Centre for Internet and Society

Open Access Day

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:45:17Z

October 14, 2008 will be the world’s first Open Access Day. The founding partners for this Day are SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science.

The Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, and the Cente for Internet and Society, Bangalore, request your presence at the celebrations of the first Open Access Day. Speaker include Prof. Andrew Lynn, Department of Bio-informatics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society.

Venue: Tagore Hall, Dayar-i-Mir Taqi Mir, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

Agenda

About Open Access Day

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access/open-access-day

Open Content and Open Access

sunil — 2009-10-08T14:54:39Z

Open Content (of which Open Access can be thought of as a subcategory) is that content which is freely available on the Internet with or without rights to modify or re-use it. Open content can take many manifestations from openly-licensed materials (Creative Commons, etc.), open access to scholarly literature (scientific, legal, etc.), open educational resources, to open access to the law (particularly legislations and judgments). We at CIS believe that sharing of knowledge and culture is only human.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access

Essay Competition

sunil — 2009-09-23T10:02:28Z

In partnership with Free Software User Group - Bangalore, the Centre for Internet and Society is organising a essay competition for school and college students from Bangalore. The last date for submitting entries is 8th November 2008. Three prizes of Rs. 3,000/- each are available for college students, and three 3 prizes of Rs. 1,000/- each are available for school students.

Poster and Cover Letter

Download an electronic copy of the poster and covering letter that has been sent to around 350 school and colleges in Bangalore city.

Process of Judging

Volunteers from the Free Software User Group will together constitute a committee that will anonymously and individual score all entries. The score will be consolidated across judges to determine the final winners.

Terms and Conditions

Copyright: The copyright of the essay will remain with the participant.
License: All submissions will automatically be considered licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 India License.
The collective decision of the judges will be considered final.

Rules

Participants must be bona fide students of a school or college in Bangalore.
The word limit for essays is 1200 words.
Essays can be submitted either in English or in Kannada.
Electronic submission should be in an Open Format [Text - .txt, Rich Text Format - .rtf, Open Document Format - .odt, Portable Document Format - .pdf]

Thanks

Free Software Users Group, Bangalore, for acting as co-organiser for the competition.
Renuka Prasad, Professor, R.V.College of Engineering for the concept, providing leadership and organising the databases of schools and colleges.
Anivar Aravind for providing advice and support.
Hiran Venugopalan, Engineering Student, for designing the poster.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/essay-competition

People

sunil — 2011-12-04T15:26:14Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people

Members

sunil — 2009-06-19T14:16:51Z

The members of the Society registered under Karnataka Societies Act are Vibodh Parthasarathi, Atul Ramachandra, Achal Prabhala, Lawrence Liang, Subbiah Arunachalam, Nishant Shah, and Sunil Abraham.

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in the creative industries, cross-national communication policy, business history of the media and governance of media infrastructure. Currently at the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, he has held positions at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, also at Jamia, Centre for Co-operative Research in Social Sciences, and Manipal Institute of Communication. He is the co-editor of L’idiot du Village Mondial (Editions Luc Pire/ECLM, 2004), Media and Mediation (Sage, 2005) and The Social and the Symbolic (Sage, 2007). His work has attracted support variously from the India Foundation for the Arts, Netherlands Fellowship Programme, Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation, Prince Klaus Fund, Charles Wallace India Trust and Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation. Periodically on assignments in business development and television production with the media industry, his last documentary Crosscurrents: A Fijian Travelogue (2001) explored the underbelly of ‘reconciliation’ following a decade of military coups in Fiji. Vibodh’s nominations include Non Executive Director, Kadam Films Ltd. (New Delhi); Independent Director, Centre for Social Ecology (Jaipur); Founding International Member, Intercultural Library for the Future (Paris); Associate, South Asian Poverty Network Association (Colombo); and, Member, Academic Council, Institute of Social Studies (The Hague).

Atul Ramachandra

Atul Ramachandra has a background in New Media having worked for 8 years with Explocity, a News Corp company, joining them at the set-up of their expansion with VC funding, looking after operations, budget control, management and selection of technology and technology providers with an accent on open source platforms. He completed his stint at Explocity as VP - Digital, having been in charge of developing new digital media products for the Internet and Mobile phones.

He is currently Project Director setting up a self-sustaining news and information service on mobile phones, for the urban slums of Kolkata. The project is funded by the European Commission through a grant to Internews Europe, a non-profit International news agency. Prior to this, he has over a decade of experience in the solar and renewable energy sector and has worked on product development and technical marketing. A graduate in applied physics (5 year MS) from IIT Delhi (1981), Atul specialised in Solar Energy and he has 3 years of post-graduate work at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA. His interests are product development and innovation, new trends in technology and web enabling of products and services. He continues to be interested in the area of new and renewable energy sources and new applications powered by them and technology for the supply of potable water powered by solar energy.

Achal Prabhala

Achal Prabhala is a writer and researcher based in Bangalore. He works primarily on intellectual property; previously, he worked in media, mainly in television and print. From 2004-2006, he coordinated the Access to Learning Materials Project in Southern Africa from Johannesburg. He works on aspects of patent and copyright systems, in relation to access to medicines and access to knowledge. Some representative publications by him include Battling HIV/AIDS – A Decision Maker's Guide to the Procurement of Medicines and Related Supplies, Intellectual Property, Education and Access to Knowledge in Southern Africa, Response to Indian Copyright Law Amendment, and Reconsidering the Pirate Nation: Notes from South Africa and India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/members

Distinguished Fellows

sunil — 2020-07-27T12:50:59Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is based in Chennai. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is based at UNU-MERIT at Maastricht. Hans Varghese Mathews is based in Bangalore. Shyam Ponappa is based in New Delhi. Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana is based in Bangalore and Mumbai.

Hans Varghese Mathews

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (known to friends as Arun) started his career as a research chemist, but found his calling in information science. In the past four decades, he has been a student of chemistry, a laboratory researcher (at the Central Electrochemical Research Institute and the Indian Institute of Science), an editor of scientific journals (at the Publications and Information Directorate of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Academy of Sciences), the secretary of a scholarly academy of sciences (IASc), a teacher of information science (at the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre), and a development researcher (at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras). While working with M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, he initiated the South-South Exchange Traveling Workshop to facilitate hands on cross-cultural learning for knowledge workers from Africa, Asia and Latin America engaged in ICT-enabled development.

Arun is on the editorial boards of six international refereed journals including Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, and Journal of Community Informatics; a member of the international advisory board of IICD, The Hague, a trustee of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, and a Trustee of the Voicing the Voiceless Foundation. Improving information access both for scientists and for the rural poor; scientometrics, ICT-enabled development and open access are among his current research interests.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is a researcher based in Maastricht. He is an Open Source Initiative board member, the founding international and managing editor of the peer-reviewed journal First Monday, and the Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT. He has undertaken several global, high-profile studies on Free Software. He is a jury member for Global Bangemann Challenge (now Stockholm Challenge Award), a prestigious prize awarded to IT projects with socio-economic impact by the mayor of Stockholm and founder member of the GII Internet Commerce Brain Trust. From 1995–1999, Rishab has worked as an editor at The Indian Techonomist, an analytical newsletter on Indian media and communications targeted at a global audience, an analyst and newsletter contributor for US-based Paul Kagan Associates, and a weekly columnist on Internet society (Electric Dreams). He still writes regularly, with over half a million words published in journals, newspapers and magazines worldwide, from PC Quest India to Wired Magazine, USA. From 2008, he heads the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT.

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow whose work is in the areas of broadband, telecommunications, and spectrum policy, from management, systems, and technology perspectives.

Beginning his career at the State Bank of India, he was a Senior Manager, Management Consulting Services, at Price Waterhouse in San Francisco, M&A Head for Citibank in India, and thereafter managed a partnership doing alliances, business strategy, and financial placements in New Delhi for major international and domestic clients. Subsequently, he was an independent consultant in India and abroad. His experience is in financial placements, M&A, and business strategy for clients in IT, telecommunications, power, oil/energy, airlines, biotechnology, banking/financial services, hotels, shipping, railroads, manufacturing, agri-business, law firms, and retail enterprises.

He has advised the government on public policy since 1990, primarily in telecommunications. As a columnist for the Business Standard, he writes on infrastructure and managing economic reforms (http://organizing-india.blogspot.com). He has an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA (History) and a BSc (Physics) from Madras Christian College."

Tejaswini Niranjana is presently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.

At CSCS (www.cscs.res.in), Tejaswini helped set up in 2001 an inter-disciplinary doctoral programme in Cultural Studies, and many of her Ph.D. students have brought Indian language materials into their research and writing. At TISS (www.tiss.edu), Tejaswini is incubating the Centre for Indian languages in Higher Education, which will anchor a multi-institutional programme for Indian languages in higher education, including production of new resources, curriculum strengthening, research training, digitisation and archiving. On the anvil is the creation at TISS of a digital hub for Indian language resources for tertiary education.

She is also Lead Researcher of the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Programme at CSCS (http://heira.in). HEIRA works towards sectoral transformation in higher education, working with private and public institutions to design and field-test new methods for curriculum development, teacher training and institutional change at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Tejaswini is co-author of a policy note on quality education in Indian languages, the recommendations of which are now part of the final 12^th Plan document (http://www.ugc.ac.in/ugcpdf/740315_12FYP.pdf).

Select publications are available from cscs.academia.edu. Her best-known book is Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). More recently, she published Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration across India and Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Tejaswini is the Adviser (since February 2013) to the 'Access to Knowledge' programme of CIS and will guide the A2K team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/about/people/distinguished-fellows