Centre for Internet and Society

Forensic DNA Databases

praskrishna — 2012-10-10T10:57:33Z

A presentation by Jeremy Gruber

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

Foreign Media on Zuckerberg's India Backlash

praskrishna — 2016-01-03T09:20:41Z

When Facebook's co-founder proposed bringing free Web services to India, his stated aim was to help connect millions of impoverished people to unlimited opportunity. Instead, critics have accused him of making a poorly disguised land grab in India's burgeoning Internet sector. The growing backlash could threaten the very premise of Internet.org, his ambitious, two-year-old effort to connect the planet.

The blog post was published in NDTV on December 30, 2015. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Indian authorities are circumspect because the Facebook initiative provides access to only a limited set of websites -- undermining the equal-access precepts of net neutrality. The telecommunications regulator is calling for initial comments by Jan 7, extending the deadline from today, on whether wireless carriers can charge differently for data usage across websites, applications and platforms.

Losing this fight could imperil Facebook's Free Basics, which allows customers to access the social network and select services such as Messenger and Microsoft's Bing without a data plan.

"The India fight is helping shape debates elsewhere," said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit advocacy group. "Activists in other countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia are watching this debate and will seize the momentum created in India."

Zuckerberg's argument for free Web access is based in part on Deloitte research showing that for every 10 people who are connected to the Web, one is lifted out of poverty and one job is created.

Facebook argues that by giving people free access to a small slice of the Internet, they will quickly see the value in paying for the whole thing. Zuckerberg has said his biggest challenge in connecting people to the Web isn't access to cellular networks, but a social hurdle: he needs to prove to people who have never been online that the Internet is useful.

"Who could possibly be against this?" Zuckerberg wrote in an impassioned op-ed in the Times of India this week. "Surprisingly, over the last year there's been a big debate about this in India."

Zuckerberg's pleas underscore what's at stake. Facebook already attracts 1.55 billion people monthly, or about half of the Internet-connected global population. To keep growing, the world's largest social network needs to get more people online. Hence the billions of dollars Facebook is spending on projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. And Internet.org, which now spans 37 nations.

India, as the world's second most populous nation, is arguably the most important piece of Zuckerberg's Free Basics strategy. But the opposition is fierce. Critics note that the Facebook service doesn't offer Web favorites such as Google's search. Facebook has said it would be open to adding more features from competitors, but critics are skeptical of giving the social-networking giant such influence on the Internet.

Critics also say that by offering a limited swath of the Internet at comparatively slow speeds, the company is creating a diluted version of the Web. That could stifle innovation by causing disadvantages for Indian startups building rival apps, or allow Facebook and its telecommunications carrier-partners to act as Internet gatekeepers.

In a sign of the importance he attaches to the issue, Zuckerberg on Tuesday called one of India's most prominent entrepreneurs to make his case.

One97 Communications, the mobile payments startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding, is one of several tech companies that have come out against Facebook's plans.

"We are totally against telcos preferring one developer over another," One97 founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a phone interview before that call. "We are asking for access neutrality. We are hoping that all startups will be treated equally."

Sonia Dhawan, a spokeswoman for One97's payment website Paytm, said the call took place but didn't describe the conversation further. Sharma wasn't available for further comment.

Facebook is now scrambling to drum up support. It's started a "Save Free Basics In India" campaign, asking Indian users to support "digital equality" by filling out a form that shoots an e-mail to regulators. That also has the effect of sending notifications to user's friends unless they opt out.
Facebook has also taken out full-page advertisements, including one featuring a smiling Indian farmer and his family who the ads say used new techniques to double his crop yield.

While countries such as the Philippines have embraced Free Basics, India has been "the outlier and more challenging," Chris Daniels, vice president of Internet.org, said in a Dec. 26 chat on Reddit.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-bhuma-shrivastava-december-30-2015-foreign-media-on-zukerberg-india-backlash

Foreign Funding of NGOs

praskrishna — 2013-03-04T23:52:31Z

Should FDI in India’s thinktank sector worry us? It is a debate long overdue.

This article by Prashant Reddy was published in the March issue of Open Magazine.

In 1976, at the height of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, India’s Parliament enacted a piece of legislation called the Foreign Regulation Contribution Act. It prohibited political parties and ‘organisations of a political nature’, civil servants and judges, as also correspondents, columnists and editors/owners of registered newspapers and news broadcasting organisations— and even cartoonists—from receiving foreign contributions.

The very fact that the Act makes a specific reference to cartoonists should be hint enough of the establishment’s paranoia vis-à-vis the ‘invisible hand’ of foreign powers back then. During a Rajya Sabha debate on the proposed bill on 9 March 1976, the term ‘CIA’ (Central Intelligence Agency) was mentioned at least 30 times by different legislators, while ‘Lockheed Martin’ (a military aerospace corporation) came up at least six times in the context of alleged instances of Americans pumping dollars into governments worldwide to buy influence during the Cold War.

The sentiment of the times was captured by the following statement made during that debate by Khurshid Alam Khan, father of India’s present Minister for External Affairs: “The CIA’s doings all over the world have very clearly indicated as to what could be done by foreign money and foreign interference.”

In 2010, a different parliament, with opposition members who had not been imprisoned like those in 1976, unanimously voted to update the law by passing the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA). In fact, the Parliamentary Standing Committee that examined the bill was headed by the BJP’s Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj, and it had no major objections.

This time round, there was no talk of the CIA or Lockheed Martin. Instead, concern was focused on the increasingly influential role of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) as institutions of civil society in India. The term ‘NGO’ found at least 40 mentions during the Rajya Sabha debate on the 2010 bill. The main concern of the Upper House appeared to be a lack of transparency among NGOs receiving foreign contributions. Hence the calls to strengthen the monitoring regime, although several MPs expressed worry that the new law would give the Centre too much discretionary power to crack down on dissenting NGOs.

Worries about the 2010 Act’s overreach were validated last year when the Government used it to clamp down on NGOs involved in anti-corruption and anti-nuclear protests. As part of that exercise, at least four NGOs were booked under the FCRA for allegedly diverting foreign funds to aid the organisation of protests against the Koodankulam nuclear power plant in Tamil Nadu. Their bank accounts were frozen. The protests, however, did not end.

Perhaps the most ironic use of the FCRA was when the Ministry of Home Affairs reportedly held back potential funding from the US-based Ford Foundation for the Mumbai-based Institute for Policy Research Studies (IPRS), a thinktank that runs Parliamentary Research Service (PRS).

Incubated at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), a Delhi-based thinktank, PRS was spun off and institutionalised as IPRS in 2010 as a Section 25 non-profit company with a registered office in Mumbai. The main aim of PRS was to provide non-partisan legislative research services to parliamentarians, most of whom are starved of resources to conduct independent research required to hold the Executive accountable in Parliament. The service’s popularity among MPs was obvious from the fact that several of them reportedly made individual representations to the Home Ministry against blocking foreign funds for its parent institute.

The tragedy of why Parliament does not have a public-funded service like PRS is a debate for another day, but choking the IPRS of foreign funds raises a question of hypocrisy since the Central Government routinely collaborates with a wide range of civil society thinktanks that receive funds from the West.

Let’s start with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). According to its filings with the MHA, accessible on the FCRA website (http://mha.nic.in/fcra.htm), ICRIER has received over Rs 11.5 crore in foreign donations from a range of international institutions such as the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Sasakawa Peace Foundation between 2007 and 2012. This council, currently headed by Dr Isher Judge Ahluwalia, wife of Planning Commission Vice-chairperson Dr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, appears to have a cosy relationship with the present establishment. When the Government was in a fix over the contentious General Anti- Avoidance Rules (GAAR) of taxation, for example, it delegated the task of ironing out its problems to a four-member committee headed by Dr Parthasarathi Shome, a well-known economic policy expert at ICRIER. There are several other projects on which the Council’s faculty collaborates closely with the Government of India.

That thinktanks are well networked goes without saying. In fact, ICRIER and PRS were involved in quite a controversy during last year’s Parliament vote on Foreign Direct Investment in India’s multi-brand retail sector. As reported by India Today, (‘Foreign Direct Instruction for our MPs?’ 6 December 2012), IPRS had organised a ‘close-door’ meeting at Delhi’s Constitution Club the day before the vote, where MPs were briefed on the benefits of FDI by Professor Arpita Mukherjee of ICRIER. Some MPs had publicly labelled this a ‘lobbying’ effort.

Another example of close collaboration between the Centre and a thinktank that gets significant foreign funding is the one between the Government and the CPR, headed by Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta. Between 2007 and 2012, according to its filings with the MHA, this thinktank received foreign funds of over Rs 40.8 crore from a range of donors such as the Ford Foundation, Google Foundation, International Development Research Centre, Economic and Social Research Council, Hewlett Foundation and IKEA Social Initiative.

Environmental policy is another area in which foreign-funded thinktanks have a significant impact. The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), headed by Sunita Narain with a governing board that has Ela Bhatt, BG Verghese, Dr MS Swaminathan and Dr NC Saxena among others, has received over Rs 67.7 crore in foreign funds between 2006 and 2012. The CSE’s main donors, according to FCRA records, include the Denmark- based Dan Church Aid, Germany-based Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst EV, Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Other donors include the Commission of European Communities and Government of India.

Going by the media coverage that CSE receives, it is safe to say that this thinktank has a profound influence on India’s environmental policy. An indication of its ties with the Government is the fact that the two had their own ‘side-event’ at the recently concluded Doha talks on climate change.

The other green thinktank with generous foreign contributions that works closely with the Government is The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI). Consider this: the International Bioenergy Summit of 2012 held in New Delhi was organised by TERI and sponsored by the Department of Biotechnology (DBT). According to its FCRA filings, TERI, with a staff of over 900, has received about Rs 155.9 crore between 2006 and 2012 from a vast variety of donors.

In the field of health policy, one of the most influential thinktanks is the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI). Since it was founded in 2006, it has received a total of Rs 219 crore in funds, its biggest foreign donor being the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and biggest Indian donor being the Government of India. Other foreign donors, according to FCRA filings, include the National Institutes of Health (of the US government), Welcome Trust, International Development Research Centre and MacArthur Foundation.

A public-private initiative, the PHFI is expected to shape India’s approach to public health policy over the next decade. An example of its influence on India’s health policy is the fact that its secretariat has been thanked and praised in a report of the High Level Expert Group constituted by the Planning Commission to frame a new policy on ‘universal health coverage’ for all Indians.

On matters of internet policy, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bangalore-based thinktank focused on internet governance and intellectual property issues, has been a member of some key government committees, like the one under Justice AP Shah to study privacy laws in India. The CIS also receives foreign funding. According to its website, it has received over Rs 8.3 crore in funds, a significant portion of it from foreign donors like the UK-based Kusuma Trust, which was founded by Anurag Dikshit, an Indian businessman who made a fortune selling his stake in a popular online gambling website. He eventually donated most of his wealth to the Kusuma Trust, which funds various charities across the world.

In the human rights space, there is the famous Lawyers Collective, which, apart from its human rights advocacy, also provides legal aid to members of disadvantaged communities. Although this collective does not appear to work all that closely with the Government, it is interesting to note that it was founded by Indira Jaising, who is currently one of the Centre’s Additional Solicitor Generals. Since 2006, according to its FCRA filings, the organisation has received around Rs 21.8 crore in foreign funds from the Ford, Levi Strauss and Open Society foundations and from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, among others.

Another thinktank that deserves a mention is the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), which was founded by Dr Parth J Shah and has a ‘Board of Scholars’ with Isher Judge Ahluwalia, Jagdish Bhagwati, Lord Meghnad Desai and Swaminathan Anklesaria Aiyar, among others, as members. While it is not clear from its website whether it works closely with the Government, it was ranked 51st in a recent global survey of thinktanks by University of Pennsylvania. According to a CCS press release, these rankings were ‘based on not just our research and analysis, but also on our engagement with policy makers and ability to influence policy decisions’. The CCS’s rank was quite a surprise, given its modest resources. According to its FCRA filings, between 2006 and 2011, it received about Rs 6.2 crore from foreign donors such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, John Templeton Foundation and International Policy Network. As per its audited accounts, available on its website, donations from Indian donors were equally modest.

The above examples demonstrate the influence of foreign funded thinktanks on almost every major aspect of Indian policy today, be it economic or environmental, related to public health or internet governance.

Is this good or bad for India as a country? Given that most sectors of the economy are now open to foreign investment, does it make sense to regulate and restrict foreign funds for such thinktanks under laws like the FCRA?

The answer depends on what Indian society expects of them. Do we expect them to be completely independent of donors in their views? Would an organisation like the CSE still get foreign funds from European donors if it were to readily welcome genetically modified (GM) food in India? In such circumstances, how independent should we expect these thinktanks to be in the arena of policy?

Absolute objectivity—or at a least public perception of it—is an absolute myth. No matter who funds a thinktank, be it foreigners or Indians, it is impossible to be seen as such. The more pressing issue is of transparency. Are Indian policymakers aware of the details of foreign funds received by these thinktanks?

Take, for example, a recent Parliamentary Standing Committee report that expressed serious reservations about GM food. The Committee repeatedly quotes with approval the deposition of Dr Vandana Shiva against GM food. A little-known fact about Dr Shiva is that her organisation, Navdanya, according to its FCRA filings, has received a total of Rs 16.7 crore between 2006 and 2012 in foreign donations from mainly European organisations (some of which also contribute to the CSE) like Bread for the World, Diakonie Emergency Aid, Hivos Foundation, Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst EV, RSF Innovations in Social Finance, and even from the European Union itself.

Would a Parliamentary Standing Committee headed by an MP of the CPM, a party that is always suspicious of the ‘foreign hand’, show the same deference to Dr Shiva’s views if its members knew of Navdanya’s European donors, several of which are also Christian churches?

In an op-ed article in The Indian Express (‘Do not disagree’, 29 February 2012), Dr Pratap Bhanu Mehta while criticising the FCRA, states, ‘Of course, NGOs should be transparent and accountable in terms of their sources of funding.’ Yet, the CPR, of which Dr Mehta is president, only discloses the names of its donors in its annual report, and that too without revealing the amounts received from each. Similarly, Navdanya offers no information on either of its websites, Indian and Italian (navdanyainternational.it), on any of its funding. Other thinktanks like the PHFI and CIS offer a more detailed breakup of their different sources of funding, while some like the CSE and CCS provide only a roll of donor names and a figure of cumulative funding with no breakup of individual contributions. So, while these thinktanks are forced to disclose their foreign funding sources to the MHA under the FCRA, why do they not volunteer exhaustive information on their own websites?

An amusing facet of this is that the Central Government and Corporate India are more transparent (even if forced to be) than these civil society institutions, thanks to the Right to Information Act, 2005, and the extensive disclosure requirements under the Companies Act, 1956. Of companies in particular, information is accessible over the internet on the MCA21 website of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. This contrast is amusing because some of these thinktanks never tire of demanding transparency of the State and corporate sector.

For several thinktanks, it is often hard to figure out something as basic as the nature of the legal entity through which they conduct their activities. Are they societies, associations or trusts? More pertinently, why is the Government not pushing for a stricter transparency regime? A major stumbling block may be the fact that these thinktanks are set up under state laws and it is difficult for the Central Government to coordinate a nationwide transparency regime. However, given that most are beneficiaries of income tax exemptions, it may be possible for the Centre to use the Income Tax Act to demand comprehensive disclosures. Since they enjoy tax benefits, they might also qualify as ‘public authorities’ under the Right To Information Act, 2005.

Another reason that disclosure of funding is important is to inform the analysis of people who usually see NGOs as selfless entities dedicated to nothing but a higher cause. While this may be true of some NGOs, many leaders of these set-ups have personal stakes in ensuring certain outcomes. After all, future donor grants often depend on sustaining one’s influence in the policy space. Many of the institutions described in this article have been regular recipients of funds from the same sources year after year.

Another question is the volume of funds coming in and where it will leave India’s public institutions that were originally meant to aid policymaking with unbiased intellectual inputs. How are cash-strapped Indian universities to compete with these well-funded thinktanks?

Government-run institutions of higher learning are supposed to have an inbuilt guarantee of academic independence, but would their scholarly voices be drowned out by those backed by bigger resources?

Also, given the frequency with which a few foreign funders appear on donor lists, is it time to worry about their influence on Indian policies? After all, generous funding lets the faculty of these thinktanks jetset around the world to attend conferences, organise seminars in India and network with officials at a level that most public universities cannot afford. How does this impact our civil society discourse? Should Parliament limit the amount that a single foreign entity can donate, or are we better off sticking to a regulatory regime that only insists on a set of disclosure norms?

On a concluding note, let us not forget that a large part of the credit for the RTI Act of 2005—the country’s most empowering piece of legislation since the Constitution of 1950—goes to the advocacy efforts of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a farmers group in Rajasthan that does not accept institutional funding from either India or overseas. Bank interest on its corpus and donations by individuals are the MKSS’s only sources of funding. Together, the two gave it Rs 30 lakh for the financial year 2010-11, details of which are available on its website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/openmagazine-article-business-prashant-reddy-march-2-2013-foreign-funding-of-ngos

Foreign Funding

praskrishna — 2013-02-25T02:11:06Z

Foreign Funding

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/ForeignFunding.png

For the love of Konkani: Preserving Goa's official language

praskrishna — 2013-09-30T05:13:34Z

With many local dialects on the brink of extinction, Joanna Lobo meets the language conservationists who have taken it upon themselves to preserve Goa's official language.

The article by Joanna Lobo was published in DNA on September 29, 2013. Nitika Tandon is quoted.

Social networking site Orkut may have lost its lustre but digging through its remnants throws up a group called Aamchigele Bindaas Community (ABC). It was started to bring together Konkani-speaking people across the world.

The group is now active on Facebook under the name Broad Minded Konkanis (BMK), where people post queries about Konkani words and phrases. "This group has helped members understand the language to a great extent,” says Rajanikanth Shenoy Kudpi, founder and one of the administrators of the 160-member group. BMK has members from Saraswat, Catholic Christian, Bunt, Navayat Muslim, Jain and other communities, who speak Konkani.

“Konkani as a language will definitely be rejuvenated if contemporaries and scholars put in consistent efforts,” says Kudpi.

One such effort was a recent four-day workshop organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Access to Knowledge (A2K) for the students of Goa University and St.Xavier’s College. “We want to strengthen the Konkani Wikipedia,” says Nitika Tandon, programme manager, CIS-A2K.

Tandon quotes the Census Department of India 2001 figures that puts Konkani speakers at 24 lakh but adds that limited documentation is available online.

However, opinion is divided over the language's fate. “I don’t think it's dying,” says Roshan Pai, founder, savemylanguage.org. Pai started the website, a Konkani dictionary that documents the language spoken by the GSB community in and around Mangalore, in 2005.

The site is dependent on volunteer contributions — people send in meanings of various words that are validated by others, who also put in different uses or meanings of the words. All the 17,528 words collected (belonging to GSB dialects in Mangalore, Goa, Kerala and Cochin) are stored online.

One of the major factors behind people talking about saving a language has to do with its links to culture. “It is the essence of life and contains a lot of information that has been passed on through the generations,” says Gurudath Baliga, assistant director at World Konkani Centre, Mangalore.

The centre works towards preserving the language by empowering the community that speaks it through tech-related grassroot activities, documenting folklore, appointing teachers in different schools and publishing books. The centre is now working on Konkanverter.com, an in, catholic Christian, ter script translator, and World Konkani Archives, that will serve as a repository for all data and text. With such initiatives, the language is in safe hands.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/dnaindia-september-29-2013-joanna-lobo-for-the-love-of-konkani

For India’s complaints department, visit Facebook Live

praskrishna — 2017-01-25T02:03:03Z

Notebook: Social media cuts through red tape in a country beset by inertia.

The article by Amy Kazmin was published in the Financial Times on January 23, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Rarely has a soldier’s lament about bad food received such attention. But Tej Bahadur Yadav, of India’s Border Security Force, made national headlines with Facebook videos complaining about his rations along India’s tense line-of-control with neighbouring Pakistan.

Standing against a landscape of desolate, snow-covered mountains, Mr Yadav bemoaned the fried flatbread and tea that constitutes breakfast, and the watery lentils, seasoned only with salt and turmeric, of his lunch. It was unclear whether his main complaint was about the poor cooking quality or limited food quantity but the video of the offending meals, including a burnt chapati, suggested both.

“I do not want to blame the government,” he said calmly in Hindi. “The government provides everything for us but these higher officers sell everything. Sometimes, we soldiers go hungry.”

Reaction to the videos, which were covered widely by the mainstream media, came fast and furious. The BSF publicly accused Mr Yadav of indiscipline, saying he was a chronic malcontent previously subjected to a court martial for aiming his weapon at a superior. It also noted he was taking voluntary retirement soon.

But many Indians found it easy to believe that their country’s troops are short-changed on food and they rallied to the disgruntled soldier as a courageous whistleblower. Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered an investigation, and a dietitian was reportedly sent to the border to assess the soldiers’ food.

Analysts pointed out that Mr Yadav’s gripe echoed official critiques of deficiencies in the army’s food procurement. “One can imagine the toil our jawans [junior soldiers] go through while guarding the border in chilling conditions. And the least they can expect is a good meal after long hours of hard duty,” an Indian Express editorial declared.

That a soldier posted in a remote border area could unleash such a kerfuffle via a video highlights how Indians armed with mobile phones are taking to social media to hold to account the traditionally non-responsive political and bureaucratic establishment.

Smartphones make up nearly 30 per cent of phones in use in India and that number is rising fast, according to the Asian research group CLSA. Sushma Swaraj, India’s foreign minister, has garnered attention for her rapid responses to individual Twitter pleas for help — whether from Indians in trouble abroad or those struggling to renew a passport or secure a visa for a visitor.

Now other ministers and government agencies, including local police forces, have begun to respond personally to pleas for help and public complaints on Twitter. It’s a big change from a time I recall well, when Indians tangled in red tape had no option but to find those with connections to try to influence, or prod, the seemingly impenetrable bureaucracy.

“Bureaucrats and politicians are now active and available on social media — ordinary citizens tweet politicians and there is a spectacle of immediate redress of complaints,” Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, told me. When New Delhi’s police department set up an office to receive complaints against corrupt officers, for example, many citizens provided audio or visual recordings of the alleged wrongdoing. It’s only a matter of time before such footage finds its way to social media — or beyond. Ironically, those whose plights gain traction on social media, and are then amplified by mainstream media, are sometimes low-ranking civil servants harassed by their superiors.

This week brought news of a female railway clerk punished for dereliction of duty after she refused to sing “one particular” duet with her senior manager at his farewell party. A friend who works for a major western social media platform here in India (who ironically can’t be identified as he wasn’t authorised to speak to me), tells me that “the power structures that governed who used to be heard and who wouldn’t be heard have changed”. As technology spreads further and deeper in India, we can expect that noise to amplify.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-amy-kazmin-january-23-2017-for-indias-complaints-department-visit-facebook-live

Font problem hits Odia

praskrishna — 2014-07-25T08:04:20Z

Focus on search for solution to lack of compatibility.

The article by Bibhuti Barik was published in the Telegraph on July 7, 2014. Subhashish Panigrahi gave his inputs.

The available Odia fonts that could be used for digital publications have compatibility problems. The fonts, which number around 10, have been developed for specific purposes and cannot be used in all applications.

Computer application researchers, linguistics, information technology experts and educationists, who met at a workshop here today, urged the state government and the IT industry to ensure the smooth use of Odia fonts.

These fonts are available on different software tools, but if one purchases one of them to install on his or her computer, it fails to open in another system. Since this happens due to lack of compatibility, it also discourages users to use Odia fonts in official work and day-to-day life.

“I think the use of Odia language in computers is restricted only to desktop publication (DTP). As the compatibility factor has come as a major handicap, the use is becoming more restricted in day-to-day life. The state government should come forward to facilitate a software so that the fonts can be used through a uniform system,’’ said linguist and founding director of the Mysore-based Central Institute of Indian Languages, Debi Prasanna Pattanayak.

Subhashish Panigrahi, a Bangalore-based IT professional who is now working on a project for Wikipedia Foundation, said: “Different fonts in Odia came to existence quite late and all were based on the skeleton of Latin fonts so that when one types an English font on the keyboard, the screen shows an Odia font. Later, unicode fonts were developed, which were not only compatible to the Internet, but had elements common with other Indian languages as well.”

Odia publishers did not agree to use the unicode fonts as they were using customised softwares. For this reason, the published books and literature fails to reach the Internet.

In 2011, Srujanika, a city-based organisation, developed a converter to use fonts from other categories to unicode type.

Sujata Patel, chief operating officer of Pune -based Tech Z Solution, said: “The affordability of Odia tools and fonts is a major concern. As they are developed by non-Odia professionals, the aesthetic aspect of Odia fonts and characters are not being taken into consideration.”

Subrat Prusty, member secretary Institute of Odia Studies and Research, said: “Odia is yet to come to the computer screen on different software tools which are used for tables, Internet applications, medical, engineering and business applications.”

“Despite having hundreds of engineering colleges, two technical universities and 10 universities we are yet to use Odia in computers,” Prusty added.

Researchers from US, Singapore, IITs, central universities, IT professionals, linguists, artistes, educationists and students of computer applications took part in the workshop that was organised at the computer science department of the Institute of Technical and Education and Research of Sikhya O Anusandhan University.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-telegraph-july-7-2014-bibhuti-barik-font-problem-hits-odia

Focus on India—WikiConference produces new apps; state government adopts free licenses

praskrishna — 2016-08-22T03:15:22Z

WikiConference India and its productive hackathon

The second WikiConference India, held August 5–7 in the northern Indian city of Chandigarh, drew hundreds of new and experienced members from 20 language communities of various Wikimedia projects from India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This event was more thematic than the first WikiConference India (held in 2011), with numerous presentations, panel discussions and workshops on the gender gap, Wikipedia in education, Mediawiki, and state of the movement in India. The event was organized by the Community of Wikimedians in India, supported by Wikimedia India and the Centre for Internet and Society, and funded by the Wikimedia Foundation. The newly formed user group Punjabi Wikimedians hosted the event. WikiConference India's main goal was to build community and increase participation among Wikimedians in India. Interest in the event was strong: 452 Wikimedians from more than six countries applied for ~100 scholarships. Wikipedia's well known gender gap was evident: only 55 scholarship applicants were women, but a strong focus on diversity resulted in ~25% of scholarship recipients going to women, and the inclusion of speakers of ~20 languages. In all, about 250 people attended the conference. Several Foundation staff spoke at the event, including executive director Katherine Maher, Asaf Bartov, and Tighe Flanagan.

A highlight of the conference was the hackathon track, which spanned all three days of the conference. It proved highly productive, yielding seven apps that are expected to help Wikimedians in a variety of ways. I spoke with Santosh Shingare (Cherishsantosh), the Bangalore-based Wikimedian who organized the hackathon. Santosh had previously served as an organizer of the 2011 WikiConference, and has run hackathons annually since then. Santosh's primary motivation for holding such events is learning; he spoke of limited opportunities to learn about new areas of technology beyond his core skills in WebRTC and Android. He enjoys collaborating with other Wikimedians and sharing technical skills. This event was his first with an international draw, and he looks forward to opportunities to collaborate beyond India's borders in the future.

As Santosh outlined in a message to the Wikimania email list, the hackathon's 35 participants made substantial progress with the following projects:

WikiSpeak with native language (web and Android): Speaking the text of Wikipedia articles
Edit Tamil Wiktionary (Android)
Audio file upload to Wikidata (Android): Assists users in uploading small files that demonstrate the pronunciation of lexical items
A layer that shows local Wikipedia articles on a Google Map
Optical character recognition for Hindi and Malayalam
Communication platform [WebRTC] (Web Application): Santosh wrote this app himself; hackathon participants used it to communicate
Notifications: browser notifications for Wikipedia functions such as recent changes

Santosh highlights that the projects grew out of advance communication. To identify problems and generate ideas, the hackathon organizing team posted a survey ahead of the event. Requests from various language communities, including Hindi, Tamil, Punjabi, and Malayalam, drove several of the projects. The software is all freely licensed, and there are no plans to generate revenue.

Santosh is not a prolific Wikipedia writer or editor, but rather sees value in his ability to communicate among Wikimedians who seek features from various language communities, including his native Marathi and other Indic languages in which he has varying degrees of fluency.

He plans to update the Wikimedia community shortly with further details on each of the seven projects. He is already planning the next of India's annual hackathons. Hackathon organizers worldwide might be interested in learning more about Indian Wikimedians' efforts, and Wikimedians around the world can expect to benefit from their projects.

The conference generated a number of media reports. P

Indian state of Tamil Nadu adopts Creative Commons license

The state of Tamil Nadu on the subcontinent

Last week brought a rare piece of good news in the world's uncertain progress towards the widespread free licensing of information on the Internet. Ravidreams announced on the Wikimedia India mailing list that the government of one of India's largest and most populous states—Tamil Nadu—has issued an instruction to Tamil University and "all other government departments and institutions to release all their publications, archives and collections under Creative Commons by Share-Alike license".

The move comes one year after the collaboration between the Global Tamil Wikimedia Community and the Tamil Virtual Academy, an independent institution set up by the state government in 2001 to provide online resources for Tamil-language communities around the world. TVA and the Tamil-language Wikimedia community collaborated to persuade the government to make the order. Wikimedia India (one of three Creative Commons affiliates in the country) served as an institutional partner, signing the initial agreement on behalf of the Indian Wikimedia community, and funding a Wikimedian in Residence at TVA.

Ravi, who also serves on the TVA committee for outreach, told the Signpost that the TVA is very keen to share its collection of encyclopedic resources with Tamil Wikimedia projects. The community contributed strategic knowledge of free-content licensing, providing precedents for free content release by other governments in India and other countries, and helped in the drafting of the actual order. "But it takes a lot of time, effort, high-profile connections to change how government institutions work", he said.

An example of the distinctive Tamil script

“

Almost 99% of the time it's about the right officer/minister who cares for our mission being in charge of the right department at the right time. It's very hard to bring change through a bottom-up approach. These precedents help when someone at the top gets interested in changing things. So, any community that expects to influence public policy should be prepared to do a lot of groundwork.

”

Tamil-language Wikipedian Thamizhpparithi Maari serves as Assistant Director, TVA and state coordinator of its computing outreach unit, which the government is funding to encourage students in the state to use open-source media and software; this program includes the development of mobile apps and the running of contests to enhance students' computing skills. He described to the Signpost the elaborate process of finally gaining legal and administrative approval for the CC-by-SA release order. Thamizhpparithi has already started a process of digitising books from the universities to share with the Tamil wiki community, involving between 400,000 and 500,000 pages in some 200 books, using Google optical character recognition (OCR).

"This is just the beginning; we expect millions of pages to be uploaded to Tamil Wikisource", Ravi said. Most of the content that will become available for uploading is in Tamil, although some will be in English and other Indian languages; this will present significant opportunities for the Tamil Wikimedia community.

A rare Tamil-language book in an archival exhibition

There are about 70 million native speakers of Tamil, and another eight million second-language speakers. It is an official language in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka (with which the state shares a maritime border), and Singapore, and is also used in Malaysia and the African island of Mauritius. The language, written in a distinctive curvilinear script, has a rich literature of poetry reaching back thousands of years, and of novels over the past few centuries; this is attested by a related category on the English Wikipedia that is already of impressive size.

The Open Policy Network, a project of Creative Commons, published an overview of the value of this kind of work in 2014; the Network advocates for governments around the world to adopt free content licenses. T

In brief

Mobile app provides offline access to 8,000 medical articles in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, and Spanish: The apps, which supplement a popular English language app, were announced by the WikiProject Med Foundation and Wikimedia Switzerland. More language editions are planned.
Wikimedia Foundation appoints five volunteers to its Board Governance Committee: Newly appointed trustee Nataliia Tymkiv announced the selection of the advisory group. Board governance issues have been the subject of much discussion since the tumultuous events at the WMF over the last year. The four members of the BGC are Tymkiv (chair), Kelly Battles, Christophe Henner, and Dariusz Jemielniak.
WikiConference North America will take place October 7–10, 2016 in San Diego. Scholarship applications are open until August 23; conference submissions until August 31.
WikiConvention Francophone will take place in Paris August 19–21.
New help page takes aim at common newbie obstacle: Many articles carry banners, to flag problems with the articles. New contributors often lack an understanding of how to go about removing the banners, if they address the underlying issues. In recent months, Fuhghettaboutit created a help page to explain the process, and advocated for linking to the page from the templates. The help page now gets several thousand views per day, suggesting that it is filling a significant gap.
Machine-assisted translation of Wikipedia articles, which has increased with the introduction of the Wikimedia Foundation's Content Translation Tool (covered by the Signpost in a June 2015 op-ed, in June 2016, and in various other pieces), has sparked a controversy in recent weeks. See here: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/CXT.
Wikidata RfC on defining data quality underway: Alessandro Piscopo, a guest of Wikimedia Germany, asserts that: "to achieve high quality, it is important to define first what data quality is on this knowledge base." Join the discussion: Wikidata:Requests for comment/Data quality framework for Wikidata. P

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For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/the-signpost-august-18-2016-pete-forsyth-and-tony-focus-on-india

FMP

praskrishna — 2012-04-16T07:04:18Z

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Flyer of the event

praskrishna — 2015-07-27T14:06:49Z

Criminal Defamation

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Flowchart

praskrishna — 2015-11-24T14:16:14Z

Stakeholders

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Flowchart

praskrishna — 2015-11-24T13:55:08Z

Flowchart

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Flaws_in_the_UIDAI_Process_0.pdf

praskrishna — 2016-03-06T10:37:28Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/Flaws_in_the_UIDAI_Process_0.pdf

Flashpoint #TrollControl: Maneka versus NCW

praskrishna — 2016-07-09T02:11:59Z

Amidst the debate over controlling online trolls - the proposal by Union Women and Child Development Minister to curb violence against women on the internet has triggered a fight between the minister and the National Commission for Women (NCW).

While Maneka Gandhi asked the NCW to monitor the internet to control trolls against women - NCW Chief Lalitha Kumaramangalam questioning the feasibility of the Minister's proposal, saying the internet is too big a space to be monitored. Sunil Abraham was interviewed. Times Now Television interviewed Sunil Abraham on this. Watch the video here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-now-july-8-2016-flashpoint-troll-control-maneka-versus-ncw

Fixing Copyright for Education (SCCR34 Side Event)

praskrishna — 2017-06-07T00:48:42Z

This event, hosted by Communia, EIFL, Creative Commons, and PIJIP, provided an overview of legal trends and developments concerning education, and presented the reality of education today. Anubha Sinha was a speaker.

The speakers described legal challenges faced by educators using new technologies, and discussed how copyright limitations and exceptions can be adapted to be fit for education in the digital age. It was held in Geneva as a side event at WIPO’s 34th Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights

Speakers:

Sean Flynn, Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, American University Washington College of Law. “Opening User Rights for Educational Uses.” Presentation | Data
Chichi Umesi, First Secretary, Mission Of Nigeria to the United Nations in Geneva. “The Importance of Education for Developing Countries.”
Teresa Nobre, Legal Expert on Copyright, Communia. “Mapping Obstacles to Educational Uses in Europe.” Final report | Infographic | Presentation
Delia Browne, Education Lead, Creative Commons Australia / Director, National Copyright Unit (Schools and TAFEs) Australia. “Tales from Australian Copyright Law Reform Debate.” Presentation | Background documents: Myth: Fair use would harm Australian authors | Myth: Fair use decimated educational publishing in Canada
Anubha Sinha, Centre for Internet and Society – India. “Access to Education Wins in Oxbridge Clash with Indian Photocopier.” Background document (by Lawrence Laing)

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/fixing-copyright-for-education-sccr34-side-event