Centre for Internet and Society

NIE Steps in to Grow Konkani Wikipedia

vishnu — 2014-10-10T11:26:26Z

The Centre for Internet & Society's Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) signed a memorandum of agreement (MoU) with Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa to enhance digital literacy in Konkani in the education sector across Goa.

The Access to Knowledge (A2K) programme of CIS, in its sustained efforts to enhance the content and reach of Kokani Wikepedia (which is in incubation), has signed an MoU for a period of five years with Nirmala Insitute of Education (NIE), a Secondary Teacher Education College established in 1963 by the Society of the Daughters of the Heart of Mary in response to the then urgent need for trained teachers in post liberation Goa. The key objectives of this partnership are: a) to design, develop and execute a certificate course titled "Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia", which is aimed at middle and high school teacher-trainees and teachers; and b) to introduce Wikimedia projects into the pedagogic curriculum of NIE.

Both CIS and NIE share a mutual interest in conserving, developing and disseminating knowledge free of cost in Konkani, which incidentally is Goa’s official language. Konkani as a language faces several challenges — it has no official script. The population who speak it are dispersed across the world and have little motivation to further the cause of Konkani, and there are few educational venues that offer a formal course to study Konkani or offer Konkani based curriculum. NIE Principal Dr. Denzil Martins welcomed this MoU and said that "it will guide our teacher-trainees to upload relevant information in Konkani that can be freely accessed by the local population" and "provide the volunteer-trainees with skills that they will be able to use to contribute and enhance the free knowledge in Konkani". The MoU was signed by Dr. Denzil Martins from NIE and T. Vishnu Vardhan (Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, CIS) in the presence of staff and students of NIE and volunteers Harriet Vidyasagar and Gayathri Rao Konkar. Dr. Rita Paes, ex-Principal of NIE who worked to forge this MoU sent her best wishes.

CIS-A2K since 2013, has worked to develop partnerships with key educational institutions to promote and grow Konkani Wikipedia. It has previously worked with NIE to design and implement a program to enroll 100 B.Ed. students to increase the amount of information available in Goan villages and towns on Konkani Wikipedia. A2K has also been instrumental in convincing Goa University to re-release Konkani Vishwakosh (encyclopedia) under CC-BY-SA 3.0 , making it freely available to public, giving them the right to share, use and even build upon the work that has already been done.

The course ‘Teaching in the Age of Wikipedia’ will enable the teacher participant to have a) a comprehensive understanding of changes due to digital technology to the knowledge domain; b) an introduction to various openness movements that inform the discourse on Open Educational Resources; c) exposure and training to participate on open knowledge platforms like Wikipedia; and d) practical examples and best practices of using Wikipedia and sister projects within the classroom context. The parties will also co-design and jointly implement programmes to introduce Wikipedia in the NIE curriculum. The curriculum for this workshop is positioned within the context of indian languages (particularly Konkani) and school education to ensure that any learning is practical and can be applied within the teachers immediate pedagogic environment. Speaking about the relevance of this course Gayathri and Harriet (who have been associated with NIE as volunteers) mentioned that "the Goa government has handed out tablets to all school going children in Goa. In order to use them effectively in the classroom will require teachers to rethink their role and teaching methodologies and this course is an important step towards that". Agreeing with this Denzil Martins feels that this course "will provide the teacher-trainees with ideas and inputs for using Wikipedia in creative ways in the classroom".

This partnership could bring huge momentum and scale for the growth of Konkani as participants who graduate from this course will as teachers act as anchors and mentors to teach and assign Wikipedia editing assignments in their respective schools and classrooms.

As Gayathri feels "such courses once fine tuned should be made available to teachers from all over the country and should be part of the package for introducing the digital technology in the school system. Today it ends with setting up computer labls in schools or distribution of hardware to students - they may have a 'computer teacher' but the class and subject teachers never become part of these new initiatives. Only when this happens can we move away from 'teaching computers' to using computers as tools to learn and teach, which is the primary objective of digital technology in schools".

CIS will develop this open course and welcomes anyone to partner in this effort, which will be made available for anyone to use it within their context. The efforts to build free and open knowledge platforms like Konkani Wikipedia will continue and partnerships like NIE will play a crucial role in building a robust knowledge society in India.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/nie-steps-in-to-grow-konkani-wikipedia

New Project to Assess Potential of Creating Open Government Data Initiatives in Chile, Ghana and Turkey

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T10:44:59Z

Steve Bratt, CEO of the World Wide Web Foundation (founded in 2009 by Tim Berners-Lee) has made an announcement on moving forward with a project to assess the potential of creating open government data initiatives in Chile, Ghana, and Turkey - the first step of what we hope to be a global initiative focusing on low- and middle-income countries.

Within less than a year, the United Kingdom and United States have put hundreds of thousands of rich datasets on the Web in machine readable formats. Thousands of applications have been built — the vast majority without taxpayers’ money — by civic hackers to analyze, mash-up, and map these data. Potential benefits of an Open Government Data (OGD) practice include new services, new insights, increased citizen participation, new businesses and better governance. Though other countries, provinces and cities are exploring OGD, there has been little activity in low and middle income countries (see map at left). Given the potential benefits and reasonable costs, it is importance to assess how relevant an OGD initiative might be in these countries as well.

The World Wide Web Foundation, with the our partner Fundacion (CTIC), is taking the first steps in this direction. We are starting a new project to conduct an assessment of the feasibility and potential of an OGD program in three diverse countries — Chile, Ghana and Turkey. The bottom line questions are: Is the country ready to engage in an OGD initiative? If so, what support might they need? If not, why not, and what lesson can we take away from this assessment?

The project originated in response to a call for proposals from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative: a donor collaborative that includes the Ford Foundation, Hivos, the International Budget Partnership, the Omidyar Network , the Open Society Institute, the Revenue Watch Institute, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The funding for this project originates from the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Institute. The project runs in parallel to a similar feasibility study focusing on India, also support by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative, and run by the Centre for Internet and Society.

Our work is starting with the development a new methodology for assessing OGD readiness, based on our experience and an excellent paper commissioned by the Transparency and Accountability Initiative and written by Becky Hogge from earlier this year. We will then conduct research through visits to each country, Web studies, and phone and email interviews to complete the assessment by the end of October. As Tim Berners-Lee said in his interview with Becky, “It has to start at the top, it has to start in the middle and it has to start at the bottom.” In other words, we must talk with people from the highest levels of government, the public administration officials who collect and care for data, and the people who will leverage the data to create new applications. And we will do so during this study. The results should be available before the end of this year.

The Web Foundation is committed to supporting efforts around OGD in individual countries, and as a emerging movement around the world. This is evidenced by the work of Web Foundation Directors Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt in the UK and US, the W3C Brazil Office in their country, and W3C’s eGovernment Interest Group, as well as work to built capacity in the Caribbean. If you want to learn more, please contact me or Stephane Boyera.

Read the original news at World Wide Web Foundation

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/creating-open-government-data

New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups

noopur — 2013-01-05T01:46:41Z

This blog post is a brief recap and snippets of my conversation with Harsh Kothari, a volunteer on Gujarati Wikipedia on what we've been doing to help with MediaWiki groups.

Earlier in December, Harsh posted an e-mail to announce India's first MediaWiki group in Ahmedabad. The group is in its final stage of approval. The e-mail also generated curiosity among community members, some of whom had discussed starting similar technical initiatives earlier on the list.

I came across the idea of MediaWiki groups while Harsh, Yuvi Panda, Sheel and I were trying to conduct a mini hackathon in Delhi. The mini hackathon was a great success and very helpful to Harsh and Sheel. That is when we realized that the best way of repeating such training sessions would be to help foster the interaction of all technical volunteers within a city. Harsh told me Quim Gil from the Wikimedia Foundation had already proposed this and it would be best if I helped him frame a proposal for a MediaWiki group in India. I was told by Yuvi and Harsh that from their discussions on IRC with Quim they all agreed that local groups would serve better than a single national group given the expanse of India.

I thought this post would lend some perspective on how we could go about supporting technical outreach in India specifically for two reasons one, because Indian language Wikipedias could massively benefit from increased functionality — new gadgets, referencing and more. Apart from this, as we all might have encountered during our outreach sessions in technical colleges, there is great interest among students in contributing to MediaWiki but not enough resources or people who could spread the word.

A local MediaWiki group could serve multiple purposes supporting the relevant language Wikipedia as well as attracting and fostering a FOSS community in their city. It could also take up the responsibility of conducting events — small and large including hackathons, workshops and more. Especially in the context of smaller cities, towns and large university campuses, setting up a technical group similar to a LUG would be very beneficial. There will definitely be challenges, as questions come by and none of these groups can follow a standard model. But, I believe a major advantage of technical groups would mean faster resolution of bugs, more frequently updated infrastructure and consequently more activity on relevant Wikipedias. I have contributed to the proposal and am helping shape the first group. In case you want to set one up in your city or university, or wish to be put in touch with people who can help please do write to me at noopur@cis-india.org.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/new-avenues

Need to develop vernacular languages stressed

praskrishna — 2013-04-15T08:47:29Z

University of Hyderabad (UoH) Vice-Chancellor Prof. Ramakrishna Rama Swamy said on Wednesday that everyone has a duty to contribute to the development of vernacular languages.

The article was published in Hans India on April 11, 2013.

He presided over the Telegu Wikipedia Mahotsavam 2013 being celebrated at the Golden Threshold in Abids. The two-day programme-cum-workshop is being organised in collaboration of the UoH, Theatre Outreach Unit (TOU), Indian wing of Wikipedia and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). While extending support to the Telegu Wikipedia (TW), the Vice-Chancellor said that he had been encouraging the university students to contribute to the site. He advised the organisers to explore opportunities to expose youth to TW.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hans-india-april-11-2014-need-to-develop-vernacular-languages-stressed

National Koha Conclave

praskrishna — 2016-02-19T16:20:23Z

Informatics Publishing organized an event at Fortune Park JP Celestial in Bangalore on February 17, 2016. Sunil Abraham delivered the inaugural address on the occasion.

For more info on the event see this page.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/national-koha-conclave

National Consultation on OER for Higher Education

praskrishna — 2017-03-28T15:53:03Z

Anubha Sinha attended the National Consultative Meet on OER Policy for Higher Education in India held at New Delhi on March 3, 2017. The event was organized by CEMCA (Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia).

Click to see:

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/national-consultation-on-oer-for-higher-education

National Conference on Opening up by Closing the Circle: Strengthening Open Access in India

praskrishna — 2013-11-08T09:57:00Z

Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist/speaker at the National Conference on Opening up by Closing the Circle: Strengthening Open Access in India.

The conference was organized by UNESCO, along with the Central Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and the Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA) on October 21, 2013. Nehaa Chaudhari was a panelist in the discussion on "Why Open Access?". She gave a presentation on 'Pondering Copyright and Recasting Openness'. A copy of her presentation is available here. UNESCO's on the Conference is available here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/national-conference-on-opening-up-by-closing-the-circle

NASA Space Apps Challenge 2017

praskrishna — 2017-04-20T16:53:35Z

The NASA Space Data Challenge (Hillhacks Pre-event) will be hosted at the Centre for Internet & Society's Bengaluru office on Saturday, April 22, 2017 from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Calling all hackers, designers, makers, the open source community, space enthusiasts and the ones who will join us for the main NASA Space Apps Challenge Hackathon.

We are thrilled to share with you that members of Hillhacks would join us to talk about the amazing work they have done so far and about their upcoming hill hacks too.

Also joining would be OpenCube Labs to share their experience of their projects in previous editions of the NASA Space Apps Challenge.

This pre-event will be a great place for you to get your doubts out of the way about the main hackathon.

You possibly can meet potential team members who can give you additional dimensions for your project. You can learn how you can best leverage the data available from NASA and tackle the challenges by them.

See you there!

Participant registration is now open! Click here to view Space Apps 2017 locations to find an event near you and sign up.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/nasa-space-apps-challenge-2017

NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2014

praskrishna — 2014-04-08T16:49:48Z

As part of the NASA Open Government Plan , the NASA International Space Apps Challenge have brought together citizen scientists, FOSS enthusiasts , Data Scientists, Open Hardware hackers and students throughout the world for collaborative problem solving with a goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in Space.

Event Flier

And once again on April 12th and 13th, 2014, the event will be organized by the Centre for Internet and Society, with a special focus on Open Data, Open Science and Citizen Science, in collaboration with Team Indus, one of 3 teams to be selected globally amidst thousands, to launch a moon rover for the Google Lunar X-Prize 2015.

The event shall start on Saturday, 12th of April, with the following morning talks:

Keynote Speaker: Dr.Jayant Murthy, Professor, Indian Institute of Astrophysics, will be addressing the gathering on Open Science, Open Data and Computing within the Indian context.
Title of Talk : Open Data , Open Science and Computing in the Indian Context: 10:30 a.m.
Abstract: As Big Science gets bigger and yields massive amounts of data, we are left with a host of insurmountable problems from the physical - How do we store and access so much data? - to the computational - How do we process the data with increasingly complex models? - to the sociological - How do we change our paradigm so that we efficiently use the data with a limited pool of skilled manpower. I will also touch on some philosophical aspects of this problem - Should all data be free and what are the implications of this on policy and on individuals.
Speaker : Narayan Prasad, Co-Founder, Dhruva Space: 11:30 a.m.
Abstract: Narayan will talk about issues surrounding Open Data, Citizen Science and Governance whilst taking us on a journey of Bangalore based Dhruva Space, one of the world's few start-ups, looking at solutions ranging from small satellite development (CUBESAT, ARDUSAT), near space environmental design, high altitude balloon imaging and internet -- many of these using open source hardware devices like the Arduino.

We will then get into break out sessions to review and sign-up for existing challenges or propose new ones amongst those listed at : https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/challenge/

The hackathon will end on Sunday, April 13, 2014 by 6 p.m.

Registration is free and you are requested to confirm your participation for the event here : https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/location/bangalore/

Participants are requested to bring their own laptops.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/nasa-international-space-apps-challenge-2014

NASA International Open Data Challenge 2015

sharath — 2015-04-27T01:08:27Z

As part of the initial NASA Open Government 2.0 plan, the NASA International Open Data challenge brings together the FOSS community, citizen scientists, open data practitioners , open hardware enthusiasts and students for collaborative problem solving with the goal of producing relevant open-source solutions to address global needs applicable to both life on Earth and life in Space.

On April 11 and 12, 2015 2015, the event will be organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with mentors from Team Indus, one of India's leading Space Technology Start-Ups. The event will start off with the following keynote and workshops at 9am on Saturday, April 11th, 2015:

Pre-Hackathon Workshop: 9 a.m., Saturday, April 11, 2015

IBM Blue Mix Team + OpenCube Labs

(Big Data Analytics using Cloud Services like Bluemix/Heroku, with node.js implementation and Android APIs)

Keynote: Amar Sharma, 12 p.m., April 11, 2015

Amar is credited as being the youngest and first Indian amateur astronomer to have an Asteroid named after him in 2014 at the age of 29. (380607 Sharma) He will talk about CCD Astro Imaging and his travails and journey as a self-made astronomer and comet hunter.

We will then break off into teams to commence the hackathon that will end on Sunday,April 12, 2015 at 6pm, after which teams will upload and present their solutions for Local and Global Nominations.

Registration is free and you are required to confirm participation at the below link:

https://2015.spaceappschallenge.org/location/bangalore/

Participants are requested to bring their own laptop/computing devices.

Please see last year's event's focus on Open Science and Big data, and the various Open Data solutions developed at CIS, to get an idea of what the event is about:

https://2014.spaceappschallenge.org/location/bangalore/ This year, we will have a workshop on Big Data Analytics conducted by IBM BlueMix Labs followed by Heroku implementation and Android Programming by friends of CIS from OpenCubeLabs, that will follow a very special Keynote speaker who is first amateur astronomer to have an asteroid named after him, to join the likes of Ramanujan and Vikram Sarabhai.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/events/nasa-international-open-data-challenge-2015

My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad

vishnu — 2013-08-19T06:51:16Z

On March 8, 2013, a day-long Telugu Wikipedia training workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team at the Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad in collaboration with Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad. This blog post gives a concise account of the event.

CIS-A2K had planned a day long Telugu Wikipedia training workshop in collaboration with Telugu Wikipedians at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad on March 8, 2013. The intention was to target research students at EFLU who are using Telugu material or working on topics related to Telugu and Andhra Pradesh. This event was also to be part of the Wiki Women’s month events across India. However, this event had to be cancelled in the last minute as a Research Student of EFLU committed suicide on the campus and there was major unrest. The faculty from EFLU though had informed of the possible cancellation of the event earlier, had only confirmed it on March 7, 2013. Rahmanuddin Shaik (Telugu SIG, Wikimedia India Chapter) and Dr. Rajasekhar (Telugu Wikipedia Administrator) had already blocked an entire day for this training workshop. In fact a lot of background work was already done for the EFLU event.

When I got the news of cancellation of the workshop, initially I was very dejected at the thought of informing the two active Telugu Wikipedians about it, which I had to do. As my tickets were anyhow booked to Hyderabad and there was no point cancelling them, as I was already on my way to catch the flight, I decided to go ahead with my journey. I made some couple of quick calls and with some effort managed to organize a Wikipedia Training Workshop in collaboration with the Theatre Outreach Unit (TOU), University of Hyderabad (UoH). I was anyhow planning on visiting them to explore an institutional collaboration. The Project Director of TOU Dr. Peddi Ramarao, though agreed to spread the word about the workshop, yet was not sure how many would turn up at such a short notice of one night.

	Rahmanuddin and Dr. Rajasekhar giving hands-on training to edit Telugu Wikipedia at Golden Threshold, Hyderabad

So on March 8, 2013 Rahmanuddin, Dr. Rajasekhar and I landed at the Golden Threshold hoping against hope to see at least 3 or 4 participants. But alas there were only 2 people when we reached the venue by 10 a.m.. By 10.25 a.m. we had 9 participants, which excited us all. The training workshop began with an introduction of all the participants. Following this a presentation was made on the significance of Wikipedia in the digital era and how Indian language-Wikipedias are pivotal in preserving the vernacular language and culture. This session was interactive with participants asking many questions. Dr. Peddi Ramarao, later, spoke about his experience of using Wikipedia as a reference tool and how he got introduced to contributing Wikipedia. Further, the discussion went on to the poor quality of articles on Telugu Wikipedia and how the participants can take part in improving the existing articles and contribute new articles. Rahmanuddin and Rajasekhar practically demonstrated the process of editing on Telugu Wikipedia. This was followed by a hands-on session where the participants actively participated in creating their Wikipedia User name on Telugu Wikipedia and did editing of few articles. The training programme was to officially end at Lunch time but even post lunch some of the participants were enthusiastic about learning more nuances of contributing on Telugu Wikipedia. The hands-on session thus continued until 4 p.m.

Post the Wikipedia training programme, I have had interactions with the Project Director of TOU to explore possible future collaborations. TOU, UoH agreed to offer space to host all Telugu Wikipedia meet-ups. As the Golden Threshold space was in the central part of the city, having this infrastructure accessible was a major boost for the Telugu Wikipedia community in Hyderabad. Further, in the discussions we have agreed to collaborate with TOU, UoH in hosting the first mega Telugu Wikipedia community event Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013.


Telugu Wikipedia Orientation in progress

Outcomes and Impact:

Out of the 9 new Users, who were trained during this workshop, 5 people have done more than 5 edits.
One person has become a very active editor on Telugu Wikipedia with more than 1000 edits in 3 months. A detailed account of this event was put up by this user on Telugu Wikipedia here [*]
Because of CIS-A2K’s efforts, Telugu Wikipedians in Hyderabad now have a good meeting space.
The availability of this space has also encouraged the Telugu Wikipedians to meet more often than before. Since March 8, 2013 Telugu Wikipedians had a total of 6 meet-ups, and all these were held at Golden Threshold.
Golden Threshold also became a venue for hosting Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013.
This visit to Hyderabad triggered a discussion about organizing Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam, which was successfully organized in a month’s time.

Looking back, though this event was done as a last minute measure without many expectations, yet it turned out to be a lucky break! Especially, because this was my first ever event as the CIS-A2K Programme Director. It will remain a very memorable one. More so because it was done in collaboration with two of the active Telugu Wikipedians. Even more so because it has created some positive energy for the Telugu Wikipedia community, which has since then become a home turf.

[*]. http://bit.ly/17WYq7X

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop

Musician donates Gwalior Gharana songs to free e-library

praskrishna — 2015-01-22T15:25:49Z

A few years ago, Mumbai-based musician Neela Bhagwat realized that her old notebooks filled with lyrics and notations of age-old 'bandishes' were in tatters. Afraid that she might lose them forever, Bhagwat decided to make fresh copies.

The article by Sandhya Soman was published in the Times of India on January 20, 2015. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Once she wrote it all down, Bhagwat handed over the notebooks to a team to upload her collection of around 330 bandishes of the Gwalior gharana to a free, online library.

"I was always keen on sharing the compositions with others. Digitization is the way to go as it can be accessed from anywhere," says Bhagwat. Based on her notebooks, around 337 bandishes have been converted to PDF format by student and music researcher Tejaswini Niranjana. "I will be uploading them soon to Wikisource, which is one of the platforms of Wikipedia," says Niranjana.

Bhagwat and a few other music-lovers like her are taking up digital archiving projects to preserve India's cultural heritage without any institutional support or grant. "I have about 337 bandishes, my guru had more than 1,000 and his guru would've had still more. So much has got lost now," says Bhagwat. Even if she is willing to teach, few are able to understand, internalize and work on these classical compositions. "No student of mine has learnt all of it. So I thought it best to keep them in the public domain," says Bhagwat.

Along with music students, scholars also find these projects helpful.

For example, Andhra Pradesh-based lexicographer Peddi Sambasiva Rao has created a master index of all the compositions of Annamacharya for Telugu Wikisource recently. Now, he is in the process of digitizing the lyrics of all the 15,000 songs of the 15th century composer along with a fellow enthusiast. "Carnatic music lovers find it difficult to locate individual songs as there are 29 volumes of Annamacharya's works. Instead of publishing the index as a book, I thought of approaching Wikipedia, which is known to everyone," says Rao.

As the index is in Unicode, the standard text encoding format, the Telugu kirtanas will soon come up on search engines, says T Vishnu Vardhan, programme director, Access to Knowledge, CIS, which helped host these projects. "By June, we hope to have the entire Annamacharya kirtanas at a single source and eventually do the same for the songs of the Gwalior Gharana. This is the only way to make our cultural heritage accessible to future generations," says Vardhan.

Bhagwat says cultural and educations institutions should take the lead in digital archiving as the benefits are multi-fold. Once the bandishes are online, Bhagwat's students abroad will have the text along with the DVDs that she has brought out. "By the second or third Skype lesson, they would've learnt it," says Bhagwat.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/the-times-of-india-january-20-2015-sandhya-soman-musician-donates-gwalior-gharana-songs-to-free-e-library

Mozilla Open Web Talks

radha — 2011-04-05T04:19:15Z

Give a talk, or just listen - On December 16 in Bangalore, Mozilla and The Centre for Internet and Society are holding an evening of talks about the future of the open internet.

We're inviting you to to give a 5 minute talk, or just to come listen:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Drumbeat/CIS-Bangalore

Presentations will either:

Explain the open web and why it matters and
Describe a concrete project idea that will make the web better.

If you're interesting in giving a talk, please sign up here:

http://fcroadshow.net/?page_id=7

If you'd like to simply attend and listen, please RSVP here:

http://bit.ly/51OOXf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/mozilla-talks

Mozilla is funding a way to support Julia in Firefox

Catalin Cimpanu — 2019-07-10T01:33:52Z

Mozilla is funding a project for bringing the Julia programming language to Firefox and the general browser environment.

The blog post by Catalin Cimpanu was published in ZD Net on July 8, 2019.

The project received funding part of the Mozilla Research Grants for the first half of 2019, which the browser maker announced on Friday.

In April, when Mozilla opened this year's submissions period for research grants, the organization said it was looking for a way to bring data science and scientific computing tools to the web.

It said it was specifically interested in receiving submissions about supporting R or Julia at the browser level. Both R and Julia are programming languages designed for high-performance numerical, statistical, and computational science.

Mozilla engineers have worked in previous years to port data science tools at the browser level, as part of Project Iodide.

Previously, as part of this project, Mozilla engineers ported the Python interpreter to run in the browser using WebAssembly.

"This project, Pyodide, has demonstrated the practicality of running language interpreters in WebAssembly," Mozilla engineers said.

In April, Mozilla said it was willing to use a research grant to fund a team of developers to port either R or Julia to the browser via WebAssembly as well.

The end result should be a Firefox plugin, similar to how Pyodide works.

Valentin Churavy, an MIT Ph.D. student and a member of the official Julia team, has applied for a Mozilla research grant, which he subsequently received.

The Julia programming language was created in 2009, publicly released in 2012, and has gained a huge following ever since. It has quickly climbed the ranks of the world's most popular languages entering the Tiobe Top 50, has a huge following on GitHub, and was one of 2018 biggest risers.

In April, Mozilla engineers also offered a grand for porting Tor to work inside Firefox, to power a Tor-powered Super Private Browsing (SPB) mode for Firefox.

While there was no grant for a project of sorts, Mozilla will be funding a research project that aims to study the performance and anonymity features of the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 protocols on the Tor network.

The full Mozilla research grants for H1 2019 are as follow:

Lead Researchers	Institution	Project Title
Valentin Churavy	MIT	Bringing Julia to the Browser
Jessica Outlaw	Concordia University of Portland	Studying the Unique Social and Spatial affordances of Hubs by Mozilla for Remote Participation in Live Events
Neha Kumar	Georgia Tech	Missing Data: Health on the Internet for Internet Health
Piotr Sapiezynski, Alan Mislove, & Aleksandra Korolova	Northeastern University & University of Southern California	Understanding the impact of ad preference controls
Sumandro Chattapadhyay	The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India	Making Voices Heard: Privacy, Inclusivity, and Accessibility of Voice Interfaces in India
Weihang Wang	State University of New York	Designing Access Control Interfaces for Wasmtime
Bernease Herman	University of Washington	Toward generalizable methods for measuring bias in crowdsourced speech datasets and validation processes
David Karger	MIT	Tipsy: A Decentralized Open Standard for a Microdonation-Supported Web
Linhai Song	Pennsylvania State University	Benchmarking Generic Functions in Rust
Leigh Clark	University College Dublin	Creating a trustworthy model for always-listening voice interfaces
Steven Wu	University of Minnesota	DP-Fathom: Private, Accurate, and Communication-Efficient
Nikita Borisov	University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign	Performance and Anonymity of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 in Tor

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/openness/news/zd-net-july-8-2019-catalin-cimpanu-mozilla-is-funding-a-way-to-support-julia-in-firefox

Mozilla DevDay 2010, Bangalore

radha — 2011-04-05T04:12:42Z

Mozilla, Mahiti & The Centre for Internet and Society are joining hands to organize an informal developer-oriented conference in Bangalore on Saturday February 27, 2010.

The Mozilla DevDay will be an opportunity for developers, open source enthusiasts, and web aficionados who live in and around Bangalore, to meet Mozilla staff and learn about the Mozilla Project and its technologies. The DevDay is a free conference open to the general public.

For more information please visit: http://j.mp/BLRMozDevDay

All interested participants are requested to register by following this link: http://j.mp/MozDevDayBLR

For the event poster, click here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/events/mozilla-devday-2010-bangalore