Centre for Internet and Society

Editing Data

praskrishna — 2012-02-14T09:30:12Z

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Edit-a-thon

praskrishna — 2014-04-07T01:21:51Z

CIS-A2K team is organizing a edit-a-thon at Goa Central Library, Panjim on March 8, 2014.

This edit-a-thon will focus on creating and improving Konkani Wikipedia articles in all scripts.
Help increase web presence of Konkani language and culture!
We look forward to seeing you there!

The event is designed for two main purposes:

Help newcomers learn about Konkani Wikipedia
Give established Konkani Wikipedians a chance to work together and showcase their language on the Internet

What?: A one-day event for everyone to come together to edit and create Konkani Wikipedia pages. Help increase web presence of Konkani language and culture! You could write about Konkani language, writers, folklore or Goan culture, history, food or anything that interests you.

Wikipedia provides enough and more space for ALL scripts - so feel free to write in which ever script you're most comfortable with. We'll have:

Article creation sprint - Create new articles on Konkani Wikipedia
Wikipedia Training - Training session to become a Wikipedia content contributor
Wikipedia Games & Quiz - Participate in Wikipedia games and quiz and win Wikipedia swags
A lot of FUN!!

Europeana Fashion Editathon at Utrecht

Who?: Anyone who can or wants to contribute to Konkani Wikipedia. Join us if you want to showcase your language on a global platform. We will have people on hand to help you with Wikipedia editing and technical aspects.

Where?: Goa Central Library, Panjim

When?: Saturday, March 8, 2014, from 10 am to 5pm. (Drop in at any time, for as long as you want. Lunch provided!)

Art & feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon

What to bring?

a laptop (but we'll have some if you don't)
ideas for articles, and supporting references for the article content
any digital photos you've taken that you would like to use on Wikipedia.
a friend or two! Bring along other people -- it's more fun and more productive too.

Questions?: Contact Nitika at nitika[at]cis-india[dot]org

Schedule

10:00 am to 10:15 am - Wikipedia Energisers & Introductions
10:15 am to 10:30 am - Discussing ideas, suggestions and goals for a productive day
10:30 am to 1:00 pm - Wikipedia page editing
1:00 pm to 2:00 pm - Lunch
2:00 pm to 3:00 pm - Wikipedia Energisers, games & quiz
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm - Wikipedia page editing
4:00 pm to 5:00 pm - Wrap-up/Review the day’s progress

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/edit-a-thon

Edict Workshop Report

praskrishna — 2010-12-16T04:15:17Z

word file

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/advocacy/edict-workshop-report

Edict Conference Report

praskrishna — 2011-08-22T12:42:18Z

Pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/publications/edict-conference-report

Edict 2010

praskrishna — 2013-01-28T10:07:59Z

Edict2010

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Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Synthesis Overview

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:26:39Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights - The Traditional Knowledge Digital Library

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:40:50Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights-the-traditional-knowledge-digital-library

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:36:46Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: Opportunities for advocacy in intellectual property rights: Access to mobile technology

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:32:57Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-opportunities-for-advocacy-in-intellectual-property-rights-access-to-mobile-technology

Economic, social and cultural rights in India: FOSS

praskrishna — 2017-04-23T05:14:13Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/files/economic-social-and-cultural-rights-in-india-foss

Echolink

praskrishna — 2013-05-05T04:59:02Z

Echolink

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EC guidelines on social media: Welcome move, but not enough

praskrishna — 2013-11-19T10:18:51Z

With election season close by and the growing ubiquity of social media, the Election Commission of India’s recent guidelines for how candidates and political parties must conduct themselves on social media are a well-intentioned step. But are these guidelines enough to regulate how online media is used by parties and candidates, given the kind of proxy wars that are played online? For now, not really.

This article was published in the First Post on November 1. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

For the first time time, the EC is seeking detailed expenditure records, and disclosure of all authentic social media accounts of every candidate. The guidelines have also looked at online advertising and the EC has asked that all ads by political parties should be pre-certified before they are released online. In fact, Firstpost’s Pallavi Pollanki had reported even before the guidelines were published that the EC was working towards monitoring the use of social media. You can read the full story here.

Currently, however, the guidelines don’t take into account, content posted by persons other than candidates and political parties. The last paragraph of the EC’s order states, “As far as the content posted by persons other than candidates and political parties is concerned, the Commission is considering the matter in consultation with the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology on practical ways to deal with the issue, in so far as they relate to, or can be reasonably connected with, the election campaigning of political parties and candidates.”

The nature of the web is such that possible to create many IPs, change Twitter handles, create new user ids on public discussion forums. Thus it becomes very hard to gauge who is a volunteer/ just another ordinary supporter or who is a paid supporter. Even the EC acknowledges that.

Sunil Abraham, Director of the Centre for Internet and Society based in Bangalore, has a valid point on this. He says, “The guidelines only regulate the social media accounts of politicians and their parties. It does not regulate social media content published by others. This basically means that the EC needs to develop sophisticated tools to detect astroturfing, sock puppetry, meat puppetry and other forms of manipulation of the networked public sphere. Without these tools it would not be possible to tell when politicians and political parties use proxies to circumvent the guidelines.”

Astroturfing, for instance is when a site or an independent entity claims to be completely neutral and in favour of a political message without revealing its funding source. Very often software is used to create many online avatars. Sometimes it’s one person with many online identities which is also known as sock puppetry.

So yes, there might be online content or websites that claim to be independent and supports or mocks a particular leader but it might not always be possible to know who is financing them. While the EC might be able to keep a tab on official Twitter handles and Facebook and perhaps other few that are revealed by the party, it will be very hard to pinpoint proxy accounts, websites etc.

For example when it comes to a leader like Modi, there are many websites that are pro and anti-Modi. One in particular which defends Modi is called Godhra Riots the True Story and seeks to tell what it claims is the true tale behind the Godhra riots. When you type Godhra Riots, it is the number two search result in Google. In the About Us section, the website claims to be run by well-wishers of humanity and gives only a vague idea of its owner.

The site tries to absolve Modi, but since it doesn’t claim to be run by any political party, it doesn’t come under the purview of the EC’s guidelines and there is no reason to reveal who runs or funds it.

Counter to that is another website called Truth of Gujarat, which seeks to reveal the truth behind Narendra Modi’s development and other claims. The work published on the site bears bylines prominently but there is no easy way of knowing who finances the site and its research. The fact is that everyone claims to be represent a certain version of the truth on the web and when you don’t know the source, it becomes deeply problematic.

There’s also the question of Internet trolls who are largely un-touched by the guidelines. And there’s no denying that trolls do form a large part of the online political discourse in India.

We asked Ishan Russel, the managing partner for The Image People, a firm that specialises in political campaign management, if the guidelines are insufficient to deal with trolls.

He wrote, “Social media has ensured that a lot more people are expressing their opinion plus the added advantage of anonymity makes it easy for trolling. The days of the political class laying down the agenda are perhaps over… To try and regulate every comment is impossible, the best perhaps the EC can ensure is that no hateful campaigning happens online.”

EC also wants pre-certification for online advertising. But Sunil feels that pre-certification is overkill. He says, “This will greatly reduce the agility required by political parties on social media. Post facto notification would have been a sufficient measure to ensure compliance with the guidelines and other regulations of the EC.”

Ishant however says that pre-certification is good especially for video-based content, “In cases where for example a video ad is used it is good perhaps to pre-screen it so that it does not violate any norms.” He feels it is necessary to ensure that the online space remains fair too.

It would be fair to say that for now while the EC’s guidelines were much-needed but given the way the Internet works, they still have a long way to go.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/firstpost-november-1-2013-shruti-dhapola-ec-guidelines-on-social-media

Eating with Phone

praskrishna — 2012-02-09T09:08:22Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/EatingwithPhone.jpg

eAccessibility Workshop 2013

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T10:47:22Z

Directorate of Information Technology (DIT), in association with Mahaonline Limited (MoL) and NIXI has organized a workshop on eAccessibility on November 19-20, 2013 at Mumbai and Pune. The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the trainer organisations for the event.

See the original published by the Directorate of Information Technology, Government of Maharashtra. Link to the event page.

For this workshop, DIT is inviting developer communities and Software companies primarily working on Government of Maharashtra websites (which are citizen-centric, high-traffic, high impact and important ones), to teach them about accessibility and try to make their websites/application compliant to WCAG 2.0 Level A. It may be noted that Maharashtra’s egovernance policy 2011 specifies that websites/applications should be WCAG 2.0 Level A compliant.

The primary aim of this workshop is to demonstrate the importance of creating accessible web sites and to educate the developers of these web sites on how to incorporate accessibility features into new as well as existing web sites. The training will comprise both theory-oriented and practical (Hands-on) sessions on their own websites.

Topics for workshop:

Sensitization, what is accessible computing, how disabled interact with computer/web, WCAG, Basic principles of web accessibility, assistive tools/products

Implementation methods : HTML Markup validation, Treatment of Links, Page structure/Content, Menu, Images, Forms, Colour, Table, CSS, Keyboard, PDF, etc.

Managing and maintaining accessibility, Access policy design etc.

Targeted Audience for the Hands-On Training:

The participants would be experience technical professionals already involved in developing high traffic/high impact important web sites for Mahatrashtra government clients, with good knowledge of HTML, XML, CSS, etc. The sessions would give hands-on training to the participants, to make the applications / websites they are working on, “Accessible”.Participants can be:

Web designers, Software Developers, Business Analyst & System Analysts working on Government of Maharashtra Projects

Developers nominated by NIC DIOs for District specific sites

About Trainer Organisations

he trainers will be specialists in web accessibility. We have coordinated with Three Front-Runner organizations in India working on Accessibility, namely The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Barrierbreak and Advanced Blind Student LearningCentre, Univ. Of Pune, to participate in this workshop as CO- TRAINERS.

Please read more about these three organizations.

Workshop Schedule

The schedule of the workshop (to be conducted simultaneously in Mumbai and Pune Locations:

Workshop	Schedule	Highlights
Main Workshop	19-20 Nov 2013	Theory and Hands-on sessions by trainers
Follow up workshop	Second week of December 2013 (Date to be finalized during main workshop)	Review of compliance work done by participating companies and certification of websites for e-Accessibility, followed by Concluding session.

Parallel Tracks and Participant Groups

This workshop will be conducted jointly in Mumbai & Pune and would be achieved by associating with co-trainer organizations with participant-grouping as described below:

Co-Trainer	Group to be alloted	Seat Capacity
The Centre for Internet and Society	Mumbai: Group A	20
Barrierbreak Ltd.	Mumbai: Group B	20
Advanced Technology Blind Student's Learning Centre, University of Pune	Pune: Group C	20

Group A and B: Participants from Mumbai, Nashik, Nagpur etc.
Group C : Participants from Pune and adjoining cities.

Location preference of the participants shall be asked at the time of registrations. It will be confirmed depending upon seat-availability, on first-come-first-serve basis.

Follow-up Workshop / Concluding session

There will be a followup workshop (1 day), which shall be important milestone for the entire initiative. During this, First half shall be devoted for compliance-check and actual certification of Websites by Trainer/faculty members. In second half of the day, DIT and MoL would invite larger group of stake-holders, namely concerned Secretaries / HoD of client Organizations.

Expected Outcome of the workshop

At the end of the workshop, as tangible output, it is expected that the sites taken up during the workshop shall be made more accessible, to have larger compliance factor for WCAG 2.0 level A. As part of one of the outcome of the workshop, it is expected that 25 to 30 inaccessible government web sites shall be retrofitting with accessibility features, to make them compliance to WCAG 2.0 Level A.

Cost of participation

Registered participants can attend this workshop free-of-cost.

All Other Costs (Travelling, Lodging, Boarding etc.) are to be borne by the participants/attendees.

Venue Details

Location	Groups	Seat Capacity
Mumbai : Mahaonline Sion Office	A and B	40 (20+20)
Pune: Mahaonline Training Academy Premises	Group C	20

Registrations

The companies working for govt. clients have to register their staff (who are working on a set of websites) for this workshop using following link:

URL: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/eAccessibility_workshop

Maximum 4 staff member can be nominated by a company. For a website, maximum 2 persons can be nominated. The decision of DIT/MoL about selection of a website/participant for this workshop shall be final and binding.

Contact Details

Email: payal.bulani@mahaonline.gov.in
Phone: (022) 6707 7000 Ext 103
Fax: (022) 2402 0507

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/e-accessibility-workshop-2013

Eaccessibility Handbook

praskrishna — 2011-11-10T09:37:08Z

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