Centre for Internet and Society

Telecom Cases

praskrishna — 2014-09-08T02:20:51Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/telecom-cases.zip

Telecom

praskrishna — 2016-07-01T16:42:08Z

Telecom

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

Telecom

praskrishna — 2021-12-14T02:11:06Z

Telecom

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Tejaswini with Participants

praskrishna — 2014-10-07T05:27:55Z

Tejaswini Niranjana with participants

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

Tejaswini

praskrishna — 2013-02-04T08:37:07Z

Tejaswini Niranjana

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

Tejas Jain

praskrishna — 2014-11-13T15:27:06Z

Tejas Jain

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

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi

praskrishna — 2011-06-06T06:30:09Z

Accountability Initiative (AI) held a bar-camp on “Technology, Transparency and Accountability” on 5th June at Google office in Gurgaon. Pranesh Prakash participated in this bar-camp.

The camp brought together technology enthusiasts, coders, hackers and policy-thinkers together in a collaborative environment to develop innovative solutions to accountability and transparency challenges in India.

Agenda

10:00 AM - Introduction
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM Combined sessions at the cafe
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo sessions in the cafe
1:30 PM - Lunch
2:30 - 5:30 PM - Breakout sessions in the various rooms and demo session in the cafe
5:30 - 6:30 PM - Deciding the future of the camp and creating blueprints for further collaboration
6:30 PM - Ending session

Some of the topics being talked about thus far

Social accountability tools and how can technology be used for this?

Public finance tracking and PAISA
Participatory budgeting
Participatory research for tracking outcomes
Citizen report cards
Social audits

Open Data and why it is important for transparency

Where can you find government data
Scraping government data using Needle Base
Why is visualization important?
Some examples of how open Data is changing the world
Akshara's work at the Karnataka Learning Partnership and the need for open educational data.
Data-mashups
The draft policy on open data in India
One stop govt ports

Technology innovations for improving the Right to Information

A wishlist
Shouldn't the replies to RTI be in the public domain?
Filing an RTI: Problems and Prospects
RTI Question and Answer Portal
How do you file an RTI though an SMS?

Egovernance initiatives that are leading to greater accountability and transparency

Mahima Kaul - Digital Empowerment Foundation

Making the links between politics and businesses transparent

Rohit Chandra

Electoral accountability

‘Improving and Strengthening Democracy in India’ - Lessons from Election Watch Process

Crowd-sourcing actionable data

An example of crowd-sourcing - Powercuts.in

Transparency in diplomacy

Using online tools to engage and be engaged by the public.

How should we look at technology when dealing with grassroots situations?

How can programmers help in making governance more transparent?

Perspectives from the Government

Perspectives from the NIC
Perspectives from the NEGP
Perspectives from the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Making conversation: citizens and their government

Making visual sense of Data and Policy

Policy to Practice: From the lab and to the people

How can legislators and parliamentarians and MPs be tracked by citizens?

Research Tools to work with large amounts of data

Other interesting ideas that have come up

Panini Keypad - Mr Abhijit Bhattacharjee
How Ashok Leyland dealt with its problems of too many layers between the customer on the ground and the top management - Its implications for the government

The Speakers

Nikhil Dey - Nikhil Dey has done more to fight for the rights of people than he will ever allow the world to find out. Always far from the spotlight, he has worked quietly to shape legislation, lobby governments and politicians and build grassroots campaigns.Born in 1963 in the city of Bangalore, Nikhil was educated in India and the US. Before the formal completion of his graduate course at the George Mason University, he left to ‘follow his bliss' and came to India. His initial work was with the Kheduth Mazdoor Chetna Sangathan in Madhya Pradesh. He then joined Aruna Roy and Shankar Singh in 1987 to go to a village called Devdungri in Rajsamand district, Rajasthan. Devdungri was soon to become the head office of the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS), a peasants-workers-women organisation founded by the trio in 1990. He currently is the Convener of the National Campaign for People's Right to Information.

Shri Sailesh Gandhi - Shailesh Gandhi is one among the handful of people whose dogged perseverance has demonstrated that the Right to Information Act is a valuable tool that can be used by ordinary people to resolve issues and to clean up public life. Currently one of the Information Commissioners of India, Mr Gandhi is a graduate from IIT-Mumbai and first-generation entrepreneur.

Prof Trilochan Sastry - Prof Trilochan Sastry has a Bachelors in Technology from IIT, Delhi, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) USA. He taught for several years at Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad after which he moved to IIM, Bangalore. He is currently Dean at IIM Bangalore. He has taught in other Universities in India, Japan, Hong Kong and United States and has published several academic papers in Indian and International journals. Has received national award for research and teaching. He was part of the cofounding team of ADR India in 1999.

GVL Narasimha Rao: Rao is a well known Psephologist who has been predicting Indian elections for two decades for various leading media organisations in the country. He is the founder of Development & Research Services Pvt. Ltd., a leading research organisation offering professional research services for various governmental, international and commercial organisations. Formerly, he was a Columnist for MINT newspaper and regularly writes in various newspapers on politics and elections.

Rao is presently Media Adviser to Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh in the rank of a state minister. He is also a member of the BJP’s National Committee on Electoral Reforms under the guidance of BJP’s senior Leader Mr. L.K. Advani.

Rao is President of VeTA (Citizens for Verifiability, Transparency and Accountability) and has organised various efforts in highlighting the lack of transparency and verifiability in Indian EVMs. He has authored a book titled “Democracy at Risk! Can We Trust Our EVMs?” which became the intellectual basis for the campaign for EVM reform. He had highlighted the vulnerabilities of India’s EVMs in a round table international Electronic Voting Workshop in Washington D.C. last year which was also attended by the Election Commission of India. Rao has blogged extensively on the vulnerabilities of EVMs at www.indianEVM.com which exerted huge pressure on the Election Commission of India and even served as an eye opener for laying bare hitherto unknown vulnerabilities (brought out by the research of Hari Prasad et al.) and raising uncomfortable questions regarding the pitfalls in EVM procurement, storage and field administration.

Mahima Kaul - Mahima Kaul is a writer/journalist and has worked with different formats - print, video and online. She has written for The Indian Express, Sunday Guardian, PBS World Focus and also worked on video programming for Al Jazeera and PBS. She was the India producer for PBS's special coverage on the Mumbai Terror Attacks, which was nominated for an Emmy Award. She has a blog that has been picked up by (among others) OpenDemocracy, Global Voices, Huffington Post and Ground Report.

She is deeply involved in ICT4D -- Information and Communication Technologies for Development -- sector. She has worked with Video Volunteers, a community media organization, and helped launch India's first community TV channel, India Unheard. She is a consultant with the Digital Empowerment Foundation where she manages the Digital Knowledge Center, the first information portal in India on best practices in ICT4D. Mahima has also established The Open Communication Foundation as a multidisciplinary platform devoted to ICT4D.

Rohit Chandra - Rohit Chandra is an engineering graduate currently doing research in the areas of power, energy and natural resources at the Centre for Policy Research. He will be discussing a nascent idea at the Accountability Initiative which hopes to map the links between businesses and politicians.

Sukhman Randhawa - Sukhman has completed her Masters in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, UK and has obtained a BA in English Literature (Hons.) from St. Stephen's College, Delhi University. She is also an honorary fellow of the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust. She has worked as a Research Associate at the National Knowledge Commission (NKC), a high level advisory body to the Prime Minister of India, on the focus areas of Higher Education, Libraries, National Portal for Teachers, National Environment Portal, National Biodiversity Portal, Quality of Life, and worked on compiling the final report of the Commission. At NKC, she also worked with State Governments for implementation of NKC recommendations and preparing blueprints for action. She has also worked with IL&FS Education and Technology Services Ltd in Delhi. Currently she is working at the Office of Mr Sam Pitroda, Adviser to the Prime Minister of India on Public Information Infrastructure and Innovations.

Gautam John - Gautam used to be a lawyer with a focus on copyright laws and has also been an entrepreneur. He is passionate about education, equality and equity and focuses on 'access' as a way to achieve these. Gautam was a TED India Fellow in 2009 and is a Creative Commons supporter. He works with the Akshara Foundation where he manages the Karnataka Learning Partnership project, Pratham Books and is an advisor to Inclusive Planet. He is a founder member of Wikimedia Chapter (India) and currently serves as Secretary on the Executive Committee.

The Karnataka Learning Partnership is a multi-party, multi-stakeholder platform to bring transparency in the public preschool and primary education space. Karnataka Learning Partnership is also a public space where citizens can contribute to the cause of ensuring better schools and schooling for our children.

Raman Jit Singh Chima - is a senior analyst, Public Policy and Government Affairs at Google, India.

Pranesh Prakash - Pranesh Prakash is a programme manager with the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit research and advocacy organization. He is a lawyer by training who's comfortable at a bash prompt. He works mostly around issues of intellectual property rights reform, promoting IP alternatives and transparency through different kinds of 'opennesses'—open standards, free/open source software, open government data, open access to law—as well as issues of freedom of speech and expression and privacy that relate to the Internet.

Last year, Pranesh along with Glover Wright, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah, prepared a report around open government data (OGD) in India as part of a series of studies commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative . In that report they looked at the existing ecosystem in terms of data practices, the policy environment (RTI, copyright, standards, NeGP, NKC's recommendations, etc.) , and specific OGD case studies of governmental organizations, civil society organizations, public-private partnerships, and civic hackers. The report then charts out challenges any campaign for OGD in India must address, as well as observations on how the very conceptualization of OGD must be different in India, and strategic recommendations on how to grow the OGD movement in India.

Rishabh Verma - A Python enthusiast, FOSS contributor,loves data mining and is always upto finding unusual patterns in large datasets. Organizer of Tech & Entrepreneurial events, he digs data-contextualization books when he should rather be preparing for his board exams.

Thejesh N - Thejesh GN is a Technologist. His area of interests are web, Open Data and Open Source technologies. He moonlights visualizing public data. He loves blogging and hacking open source software. You can find more about him here.

Chakshu Roy - Chakshu is a lawyer who specialised in real estate law and commercial agreements before joining PRS. He has earlier worked in corporate law with the Chamber of Law, New Delhi. He holds bachelors degrees in Commerce and Law from Delhi University. Chakshu Roy heads technology initiatives at PRS Legislative research, developing a comprehensive technology strategy to engage large sections of the Indian population in policy making.

Vinay Kumar - Vinay Kumar is the chief strategist at Digital Greens. He currently manage operations of Digital Green and contribute to its organizational development. He is also a consultant to Translational Health Science & Technology Institute (THSTI) at Department of Biotechnology. Prior to this he was at India Operations Director at PATH and Regional Operations Manager for Asia / Near East with IntraHealth International. Earlier he was with the Reserve Bank of India. I have an MA in Political Science and M. Phil. in International Relations from JNU and MBA from FMS.

Manu Srivastava - Manu Srivastava works as Vice President - Delivery at eGovernment Foundation, a not-for-profit trust that was founded in Feb 2003 by Nandan Nilekani & Srikanth Nadhamuni with a goal of creating an eGovernance system to improve the functioning of City Municipalities leading to better delivery of services to their citizens. He has been in the field of Municipal Governance for the last 7 years and focusses on supply side, with the Municipal Governments, to create sustainable, efficient, transparent and accountable Municipalities. eGovernments Solutions have been deployed in more than 250 municipalities across the country.

Dinesh Shenoy - Dinesh Shenoy is a business developer at Palantir. Palantir is a firm believer in the fact that well-informed citizens lead to better government, and making government data available is certainly an important first step. In practice, however, information is scattered across countless domains, and combining such widely dispersed knowledge in a meaningful way is a technical challenge beyond any private citizen's capabilities. Palantir has eliminated this barrier, democratizing the data and providing the tools to place a new world of analysis at your fingertips.

Palantir has developed AnalyzeThe.US which allows anyone to to explore vast amounts of data, including key datasets from www.data.gov. It brings critical knowledge together on a single stage, while providing rich analytical applications that enable anyone to develop an intuitive picture of the complex flow of resources, money, and influence that affect how our government functions. Ultimately, by allowing citizens to analyze our democracy, AnalyzeThe.US democratizes analysis.

Paul Culmsee - Paul Culmsee is a dialog mapper based in Perth, Australia. He has faciliated a number of meetings and done lot of dialog mapping particularly for the public sector in the areas of urban planning and health. He is the only certified dialog-mapper in the Southern hemisphere. He has also dialog-mapped politicians. His work has culminated in soon to be released book called "Beyond Best Practices", which outlines IBIS based techniques - a radically inclusive approach to knowledge management that allows groups to capture and make sense of unstructured knowledge during project meetings. and case studies. The book goes beyond the tool of mapping and the concept of wicked problems to look at what is needed to create and maintain a "holding environment".

Frederick Noronha - Frederick Noronha is a journalist, writer, publisher and photographer from Goa, India. He is known for online community building, and for promoting the cause of Free Software in India. Among the other campaigns he has been actively associated with are the successful community radio campaign, right to information initiatives, sharable content (including the information commons, Creative Commons, Wikipedia). He has been active in mailing lists within India, and has undertaken blogging assignments in Uganda, Malaysia and Thailand. He is on twitter at @fn and shares his links via Facebook and del.icio.us (fredericknoronha)

Nikhil Pahwa - Nikhil Pahwa is a media junkie, journalist and a blogger. He has covered the digital media business for more than 3 years. He has helped bringing a pan-media perspective to digital media reportage, highlighting industry issues, identifying opportunities and problems, and questioning the efficacy of decisions being made by some large media companies. Nikhil Pahwa undoubtedly is one of the popular names in the business of digital media coverage. Companies referMedianama for the latest breaking news in the digital media industry.

Kohl Singh Gill - Dr. Kohl S. Gill is the President and founder of LaborVoices, Inc. Dr. Gill served as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow for the U.S. Departments of Energy and State, most recently as the South Asia and Middle East Labor Affairs Officer for the Office of International Labor and Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Prior to federal service, Dr. Gill was an Indicorps Fellow in the slum areas of Delhi, India, serving as a volunteer paralegal with local residents, using transparency legislation to fight both petty and grand corruption at the local level. Dr. Gill is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for his work in quantum computing and semiconductor physics.

Aaditya Dar, Dhruv Suri and Ritwik Agrawal - Aaditya, Dhruv and Ritwik are interested in exploring and evolving innovative interventions to improve governance in India. They have varied backgrounds - economics, policy research, law, advocacy [and even math!] and have worked together in the past on education and governance related issues as part of United Students.

Vijay Pratap Singh Aditya is a development professional with hands-on experience in institution development, development research, communication systems and grassroots networking. He has considerable experience in developing systems and platforms for enabling enterprise support. Vijay is an Electrical Engineering Graduate with a Post-Graduation in Management from the Indian Institute of Forest Management, Bhopal, M.P., India. Vijay is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ekgaon.

The other speakers were:

Vivek Joshi
Siddhant
Mudit Tuli
Ankit Rastogi
Nirmesh Singh
Manish Shekhar
Shashank S
Mandira
Tonushree
Shomikho Raha

The rationale behind the camp

Founded in 2008, AI is a research initiative that aims to improve the quality of public services in India by promoting informed and accountable governance. To this end, one of AI's key efforts is to develop innovative models for tracking government led social sector programs in India. The Centre for Policy Research, an independent and non-partisan research institute and think-tank, is the institutional anchor for this initiative.

It is now widely accepted that greater transparency – access to information and data on the day to day functioning of government – is key to creating accountable and effective governance systems. The Right to Information Act (2005) has played a significant role in strengthening transparency by committing the government to both proactively providing citizens with information and also responding to specific information requests. While the Act has met much success – RTI applications are growing by the day - there remain concerns related to quality, and reliability of information and data provided. Moreover, there are still many gaps in the Government’s efforts to proactively disclose information and data of public relevance.

Technology is one of many tools that can help address these gaps. There are some incredible initiatives taking place across the world on opening government data and on getting data to work for ordinary citizens. [See below for a sample of initiatives] Through the bar camp, we hope to create a platform for technologists to share these technologies and contribute to the debate on strengthening accountability and transparency.

Equally, we believe that technology solutions can be significantly enhanced if they are developed in consultation with people working on the ground, people who deal with the challenges of our current governance systems in India. By organizing a bar camp, we at AI want to initiate a conversation between technology specialists and people working on the ground. Through the bar camp, we intend to create a space where people can share their knowledge about how best to use new technologies to make our government really work for the people.

Online conversations

To faciliate conversations between interested people and for people who are interested in being a part of the planning process, we created a Google-Group. To send in your suggestions for the camp, both on what you would like to hear, and on what sessions you would like to take, you can use the google-group or send in your entries through our Facebookpage, our Twitter handle or through comments on this blog post. Our entry on the official bar-camp page is here. To tweet about us please use the hash-tag #TAC1.

Do you need more ideas?

To spark your thought processes, we consolidated a list of websites which deal with "Technology, Accountabilty and Transparency". Have fun!

A compendium of ideas from across the world can be found here.
The Sunlight Foundation does some excellent work on technology and transparency issues.
The technology for transparency network maps technology initiatives across the world.
Code for America brings together techies from across the world to use their skills for the greater common good.
Civics Common is another organization working on using technology for common good, and this involves a lot of transparent data.

For any other information, please contact lemmanuel @ accountabilityindia.org.

See the entire details on the Accountability Initiative website.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/notices/technology-transparency-accountability

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education

praskrishna — 2015-03-30T14:54:21Z

Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation.

The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.

Peer-to-Peer Technologies

The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these critically in order to build a better learning environment for themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.

Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.

As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction and learning.

The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:

The Costs of Belonging

Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend circles within the college environment.

It was particularly insightful for us to understand that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping ‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers, internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways, these students were digital natives if defined through access, because they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.

Based on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting, exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel excluded from the power of the digital.

The Need for Diversity

It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us. Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English, fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.

Such an idea might also help in reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find themselves tentative and intimidated online.

The breakthrough that the participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning lesson for us.

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning

As a part of their orientation to the world of the digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.

Working together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories, emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated special trainings with different experts in areas of language, communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure that is different from the regular classroom learning.

What would happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities, where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities, cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys, ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.

Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies. How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we organise a faculty training workshop later in December.

These three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream learning within higher education in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education

Technology, Power, and Revolutions in the Arab Spring

praskrishna — 2013-07-01T08:36:57Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), Bangalore cordially invites you to a talk by Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan on technology, power and revolutions in the Arab Spring. The talk will be held in CIS office on July 2, 2013 from 6.00 p.m. onwards.

Ramesh Srinivasan

Ramesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote an op/ed at the Washington Post explaining the complex nature of social media in revolutions and riots, such as those in Egypt and in London, and also a column for the Post’s Sunday Outlook section on the 5 Myths of Social Media. Additionally, he has written multiple front page articles for the Huffington Post, including a piece on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post. He has had his work featured on the front page of the UCLA and USC websites.

Recent public outreach has built on his response in the New Yorker (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers, pragmatically studying their strengths and limitations, who were involved in recent revolutions in Egypt and Kyrgyzstan, as discussed in a recent NPR interview. He has also collaborated with non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. His work has impacted contemporary understandings of media studies, anthropology and sociology, design, and economic and political development studies. He has given several major invited talks, including recently at LIFT in 2009 (http://vimeo.com/5520100). He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

See Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan's blog page

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/technology-power-and-revolutions-in-arab-spring

Technology, Gender Based Violence

praskrishna — 2014-12-07T03:07:32Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/technology-gender-based-violence.pdf

Technology in Government and Topics in Privacy

praskrishna — 2013-12-27T10:20:33Z

Malavika Jayaram is a speaker at an event organized by Data Privacy Lab at CGIS Cafe, Cambridge Street, Harvard University Campus. She will speak on Biometrics in Beta – India's Identity Experiment on December 9, 2013.

Technology in Government (TIG) and Topics in Privacy (TIP) consist of weekly discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of privacy (TIP) and uses of technology to assess and solve societal, political, and government problems (TIG). Discussions are often inspired by a real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant, who may be from industry, government, or academia. Practice talks and presentations on specific techniques and topics are also common.

Abstract of the Talk

India's identity juggernaut - the Unique Identity (UID) project that has registered around 450 million people and is yet to be fully realized - is already the world's largest biometrics identity scheme. Based on the premise that centralized de-duplication and authentication will establish uniqueness and eliminate fraud, it is hailed as a game changer and a silver bullet that will solve myriad problems and improve welfare delivery, yet its conception and architecture raise significant concerns. In addition to the UID project, there is a slew of "Big Brother" systems that together form a matrix of identity and surveillance schemes: the UID is intended as a common identifier across this matrix as well as other public and private databases. Indian authorities frame Big Data as a panacea for fraud, corruption and abuse, without apprehending the further fraud, corruption and abuse that joined up databases can themselves engender. The creation of a privacy-invading technology layer not simply as a barrier to online participation but to social participation writ large is not fully appreciated by policy makers. Malavika will provide an overview of the identity landscape including the implications for privacy and free speech, and more broadly, democracy and openness.

Malavika Jayaram

Malavika is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, focusing on privacy, identity and free expression, especially in the context of India's biometric ID project. A Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, she is the author of the India chapter for the Data Protection & Privacy volume in the Getting the Deal Done series. She is one of 10 Indian lawyers in The International Who's Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers directory. In August 2013, she was voted one of India's leading lawyers - one of only 8 women to be featured in the "40 under 45" survey conducted by Law Business Research, London. In a different life, she spent 8 years in London, practicing law with global law firm Allen & Overy in the Communications, Media & Technology group, and as VP and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. During 2012-2013, She was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.

Click to read more on the event originally published by Data Privacy Lab here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/technology-in-government-and-topics-in-privacy

Technology for Accessibility in Higher Education

praskrishna — 2012-01-29T12:37:41Z

Nirmita Narasimhan wrote in the journal published by Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/accessibility/technology-for-accessibility

Technology Evangelists and Religious Evangelists — A Talk by Katherine Sydenham

praskrishna — 2012-09-04T10:44:34Z

Katherine Sydenham from the University of Michigan School of Information will deliver a lecture at the Centre for Internet & Society office in Bangalore on August 10, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.

Abstract

The current investigation explores the possibility of comparison of techniques used by technology evangelists and religious evangelists. The study sought informants from three major categories: proprietary software evangelists, proponents of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and religious evangelists of several religious traditions. A preliminary analysis of qualitative data indicates that there are enough similarities in strategies used by members from each group to make the inquiry relevant. Early data also reveal significant differences in each group´s strategy that may inform and shape future efforts on behalf of technology evangelists to reach a wider audience for their products.

Katherine Sydenham

Katherine is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan School of Information. Her research in the Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) field focuses on technology adoption by marginalized communities. Her background is in Religious Studies and Library and Information Science. Her summer internship at Microsoft Research is exploring the strategic similarities between technology evangelism and religious evangelism.

Click here to read more about Katherine

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/technology-evangelists-religious-evangelists

Technology Culture and Events in South East Asia — A Presentation by Preetam Rai

praskrishna — 2012-12-19T12:25:29Z

Preetam Rai who works with nonprofits, startups and educational institutions will do a small presentation cum discussion at the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore on December 18, 2012, from 5.00 p.m. to 6.30 p.m.

In 2012, Myanmar hosted one of the largest open technology event with over 5000 attendees joining the Barcamp Yangon. Every month, Cambodian youth put together dozens of self-initiated peer learning events and actively use social networks to recruit participants. Thais are creating physical spaces where social entrepreneurs and developers collaborate with each other.

Join us to explore these trends and how they are helping change South East Asia. Learn how the technology enthusiasts are ignoring past national antagonism and traveling across borders to connect with peers.

We will introduce you to events and spaces(coworking spaces, hackerspaces) that you can join in to explore this activity first hand when you are traveling through the region.


Participants from several South East Asian countries at BlogFest 2012 in Cambodia.

Preetam Rai

Preetam Rai helps put up technology and educational events in South East Asia. He works with nonprofits, startups and educational institutions helping them connect better with their audiences. He was the South East Asian Regional Editor at Global Voices Online, a social media aggregation project initiated by the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society. He is on twitter at @preetamrai.

VIDEO

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/technology-culture-and-events-in-south-east-asia

Technology Business Incubators

praskrishna — 2015-07-25T15:41:53Z

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