Nilekani.

But a group of prominent civil society organisations are running a Campaign For No-UID, explaining that it is a "deeply undemocratic and expensive exercise" that is "fraught with unforeseen consequences."

Participants in the campaign include well-known human rights organisations such as the Alternative Law Forum, Citizen Action Forum, People's Union for Civil Liberties, Indian Social Action Forum, and the Centre for Internet and Society.

A meeting was organised by the campaigners in New Delhi on Aug. 25 where speakers ridiculed the idea of a 12-digit number, and said it is unlikely to rectify, for example, the massive corruption in the public distribution system that is supposed to provide food to poor families.

J.T. D'Souza, an IT expert, asserted at the meeting that the use of biometrics on such a massive scale has never been attempted before and is bound to be riddled with costly glitches.

Other speakers raised issues of security and the possibility of hackers getting at databases and passing on information to commercial outfits, intelligence agencies or even criminal gangs.

In talks and television interviews, Nilekani has maintained that the benefits of the UID project far outweigh its risks. "It's worth taking on the project and trying to mitigate the risks so that we get the outcomes we want," he told the CNN-IBN television channel in an interview.

But the possibility of religious profiling by state governments or misuse by caste lobbies is real. This is because the central government has decided to include caste as a category in the UID questionnaire to be filled out by applicants.

Because identity is already a potent issue and the trigger for frequent identity-related conflict – such as the 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat that left 2,000 people dead – any exercise that enhances identification is fraught.

Usha Ramanathan, a prominent legal expert who is attached to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in the national capital, does not buy the UIDAI's assurances.

At the Aug. 25 meeting, Ramanthan said that while enrolling with the UIDAI may be voluntary, other agencies and service providers might require a UID number in order to transact business. Indeed, the UIDAI has already signed agreements with banks, state governments and hospital chains which will allow them to ask customers for UIDs.

Ramanathan said that, taken to its logical limit, the UID project will make it impossible, in a couple of years, for an ordinary citizen to undertake a simple task such as travelling within the country without a UID number.

The UIDAI will work with the National Population Register (NPR) which draws its powers from the Citizenship Rules of 2003 and provides for penalties if information is withheld.

And as a government website says: "Certain information collected under the NPR will be published in the local areas for public scrutiny and invitation of objections." Seeking to allay privacy fears, the website goes on to explain that this is merely "in the nature of the electoral roll or the telephone directory."

But things begin to look ominous when seen in the context of the National Intelligence Grid (NATGRID), the setting up of which home minister P. Chidambaram announced in February as part of his response to a major terrorist attack.

Chidambaram said NATGRID would tap into 21 sets of databases that will be networked to achieve "quick, seamless and secure access to desired information for intelligence and enforcement agencies."

He added that NATGRID will "identify those who must be watched, investigated, disabled and neutralised."

"Internationally only a few countries have provided national ID cards because of the unsettled debate on privacy and civil liberties," says Prof. R. Ramakumar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. He added that several countries have had to withdraw ID card schemes or drop biometric aspects because of public opposition.

Nilekani maintains that the main purpose of the UID project is to empower the vast numbers of excluded Indians. "For the poor this is a huge benefit because they have no identities, no birth certificates, degree certificates, driver's licences, passports or even addresses." (END/2010)

Read the original news in IPS

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/india-fears-of-privacy-loss

On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop

praskrishna — 2012-01-03T10:35:34Z

What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These were the kind of questions that the Talking Back workshop held in the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan from 16 to 18 August 2010 posed.

Twenty-two Digital Natives were selected from regions as varied as Kyrgyztan, Pakistan, Vietnam, Jakarta, India, China, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Moldova and Thailand to come together and share their stories at the 'Talking Back' workshop. While we already began pinging everyone on the phone, and online through emails and chat, the participants themselves were encouraged to fraternise digitally before they even met IRL (in real life).

The Great Fire Wall

Two participants were lost to border authorities as they not only disallowed their entry into Taiwan from China but also permanently blocked their movement out of China. Another one from Burma missed out on being present at the workshop as much as we missed not having her with us.

Though admittedly on the first day of the workshop we did have them in on our secret group chat that we infamously termed as a coup d'état. A facilitator also on her way from Egypt was unable to make it through to us. Our Taipei team learned that a certain Chinese Airlines had omitted clearing the visa on arrival for a number of our invitees to the connecting airlines. While some we did insistently manage to pull across, the aforementioned were lost to the borderlines.

In Academia Sinica

So were we all in Academia Sinica, Taipei and under one roof by the night before the workshop? No, not yet. As mentioned above, three participants and a facilitator were unable to make it. On the Monday morning of 16 August 2010, Ritika Arya, a 20 year old Indian national had not yet arrived. She was to come as a participant and had on the previous day arranged for an event by her NGO, My India Empowered, Mumbai, India (MIE). She had already intimated us about her meticulous plans for Independence Day. However, it was Monday and she wasn’t yet there in the workshop! A call made it known that she was in fact at the Taipei airport with luggage transfer issue to be resolved. Ritika shared with us later how she grappled with the thought of losing her luggage and also spending a lot on the taxi fare instead of getting on a bus from the airport to Academia Sinica. Ritika, founder of MIE came in the nick of time really. Kudos to Ritika for the grand success of her event on India's Independence Day and for her landing smack on Day One; just in time for the Birsds of a Feather (BoF) meetings.

The First Day

On the first day of the workshop many presentations were made in quick succession. At end of presentations by facilitators and participants it was apparent that there was a language issue. We had Som Monorum from Vietnam who'd write down in English what he had to say and then say it out aloud to us. He continued adding all his responses to the group at large this way. Pichate from Thailand not only heard out every single presentation from start to end but also shared instances from his country with relevance to topics mentioned. For instance, when Seema Nair spoke of the Pink Chaddi Campaign, India, Pichate was quick to share links to the union labourers who were members of Triumph Employee's Union

An impromptu wake up call for some who were in jetlag daze was the coup de tat which was but a group chat initiated by most of us on whom no amounts of coffee could shake off jet lag. Hardly were we five minutes into the coup d'état when chat members being refreshed from it, one by one returned to 'workshop mode' and slipping out of the group chat resumed focus on the workshop. The smileys and lols remaining in the group chat RAM.

Same Same - But Different

As per the workshop schedule the first day we worked in BoF format. BoF is a type of un-conference model wherein members are grouped by what they share in common, be it the use of technology or the topics of work, each group of participants being assigned one guide.

Later the participants were assigned partners to discuss

What is my political legacy?
Who are the people I engage with?
Who are the others that I am engaging in this?

and make a presentation of the other's work.

Some initial responses briefly in the beginning:

"What do you mean my political legacy? I am apolitical."

“My work is very much so in the realm of the 'political'. I report on politics so of course I understand that I am engaging citizens reporting via mobile tools and the Internet. This is my legacy.”

“But I tell stories and I teach people to depict their own stories using such and such software and the Internet yes. These are any stories and lie in the creative realm and not political really. So how is my work political?”

“I organise teaching slum children and we enroll them into government schools. I do this to help them and have always wanted to help them. What do you mean by my legacy?”

“I feel strongly especially for women’s rights and I research into the changing face of political feminist activism.”

The intense ice breaking BoF meetings were certainly fruitful.


On the second day an impromptu exercise which took us briefly away from the scheduled Barcamp model of conferencing. We were made into random groups and assigned one Global Crisis to each group. We were to plan a solution via campaigning for the crisis with a plan which we were to present at end. The topics assigned varied from Violence to Global Warming.

The last day had a flurry of activities from participant Prabhas Pokharel's birthday to more Barcamped discussions, presentations of our campaigns to solve Global Warming et al. At the end after the vote of thanks we had an open feedback session. Here most importantly was brought to the table the need for sensitivity to language and vocabulary hindrances.

Chips Ahoy!
	Over the three days of discussions, presentations and reflections also at the end, the Taipei team organised visits to the 101 – the tallest building in the world to date, the night market and the participants themselves explored a lot of it on their own.

Travellers who plan to travel to places with cuisines unacquired by their own palate came prepared with a 'Help! What can I eat!' and 'OMG I need a Burger!' and 'Where's the closest Starbucks?' Well we all did dive into the hot pot outlets, mama-papa set meal restaurants and iced oolong tea shops with broad grins. Taiwan has been spoken well of for its Taiwanese cuisine and being an Indian-Chinese I must say even I can’t label it as Chinese food, for it honestly has a style of its own. Parathas on the streets!

The Taipei Team were as attentive to the dietary preferences as anyone could be. On Prabhas's birthday for instance, Miss Mengshan Lee got us three cakes! She said, “We wouldn't want anyone to be left out and to celebrate altogether. With everyone's needs met; eggless and with the egg we made a pretty picture.

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

Innovate / Activate

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:18:29Z

The event will be held on 24 and 25 September 2010 at New York Law School.

Registration is now open! Click here to register.

Innovation is unquestionably important to society. Intellectual property regimes seek to provide incentives for such innovation. Understanding the inter-working of intellectual property regimes and innovation may lead to conclusions that such regimes are not working well, or at all, in encouraging innovation. When such failures are perceived, active communities form to address the shortcomings. Many communities have formed around issues such as free speech vs copyright; the importance of fair use; alternative licensing regimes such as Creative Commons or free and open source software; patent protection of software and business methods; and patents vs downstream innovation of critical pharmaceuticals.

While these approaches have been exceedingly important in bringing about needed change, many successful groups have devised strategies that balance the extent to which activists work within existing innovation systems in order to achieve their goals, as they continue to explore the necessity of circumventing those systems. At the same time, the increased production of and focus on IP in all industries has catalyzed the emergence of IP obstacles in areas where IP has traditionally not been a consideration, thus creating new areas for activism. It’s time to reexamine our approaches to improving global welfare by identifying new and existing IP-related challenges to activism, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur social, political, environmental, scientific, technological and legal change.

The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School is proud to present Innovate / Activate, a two-day unconference, cosponsored by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where IP practitioners and activists will share their ideas and experiences in order to transform the landscape of activism.

Event organizers

Read the details on the New York Law School website

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

WEBINAR: Closed for Business

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:18:07Z

A Global Panel Discusses International Copyright Laws and Their Impact on the Open Internet

The digital revolution has forged new ways to create knowledge, educate people and disseminate information. It has also restructured the way the world perceives and conducts economic practices, runs governments and engages politically. Recognizing this new dynamic requires global discussion and a common desire & commitment to build a people-centred and development-oriented Information Society. Coming off the heels of the latest Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) discussions in Washington, D.C. and on the eve of the upcoming Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Vilinius, we invite you to join in a discussion about the future of Internet.

This online-only event features an array of panelists from regions around the world. We invite you to watch the New America LiveStream channel and to participate in an online chat room during the event. If you plan to participate, please register using the form at right.

In addition, if you have specific questions you'd like the panel to address, we encourage you to post them prior to the event here.

Participants

Featured Speakers

Joe McNamee
Advocacy Coordinator, European Digital Rights

Sherwin Siy
Deputy Legal Director, Kahle/Austin Promise Fellow, Public Knowledge

Renata Avila
Creative Commons Guatemala and Global Voices Guatemala

Sunil Abraham

Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India

Clare Curren

New Zealand Labour Party Spokesperson for Communications and IT

Moderator

Rebecca MacKinnon
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation

Event Time and Location
Thursday, September 9, 2010 - 10.00 a.m. to 11.00 a.m.

For details of the event on the New America Foundation website, click here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/webinar-closed-for-business

The madness of software patents

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:17:11Z

India’s patent law excludes software per se, yet over a thousand patents have been granted, writes Lata Jishnu in an article published in Down to Earth.

Per se is a straightforward term meaning by or in itself. Those who use it are pretty clear what the Latin-origin term signifies. And that’s what our lawmakers must have also believed when they used it in the 2005 amendment to India’s Patent Act.

But unaccountably this particular term has turned out to be prone to misuse more than anything else in the country’s patent law, leading to a host of software patents that should never have been granted in the first place. So me have been challenged and many more are set to be opposed in the courts but what is clear is that patent examiners in India have learned nothing from the anarchy in the US where the liberal grant of patents to software programmes and business methods has resulted in the biggest logjam in the courts. Patents cripple innovation and creativity by blocking access to data format specifications—and they hurt everyone.

A scan of the current patents disputes reveals how expensive and destructive these suits are.

InNova is suing 36 of the world’s top flight computer, telecom and banking companies for violating its patent, which “covers technology used to differentiate between spam email messages and those that users actually want to receive”. The company claims its spam filter is one of the “building blocks for all email communications” but some experts say that actual spam filtering is far more sophisticated than the methods in the firm’s patent.
Oracle is suing Google because it says Google’s Android operating system infringes seven patents it owns on Java. Analysts allege that Oracle wants to assert its dominant position in the Java ecosystem.
Microsoft and Salesforce, a small competitor, were suing each other, with the Redmond behemoth claiming Salesforce used its software-as-a-service products, while Salesforce accuses Microsoft of violating its patents.
VirnetX Holding Corp, an Internet security software firm, which successfully sued Microsoft for US $200 million, is now charging several other corporations with violating patents for technology used in mobile phones, remote communication and virtual private networking.

This list is merely illustrative of the madness out there. It is precisely to avoid such anarchy that India’s law was so formulated as to exclude software and business method patents. Here is what Section 3 (k) of the Patent Act says cannot be considered inventions: a mathematical or business method or computer programme per se or algorithms. In other words, computer programmes are a kind of algorithm just as algorithms are a kind of mathematical method. One reason for this exclusion is that computer programmes are protected by copyright in India and it was not thought necessary to provide additional protection through patents.

But lawyers being what they are, have set their sharp legal brains to assay what “computer programme per se” could be made to mean—encouraged, of course, by firms keen on pat - ent protection for software applications and business methods. The result is pretty dismaying: hundreds of patents granted in recent years, setting at naught the intention of the law. The Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) offers some estimates of the number of software patents granted in India. It says around 200 software patents have been granted till date (applications have been filed since 1999), another 1,000 patents were given for inventions which use the term ‘computer’ in the abstract describing the invention.

Krithika Narayana of CIS explains that actual numbers are hard to come by because there is no category for software patents. Thus, applications may be described as either ‘computer-based’ or ‘computerised’ or ‘computer implemented’ systems. However, most software patents are concentrated in the group of patents with G06F as their classification. The figures have been culled from this category. There is more bad news. Hund reds of software patent applications are in various stages of examination, opposition and grant which have not been included in the CIS tally. How has all this come about?

Most applicants manipulate the term ‘computer programmes per se’ to obtain patents for computer programmes run in combination with hardware (even though the hardware only executes the programme and has no ingenuity of its own) or software embedded in a machine (embedded systems). Clearly, the patent office has been wrong in granting such patents.

To end this, CIS, working in tandem with Knowledge Com - mons and Software Freedom Law Centre, is set to challenge a software patent. Hopefully, it might stop the tide. Otherwise, the consequences are scary. As Richard Stallman, the guru of free software, said, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

Read the original in Down to Earth

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/madness-software-patents

Why piracy is tough to rein in

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:16:50Z

“Video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the film industry”

Armed with a shoulder-strung carry bag, Meeran (name changed) walks into an apartment block that he frequents. By the time he comes out, he has sold nearly 10 pirated DVDs. His brother runs a shop which makes a business of Rs.1,000 to Rs.1,500 a day. But regular customers can avail themselves the privilege of his visit to their homes.

Film buffs like Madhankumar Subbiah, who buys DVDs, say the proliferation of multiplexes means a significant number of people cannot afford to go to the cinema regularly. “On the other hand, a whole family can watch the movie spending just Rs.30 on a pirated DVD. I feel that this trend would continue unless ticket prices are reduced,” he adds.

Depending on which side of the copyright debate you are on, Meeran is either a pirate who is a making a dent on the film industry's profits or a trader who is trying to take advantage of a backlash against monopolistic tendencies in the entertainment industry.

According to sources in the Video Piracy Wing of the Central Crime Branch, Puducherry is the headquarters of the illegal piracy business. Multiple copies are made using the master prints from the overseas rights agreement and distributed to various parts of Tamil Nadu.

CCB's Video Piracy Wing, in the last one year, has booked 234 cases and arrested 279 persons, of which 23 have been booked under the Goondas Act.

To understand piracy, it has to be placed in context. G. Dhananjayan, Chief Operating Officer, Moser Baer Entertainment, says the opportunity is not there for the consumer to buy the original. “Tamil cinema is not encouraging other modes of revenue generation. Unlike anywhere else in the country, producers get into agreements with satellite networks to release it on television before a DVD release.”

The DVD release window is usually six months after the release in theatres. According to him, the video market is being treated as a poor cousin of the industry. Kerala, for example, he says has a thriving video market because the release window is 90 to 100 days after the release in theatres.

Though movies are meant to be viewed in theatres, digital technologies have enabled a segment of movie watchers who prefer to enjoy the experience through on-demand or even streaming content.

Nishant Shah, Director, Centre for Internet and Society, says that attempts at controlling piracy are futile. The digital technologies that we are working with are intuitively designed for copying, dissemination and sharing.

According to him, copyright is not a pre-given frame of reference. It arose, historically and culturally, with the industrialisation of information and came into being so strongly because of the possibilities and limitations of analogue technologies.

He says media conglomerates that “try to imagine the consumer as monolithic and unchanging, and accuse them of piracy and theft, will only alienate the audience.” It is a move that fails to recognise the changing dynamics of cultural economies, he adds.

Read the original in the Hindu

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/piracy-tough-rein

Centre for Internet and Society

The geek shall inherit the earth

Stiff Resistance Dogs India's ID Plan

Data Activism and Grassroots Empowerment in India

September 2010 Bulletin

News Updates

Events

Research

Accessibility

Access to Knowledge

Openness

Internet Governance

Telecom

Conference: Internet at Liberty 2010

The Binary: City and Nature

Readings from Miniature Paintings

Imagined Geometry in a City

Nature and the City

UNESCO's Open Forum

A Talk by Charlotte Lapsansky

About Charlotte Lapsansky

Software Freedom Day Inter-college Contest

INDIA Fears of Privacy Loss Pursue Ambitious ID Project

On Talking Back: A Report on the Taiwan Workshop

The Great Fire Wall

In Academia Sinica

The First Day

Same Same - But Different

Chips Ahoy!

Innovate / Activate

WEBINAR: Closed for Business

Participants

The madness of software patents

Why piracy is tough to rein in