Openness Blog

Last week, and for many a surprise, Google launched its new social networking platform, Buzz.  The new service is Google’s effort to amplify the “social nature” of their services by integrating them under one platform, and adding some extra social utility.   The social application runs from the Gmail interface, but also links other Google accounts a user may have, including albums on Picasa, and Google Reader.   The service also allows for the sharing from external sources, such as photos on Flickr, and videos from YouTube.  The service also allows users to post, like, or dislike the status updates of others which may be publicly searchable if the user opts.  Before a Gmail user may fully participate in Google Buzz service, a unique Google Personal Profile must be created. 

User Consent

Much of the buzz surrounding the new social networking service last week wasn’t paying much lip service to the new application.  Instead, an uproar of privacy concerns continued to dominate the Buzz scene, with many critics quickly labeling Buzz a “privacy nightmare”.  A formal complaint has been already filed with the US Federal Trade Commission in response to Google’s new privacy violating service.   A second-year Harvard Law student has also filed a class-action suit against the company for its privacy malpractices. 

Much of the privacy talk thus far has focused on issues of consent, or lack thereof, in this case.  Upon Buzz’s launch, Gmail users were automatically subscribed as “opting in” for the service.  Google has used the private address books of millions of Gmail accounts to build social networks from the contacts users email and chat with most.  To entice users into using the service, Gmail users were set to auto-follow all of their contacts, and in turn, to be followed by them, too.  Furthermore, all new Buzz users had been set to automatically share all public Picasa albums and Google Reader items with their new social graph.  It is argued that social network services should be opt-in, rather than opt-out, and that Buzz has violated the consensual nature of the social web. 

Illuminating the complications of building a social graph from ones inbox is the story of an Australian women, who remains anonymous.  As she claims, most of the emails currently received through her Gmail account, are those from her abusive ex-boyfriend.  Due to Google’s assumption that Gmail users would like to be “auto-followed” by their Gmail contacts (mirroring Twitters friendship protocol), items shared between herself and new boyfriend through her Google reader account had become public to her broader social graph, including her ex-boyfriend and his harassing friends.

In a blog response directed to Google’s Buzz team, the woman scornfully wrote- “F*ck you, Google. My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety, and I will now have to spend the next few days maintaining that safety by continually knocking down followers as they pop up. A few days is how long I expect it will take before you either knock this shit off, or I delete every Google account I have ever had and use Bing out of f*cking spite”.  As this case demonstrates, the people we mail most often may not be our closest friends.   As email has replaced the telephone for many as the dominate mode of communication--some contacts may be friends, however, many others may not be.  

In response to the uproar, tweaks to Buzz’s privacy features have since been made.  Todd Jackson, Buzz’s product manager, has also posted a public apology to the official Gmail Blog late last week for not “getting everything quite right”.  The service will now assume the more user-centric “auto-suggest” model, allowing users to selectively choose the contacts they wish to follow, and will also no longer auto-link Picasa and Reader content.  However, as the EPIC’s complaint notes, many are still unsatisfied with the opt-out nature of the service, arguing that users should be able to opt-into the service if they so choose, rather than having to delist themselves for a service they didn’t necessarily sign up.  Ethical quandaries also still loom over Google’s misuse of the users’ private contact lists to jumpstart their new service. 

Contextual Integrity

The attacks on personal privacy resulting from Google’s model are vast.  As the case of the Australian woman illuminates, the concept of the “online friend” has completely taken out of context with Buzz’s initial auto-follow model.  Many of the contacts we make on a daily basis need not be made public through the Google profile.  For most, this Buzz’s privacy breach may be benign or annoying at most. However, those who are engaged in sensitive social or political relationships via their Gmail chat or email accounts, the revelation of common contact could have been potentially damaging for many.  A reporter from CNET has cleverly labeled Buzz’ as a “socially awkward networking”, as bringing diverse contacts under one umbrella doesn’t exactly make the most social sense. In response, Gmail users are required to sort through and filter their Buzz followers according, or choose to disable the service all together.

Besides questions of who is stalking whom, the assumptive and public nature of Google’s  new move has cast a shadow of doubt among Gmail users regarding the ability of Google to maintain the privacy and contextual integrity of the Gmail account.  Should one account be the place to socialize, and  “do business”?  Gmail is, and should remain, an email service.  However, Buzz takes the email experience into new and questionable grounds.  Do Gmail users feel entirely comfortable having their personal email, social graph, and chat functions all coming under the auspices of one platform?   Many users felt they had been lured into using a social networking service that they didn’t sign up for in the first place.   

Social Media Competition

In addition to Google’s attempt to integrate their various service offerings, Buzz is seen as an obvious attempt to bolster competitiveness in the social media market.  In 2004, Google released Orkut. While the service has become big in countries such as Brazil and India, it has been overshadowed by sites such as Facebook in other jurisdictions, and has not been able to prove itself as a mainstream space for networking.  In the past year, Google had also launched Google Wave, a tool that mixes e-mail, with instant messaging and the ability for several people to collaborate on documents.  However, the application failed to completely win over audiences, and was considered one of the top failures of 2009. 

With Google unable to effectively saturate the social media ecosystem, Buzz is an attempt to compete with the searchable and real time experiences provided by social media giants, Facebook and Twitter.  Increased competition within the social media market could be a positive development for privacy, as social media companies could arguably be compete on their ability to provide users with preferable privacy architectures.  To the contrary, however, such competition has thus far had negative ramifications for user privacy, as the recent Buzz and Facebook moves illustrates.  Facebook’s loosened privacy settings were a competitive knee-jerk to Twitters searchable and real time experience.  Through a Twitter search, individuals can come to know what people are saying about a certain topic, event, or product, and as a result, the service has received a great deal attention from users, and non-users such as advertisers, alike.   

In an attempt to one-up, their competition, the “Twitterization” of Facebook followed in two distinct stages.  First was with the implementation of the Facebook News Feed, which gave users a real time account of actions their friends on the site.  Many argued that this feature invaded user privacy.  However, it was argued by Facebook that they only were making available information that was already accessible through individual profile pages.  The News Feed, as it happens, effectively took user information and actions on the site out of original context by streaming this information live for others easy viewing.  Information users once had to rummage for had become accessible in real time on the homepage of the service. 

Secondly, Facebooks’ recent privacy scandal was a step towards making profile information more searchable and accessible to third parties, as is most often the case with the more public feeds on Twitter.  As one commentator notes,   “Facebook used to be very private but private is not great for search, to have great search you need all of the data to be publicly available as it mostly is on Twitter. Facebook have not quite nailed real time search yet but they are getting there and it will soon be a great way of examining sentiment across different demographics”.  As a result, information on Facebook, such as name, profile picture, friends list, location and fan pages have become open access information.  In addition, users on Facebook have been subjected to new privacy regime without notice, leaving their profile pages generally more open, and searchable through Google.    

Converging the Online Self

The impact Buzz alone can make on the social media landscape remains questionable (Gmail heralds only 140 million accounts, which is a deficient cry from Facebooks’ 400+ million dedicated users).  However, despite Googles’ in/ability to become claim hegemony over the social web landscape, the abuse of private information to launch a new service has raised serious debate over the privacy and the future of social networking.  The Buzz service marks more than yet another new social networking service that brushes aside the privacy of users.  As user control and privacy becomes an increasingly peripheral concern, Google’s shift toward privacy decontrol also signifies a worrisome supply-side shift towards the “convergence” of online identity.

Within this new dominant paradigm, privacy concerns are often interpreted as antithetical to competitiveness in the social media marketplace.  Instead of an imagined ecosystem based on user control and privacy preference, it can now be inferred that the competiveness of social networking services will continue to disrupt the delicate balance between the public and private online. Regardless that greater visibility and searchability of the social profile may not be in the public interest, Google’s recent move works to reinforcement of the new status quo of “openness”.  Furthermore, it is questionable as to how concentrated and integrated a user may want their online activities to become.  A critical discourse of online privacy must, therefore, take into account the ways in which the social web has renders the user increasingly transparent through networks of networking services. 

Google’s Buzz illustrates this point quite well.   Initially, Gmail was a straightforward email service.  Next, the AdWords advertising service and Gmail chat had become integrated into the Gmail experience.  Because Google was using the confidential emails of its Gmail users, privacy concerns began to mount upon the launch of the the AdWords service.  However, turmoil surrounding AdWords died down, notably as Google continues to reassert that is is bots, not humans, that are scanning the emails in order to provide the AdWords service.  Next, there gradually occurred a convergence of Google services under the single social profile, or “email address”.  A single Gmail account potentially includes use of with Google reader, calendar, chat, groups and an Orkut account.  In terms of behavioral targeted advertising, Google has recently announced that they will be providing personalized search results even to users who have not signed up for Google services.  This will be done through the placement a cookie on all machines to provide targeted advertising seamlessly through each Google search and browsing session.    

While many argue that the collection of non-personally identifiable information poses no privacy harm, this assumption needs reassessment.  As Google comes to offer us more, they also come to learn more, and Buzz signifies this trend towards a Googopolized social web.  To add another layer of complexity to Googles hegemony, users of the Buzz service are also required to create a “Google Profile”, which is searchable online and displays real time status updates, comments, and connections from other social network services, such as Facebook and Twitter.  As Google recently launched the beta version of the new Social Search, Buzz was just the service required to increase the relevance to the new service by encouraging Gmail users to publish even more personal information.  The creation of a personal Google profile, which is indexed and searchable, raises many concerns about privacy and identity, and doubts are continually raised over how much Google should come to know about us.

While Google’s services have arguably made the online social experience more seamless and tailored, it is questionable as to how relevant, or even desirable, such a shift may be.  At present, it may appear that Google is wearing far too many hats, and users should be wary of placing all eggs into one basket.      As the launch of Buzz has shown us, user consent and the contextual integrity of private personal information can be compromised when a diverse number of online services are integrated and given a social spin.    When competition among social web providers drives users to lose control of the private information which is inherently theirs, critical questions surrounding competition, convergence and privacy require critical exploration.  

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The perils of information exposure and the loss of privacy on social network sites (SNS) has become a talked about issue. Information once considered has private has in many instances become viewable by unintended audiences of parents, colleagues, college admission officers, employers, even the courts.  The recent Facebook privacy scandal, which left sensitive personal information for millions of users open and searchable via Google, heightened privacy consciousness amongst users, public interest groups, and Facebook itself.  As the free flowing nature of information on the internet has redefined practices surrounding the disclosure of information, new and multidimensional privacy challenges have arose as a result. 

The much-celebrated ethos of “openness” continues to attract numerous and diverse users to SNS, and without a doubt, these platforms have enabled users to stay connected and share information with the people around them -- for better or worse. However, it is within this inherently open context that notions of privacy are continuously being challenged and redefined.   While a particular user may prefer to keep certain information widely available to attract “potential friends” within a certain network or social circle, it may go without saying that the same user may not be comfortable with a family member viewing that same information, or having personal information open access to third parties.  It is this iterative tension between “openness” and privacy which beckons the need to balance the openness of SNS with the privacy of its members.

Privacy as a Semi-Public Personal Space

Most commonly, privacy has been interpreted by users as a “lack of access”, or the degree to which they are able to protect their information from the public gaze.  Various research examining the privacy (mal)practices of users have also, by in large, conceptualized privacy within this public/private binary.  The most popular SNS today do allow users to careful define their privacy level.  However, whether or not the information of a user remains open, restricted, or private will depend on the privacy preferences unique to the user, and to some degree, the architecture of a particular SNS.  Inferring from privacy in practice, researchers have generally labeled users as privacy fundamentalists, pragmatics, or the marginally concerned .  While making this distinction has been useful, is important to note that the diversity and complexity of relationships within a single networked space obscures the inherent simplicity of such typology.  With many online social networks becoming representative of offline affiliation, the challenges inherent to maintaining a diverse number of social relations online may lead researchers to interpret uncertain privacy practices as paradoxical.  Such a notion also calls into question the utility of categorizing users according to their privacy practices.

To illustrate such complexity, many users today are compelled to join sub-networks or groups within these sites, which then cluster users and relax the privacy settings between them.  While a college student may wish to keep weekend outings hidden from the professors they have connected with, they may also be tempted to reveal such information with his network of peers-- to which the professors may belong. The open nature of these sub-networks are inherently valuable for maintaining offline affiliations, friendships and collegial relationship. However, this also increases the likelihood invisible audiences of unintended users may gain access to potentially unflattering information to an .  By joining a network on Facebook, for example, the personal information of a users profile page becomes open to all “friends and networks”, even if the users may previously had their information set behind a more granular privacy settings. 

Within these open spaces, the ability of users to make appropriate or selective disclosures of information is becoming obscured.  While Facebook does allow for users to alter the settings after joining a network, such “openness by default” may catch many users off guard or only be brought to their attention once they face its negative repercussions.  Because the maintenance of a wide variety of such social relationships depends on the disclosure/non-disclosure of certain types of information, privacy in praxis has become an act of balancing the utility of social network with the privacy concerns they present. Users are now faced with the challenge of classifying certain pieces of information public or non public, or determining suitable practices of disclosures amongst a diverse social graph. It is not to be expected that such decisions will become easier within a context whose architecture is built on openness to make it “easier for friends to find, identify, and learn about you”. 

Privacy as Control over the Flow of Information

While the classification and coding of information vis-à-vis a diverse set of relationships forms the base of practice for most of the privacy conscious, this paradigm of privacy remains rather limited within a defined network of individuals, whether they be “friends”, within an intended audience, or not.  Within this framework, information is understood as being either socially or institutionally sensitive, as its exposure may affect certain social or institutional relationships.  Given the spatial and temporal context the “social profile” gives to personal information, it is reasonable to see how popular understandings of privacy have been within the public/private paradigm.

While this may be the case, it is important that users observe how the inherently “networked” nature of these spaces complicates the common privacy paradigm.  When a user joins a SNS, they enter into a complex and opaque set of networked relationships beyond those with their “friends” and “friends of friends”.  There exists sub-networks of third-party actors which constitute corporate entities, their partners and affiliates --may they be advertisers, third party developers, or a broad range of other service providers.  Many of which are granted access to your information in varying forms and for differing reasons.  With the introduction of the Open Social network, fronted by Google and various social advertising and developers networks, the ability for one to maintain the control and integrity of their information or “data” has become an increasingly complex endeavor.   

While the importance of maintaining non-public social spaces online should not be diminished, in a time when collecting, storing, aggregating and disseminating information has become increasingly easy and cost-effective, users of SNS must begin to conceptualize online privacy in a way which extends past the social context popularly understood to give “information” meaning.   Once information loses its contextual place of meaning, which may be the profile itself, users seem less apt to consciously consider the collection and dissemination of such data as a breach of privacy, or even a concern at all.  It may be true that the socially sensitive nature of such data is reduced once it is disassociated with a particular user, or that the click stream patterns and other information collected by advertisers through cookies may not always pose a direct and potential threat to our privacy as we’ve thus far conceived it.  However, a brief glance at the privacy policies, terms of use, and on-site practices of a few SNS illuminates that privacy must be seen as the control over the flows of personal information.that

Privacy vis-à-vis Third Parties

As many have illuminated, SNS are commercial enterprises with a business model based on the harvesting of personal information for marketing and other purposes.  Therefore, it may be naive for a users to believe what happens on these sites stays on these sites, or that privacy settings, however granular they may be, grants them adequate control over their information.  While SNS such as Bebo state that they “take your privacy very seriously”, the onus is on the user to determine whether or not the privacy standards of third party applications are up to par.  The transfer of responsibility for monitoring the privacy practices of third parties is characteristic of many popular SNS.  MySpace states in their privacy policy that they do not “control third parties” and cannot “dictate their actions”, while Facebook similarly states that they cannot guarantee that such third parties will “follow their rules”. 

As third parties are often governed by their own privacy policies, the unmonitored and unenforced nature of these networked relationships places further responsibility on the individual users to ensure that privacy practices are adequate.  This becomes quite difficult on SNS like Facebook, where third party developers are granted access to the personal information of all you and all your network members, including photos, videos, and other biographical information.

The relatively anonymous nature of these parallel sub-networks also obscures the ability of the user to take control over the accessibility of their information.  Further, the privacy policies of the various SNS give no indication as to “who” their affiliates, partners, and service providers are.  Most SNS also reserve the right to transfer personally identifiable information to its partners and affiliates if they have a “business reason to do so” and in all cases, advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies with regards to the information they collect -- some of it personally identifiable.  To complicate matters, all of the leading SNS, including Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and Bebo, reserve the right to collect information about you from other companies and publicly available sources.  It is unclear as to what information is being collected or for what purposes, and unfortunately, such information is effectively kept “private”.

Redefining Privacy on Social Network Sites

Social network sites can be seen as open spaces which allow users to maintain diverse personal relationships.  However, the somewhat anonymous parallel networks of third parties which exist on these sites threatens the “open nature” of these sites vis-à-vis our privacy.  While users may maintain that the information they have provided is kept secure and private, these parallel third party networks negates the control an individual may assert over the flow of their information.   It is within this context that privacy needs to be conceptually redefined in relation to both user “information” as it appears on a social profile, and “data” once it is processed by third parties.  There is a need for an alternative paradigm to privacy on SNS which takes into consideration the flow, retention and use of personal information. 

While it may be too early to determine whether or not the expected digital dossiers complete with complex user-specific biographical data will be developed or come to threaten our privacy in a fundamentally new way, it is also premature and erroneous to assume that traditional notions of privacy are fundamentally antithetical to the net.  As communication become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, so to should our perceptions of privacy and ways of preserving it.  SNS must also become responsible for ensuring greater transparency in the flows and uses of personal information, working to standardize the privacy policies in such a way that makes the user experience one which is seamless with respect to privacy practices.  Initiatives such as the W3C’s P3P are a promising step towards nurturing a more nuanced understanding of privacy among internet users.  Only through understanding privacy as the control over the flows of personal information can be balance the interests of SNS users with the business models of these “open” networked spaces.

A good number of netizens spend hours on social networking websites – lovingly building a circle of friends, or alternatively a social or commercial marketing campaign. God forbid –if something goes wrong then we start again from square one. There are several serious threats right there on the horizon, of which I will name only two. One, the owner of the social networking services could go bust – if it could happen to the Lehman Brothers it can happen to Web entrepreneurs still dreaming about their business model. Two, a security slip from either side could result in a bot or hacker gaining control of your account and also corrupting your data. Last year, Myspace was breached and 17 GB of private photographs was leaked onto The Pirate Bay. Earlier this year, Microsoft almost lost data for nearly 800,000 sidekick smart phone users in the US. Today, compromised twitter accounts can be noticed by the increased frequency spam messages. As these systems become increasingly complex and ownership shifts, these mishaps are only going to get more frequent. And in most cases you just can't backup your own data.

In the days of offline software – vendor lock-in was achieved using proprietary formats thus preventing users from migrating to the competition. As a result, very few of us have files from the Word Star and Word Perfect days.  Proprietary formats force the user to keep renewing the license for the associated software or worse, pirating it. Fortunately, the copyright law in many countries including India allows for reverse engineering and free software developers were able to provide us alternatives such as OpenOffice.org. This combined with anti-trust investigation in Europe and US has resulted in Microsoft embracing an open format as native storage for the latest version of the Office suite. 

Today it is déjà vu in the world of social networking in particular and cloud computing more generally. Facebook, Myspace, Orkut and their ilk all provide file storage, contact management, messaging and calendaring functionality. However, very few of them actually allow the user to backup their data – for example on Facebook and Myspace it is not possible for a user to backup their contact database. Some exceptions like Orkut allows for export of contact database, etc., but that is more because it is not the primary monopoly that Google wants to protect. Fortunately, email providers like Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail have all finally embraced open protocols and are using POP3 or IMAP protocol and we can copy our mail offline using Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird. In the future, social networking sites may congregate around a couple of open standards and offer their users true digital social mobility. There are already some initial signs of hope here – for example, the Data Portability Project is supported by individuals from Plaxo, Facebook and Google.

However, if competition and technological development does not rectify the situation then there might be a case for government intervention. Especially, because citizens wishing to engage in e-governance have no choice but to embrace the choice of the politicians and bureaucrats whether it is Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. In Canada, the Privacy Commissioner forced Facebook to change its policies on retaining user data after they had deleted their accounts. In US, the Attorney Generals of 49 states gave a laundry list of modifications to Myspace in order to keep children safe from paedophiles. In India too, the government and civil society should collaborate on policy reform to ensure that citizens’ rights are protected on social networking websites. Think of it as a phone number portability equivalent for Web 2.0.

The notion of free and open is under great debate even under that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different, often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.

Open video, in that matter, has gone through different iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective hearing, through the day: Access, Archive,  Share, Remix, Repurpose. And it is these five that we need to now imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups today.

Access has been one primary question that almost everybody dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements, where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access, privilege, bandwidth, education etc.  To contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something that different participants have voiced the need for.

Archive is a preoccupation with most people because archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to different people, there are older questions of representation, voice, empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of access, distribution etc.

Sharing is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do we share it with?  Tools by which sharing leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks can be built up?

Remix has been of great value because it means that you are being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc. can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic and mechanics seems to have emerged.

Repurpose is my additional reading of something that perhaps needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms, protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.

If you are ever in Bangalore on the third Wednesday of any month, you must attend the Bangalore K-Community: the monthly gathering of knowledge management professionals! This time, I invited two speakers from the information industry and ICT4D sectors (see www.Kcommunity.org for speaker profiles). The theme was Internet content models and governance. The Internet is a key game-changer in the knowledge society, through its vast archival and real-time content, applications for social media, and governance models.

N. V. Sathyanarayana (“Sathya”), Chairman & Managing Director of Informatics (India), set the stage by charting changes in the online media landscape. In less than ten years, Google has become the dominant media player, overtaking 100-year old rivals like Thomson/Reuters/Reed/Elsevier. In fact, the top 10 players in the online content industry are all free-content (ad-supported aggregator) companies: GYM (Google, Yahoo, MSN). Free and open content have disrupted the traditional paid content model, but the paid model will work for those content providers who can find an assured base of institutional buyers. The free content model is based on ad revenues which in turn are based on the overall performance of the economy: the current downturn is shaking up the content industry.

The dominant rise of information related to human resource activities as part of the overall content pie is a notable trend in recent years, said Sathya, citing research from Outsell. Online access has completely transformed research and academic activities. Just a few decades ago, researchers had to first monitor and read all available published material before making connections and drawing analyses – now a number of automated tools can provide alerts, search resources, identify trends and help visualise domains of knowledge. The Internet has also greatly extended the shelflife of content; many journal publishers who used to make money only on sales of new copies to libraries now make even more money on digital access to back issues.

Sunil Abraham  (http://twitter.com/Sunil_abraham), executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, focused more on the democratic potential of the Internet for knowledge dissemination. He charted out the evolution of the open model for software, content, access and educational resources. He distinguished between “muft” and “mukti” interpretations of the often-misunderstood term “free” – it can mean free of cost or freedom/liberation (translations from Hindi). Sunil dwelt on the implications of copyright, copyleft and copycentre models of IP, as well as governance models such as WikiPedia in English and other languages. These open code and content models are in turn affecting business models of companies ranging from IBM to Apple, and will also impact online content access for marginalised and needy communities.

An interesting discussion followed, touching on “healthy useful piracy,” IP models of scholastic v/s entertainment content, ownership rights of translated materials, “responsible” authorship and metaknowledge in Wikis, outdated information policies and knowledge cultures at companies who block employee access to social media, the need for more knowledge sharing in the fragmented NGO sector, the need for organisations to incentivise not just innovation but also copying/sharing of knowledge, and even Christian v/s Hindu worldviews and binary v/s polytheist interpretations of fee/free/layered content models! Now that’s a profound note on which to end 2009; see you all in 2010!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 6:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. 

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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), iCommons, Open Video Alliance and Magic Lantern are organizing a workshop on December 15, 2009.

This workshop in Bangalore—modelled after a similar meeting in October 2008 at Yale University—draws together experts from tech, art, film, NGOs and business to explore the future of online video.

When: December 15th, 2009

Where: The Energy and Resources Institute- Southern Regional Centre

(TERI-SRC)
4th Main, 2nd Cross, Domlur II Stage
Bangalore- 560071

What: The Open Video Summit is a one-day workshop to explore issues of intellectual property and telecom policy for video. By inviting experts from different fields to participate in the workshop, we aim to create a framework for open video in India and to better understand how the online video medium is developing. We also hope to expand the network of researchers who have open video on the radar and to foster international collaborations. We expect between 30-40 participants to attend.

Participants should bring some specialized knowledge or insight about the state of online video to the event. The workshop is highly interactive and its success will depend on the quality and dynamism of our discussions. This workshop will in turn direct iCommons research efforts in the area of online video policy.

Why: We’re now surrounded by cameras in cellphones, laptops, and everywhere else. Software and storage advances have made video remix an emergent art form. For the first time, huge numbers of people are communicating through video. Video is almost like a new language, a new toolkit for self-expression. This has some pretty profound implications.

But while sites like YouTube have enabled millions of people to broadcast themselves, it offers just a glimpse into the future of the online video medium. Heading into this future, the tools for creating, manipulating, and sharing video must be available to everyone. And while having community-developed, open source versions of these tools is a critical charge, it’s only one part of a larger puzzle. Open video requires that networks and technical, legal and business structures support the ability of huge numbers of individuals to use video in ways that go beyond just watching.

The Open Video Alliance was created to support industry coordination toward an open video ecosystem. OVA members develop free and open source software and conduct policy research to support a more participatory video medium. The OVA also coordinates the Open Video Conference, a multi-day summit of thought leaders in business, academia, art, and activism to explore the future of online video. The first OVC was host to over 800 guests, including 150 workshop leaders, panelists and speakers. Over 8,000 viewers tuned in from home to watch the live broadcast.

Meeting Organizers:

The Open Video Alliance is a coalition of organizations devoted to creating and promoting

free and open technologies, policies, and practices in online video. OVA founding members include Mozilla, the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, iCommons, and the Yale Information Society Project.

iCommons is a project-based incubator organization dedicated to promoting free culture and the global commons.

The Centre for Internet and Society critically engages with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of Internet and Society, with particular emphasis on South-South dialogues and exchange.

Magic Lantern Foundation is a non-profit group working with media and human rights.

This meeting made possible with the support of the Ford Foundation.

Working schedule:

Morning: 

• Keynote talk and brief discussion
• Lightning presentations by selected participants
• Breakout discussion groups

Afternoon:

• Lunch
• Breakout discussion groups
• Plenary discussion to identify focus areas and summarize

Evening: 

• Film Screening

Space is limited. Please RSVP to conference@openvideoalliance.org, and feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. We look forward to meeting you in Bangalore.

Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net

CIS and JAAGA organised a CC Salon (http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon) by Jon Phillps on Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net

Venue: JAAGA
Time: 7.30pm

The aim of this get together was to share knowledge and experiences of alternative copyright licensing.  Artists, lawyers dealing with copyright licensing and others are encouraged to highlight their own work, experiences and queries about Creative Commons and other alternative licenses.

An abstract of the presentation and the bio of Jon is given below.

ABSTRACT:

Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net

Creative Commons is a well-known nonprofit organization that increases sharing and improves collaboration. Its key tools are six licenses that fit between public domain and complete control, copyright, to give you control over how your work is shared with the world. This presentation explores high level case studies that use Creative Commons licenses to make a successful project. The key featured case study is Status.Net, a new status updating hosted service and open source software that uses Creative Commons licensing for content.

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Salon

BIO:

Jon Phillips is a community and business developer contributing to society and building meaningful relationships. In 2002 he helped launch the open source drawing tool, Inkscape and founded the Open Clip Art Library. From 2005 until 2008 he built Creative Commons’ community and business development projects and is currently a Creative Commons Fellow. Currently, he is growing the media company Fabricatorz with Cantocore Art Exhibitions, Laoban Open Soundsystems, and is recently assisting with an upcoming re-launch of Status.Net (Identi.ca). He is known for growing successful open communities globally, leading international business development in Asia (particularly China), and developing Open Marketing.

http://rejon.org/bio/#images

Videos

Sir Tim Berners-Lee started the session with an address on various rights.  Rights, he noted can range from being things like the rights to air and water to the right not to have the data carrier you use determine which movie you watch.  Then, there are tensions between rights: the right to anonymity can clash with the right to know who posted information on making a bomb.  Berners-Lee stated that for 2009, he has chosen to pursue one particular right: the right to government-held data.  This data can include everything from where schools are to emergency services such as locations of hospitals.  Today, we are talking about standards. 

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a fifteen-year old body in which all kinds of people come together for purposes of setting standards around the World Wide Web.  Thus, everything from HTML, which is used to write Web pages to WCAG, which are guidelines to enable people with disabilities access websites through assistive technologies.  W3C conducts its discussions openly: anybody who has a good idea has a right to participate in its discussions -- it does not matter who one works for, who one represents -- what does matter are the ideas one brings to the table.  The kinds of standards that W3C deals with are of interest to an immensely wide-ranging group of people.  Even ten-year olds have actually expressed their opinions about standards like HTML.  All this openness of participation must be guaranteed while ensuring that the processes move forward.

Next spoke Renu Budhiraja of the Department of Information and Technology, which is a part of the Indian government.  She started off by hoping that this workshop would be not only a platform to share knowledge, but also to reach consensus on a few matters.  Next, she laid out why open standards are extremely important for the Indian government.  What citizens want in their interactions with the government are ease of interaction and efficiency.  For them it is immaterial whether a certain service is provided by Department A or Department B.  Thus we need to move towards a single-window government service for citizens, enabling them to interact easily with the government's various departments.  While such an initiative must be centralized for it to be effective, it is crucial that its implementation be decentralized and suited to each district or localities' needs.

There is, understandably, a huge institutional mechanism behind ensuring that these systems are based on open standards.  We have expert committees, consisting of academics and knowledgeable bureaucrats, and working groups, which include industry groups.  Through these, we have evolved a National Policy on Open Standards, which is currently in a draft stage, but shall be notified soon.  This policy outlines the principles based on which particular standards required for governmental functioning are to be chosen or evolved.  This document will ensure long-term accessibility to public documents and information, and seamless interoperability of various governmental services and departments.  It will also reduce the risk of vendor lock-in and reduce costs, and thus ensure long-term, sustainable, scalable and cost-effective solutions.

Ms. Budhiraja noted that there are a few aspects of the policy that bear discussion in a forum such as the IGF.  First is the issue of whether royalty-free is the only choice for innovation.  All other things equal, between royalty-free and reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) standards, of course royalty-free is to be preferred.  But what if a superior technology (JPEG200 vs. JPEG) is RAND?  What should the government's position be in such a case?  Further, what should the government's position be when in a particular domain a RAND standard is the only option? 

Next is the issue of single vs. multiple open standards.  When interoperability is what we are aiming at, can multiple standards be recommended as some in the industry are asking us to do?  And then is the issue of market maturity.  The government sometimes finds itself in a situation where a standard is available, but well-developed products around that standard aren't and there aren't sufficient vendors using that standard.  All these issues are of great practical importance when a government works on a policy document on standards.

Next up was Sunil Abraham, Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society.  His presentation was on open standards as citizens' and consumers' rights.  He started off by citing the example of  the Smart Card Operating System for Transport Application (SCOSTA) standard, and the implications that the SCOSTA story has on large-scale projects such as the National Unique ID project currently under way in India.  SCOSTA, an open standard, was being written off as unimplementable by all the MNC smart card vendors who wished to push RAND standards.  IIT Kanpur helped the government develop a working implementation.  Within twenty days, the card manufacturers submitted modified cards for compliance testing by NIC.  Because of SCOSTA being an open standard, local companies also joined the tender.  The cost went down from Rs. 600 per card to Rs. 30 per card.  This shows the benefits of open standards as a means of curbing oligopolistic pricing, and working for the benefit of consumers.

From a rights-based perspective, access to the state machinery is a primary right.  Citizens should not be required to pirate or purchase software to interact with the state.  If e-governance solutions are based on proprietary standards, not all citizens would be equal.  The South African example or requiring a particular browser to access the election commission's website shows that in a rather drastic fashion.  When intellectual property interferes with governmental needs, governments have not been shy of issuing compulsory licences.  This was seen when during the Great War the United States government pooled various flight-related patents and compulsorily licensed them, as well as what we are currently seeing with many Aids-related drugs being compulsorily licensed in developing countries.  Thus, there are precedents for such licensing, and governments should explore them in the realm of e-governance.  Many countries now have statutes that guarantee the right to government-held information.  Government Interoperability Frameworks should take these into account, and mandate all government-to-citizen (G2C) information be transacted via open standards.  This must be backed up by a strong accessibility policy to ensure that the governments don't discriminate between their citizens.

Proprietary standards act like pseudo-intellectual property rights, just as DRMs do.  They add a layer on top of rights such as copyright, and can prevent the exercise of fair use and fair dealing rights because of an inability to legally negotiate the standards in which the content is encoded in a cost-free manner.  In guaranteeing this balance between copyrights and fair dealing rights, free software and alternative IP models play a crucial role.  Because of software patents being recognized in a few countries, development of free software which allows citizens to exercise their fair use rights is harmed in all countries.

Steve Mutkoski of Microsoft spoke next and placed the standards debate in a large context.  He noted that standards are a technicality that are only a small part of the large issue which is interoperability in e-governance and delivery to citizens.  The real challenges are organizational and semantic interoperability.  Frequently interoperability is not harmed by technical issues, but by legal and organizational issues. Governments used to work on paper; during the shift to electronic data, they didn't engage in any organizational changes.  Thus they continue to function with electronic data the same way that they did with paper-based data.  Governments often lack strong privacy policies regarding the data that each of their departments holds.  This harms governmental functioning.  Additionally, legacy hardware and software have to be catered to by the standards we are talking about: sometimes an open standard just will not work. 

Standards don't guarantee interoperability, and there is significant work done on this by noted academics ("Why Standards Are Not Enough To Guarantee End-to-End Interoperability" Lewis et al.; "Difficulties Implementing Standards" Egyedi & Dahanayake; "Standards Compliant, But Incompatible?" Egyedi et al.).  Mandated standards lists will not help address interoperability issues between different implementations of the same standard.  What would help?  Transparency of implementations; collaboration with community; active participation in maintenance of standards, etc., would help.  There is a need for continued public sector reform, with a focus on citizen-centric e-governance, and a need to engage with the question of whether government-mandated standards lists lead the market or follow the market.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh, a senior researcher at UN University, Maastricht, spoke next.  He started by noting that technical standards are left to technical experts.  That needs to change, which is why discussing open standards at the IGF is important.  He next set off a hypothetical: imagine you go to the city council office in Sharm el Sheik, and at the parking lot there it says that your car has to be a Ford if you are to park there; or if the Dutch government insists that you have a Philips TV if you are to receive the national broadcaster's signal.  While these might seem absurd, situations like this arise all the time when it comes to the realm of software.  Thus, the social effects of open standards are of utmost importance, and not just their technical qualities.  Analysing the social effects of open standards takes us back to the economics of technology and technological standards.  Technological standards exhibit network externalities: their inherent value is less than the value of others using them.  Being the only person in the world with a telephone won't be very useful.  Technological standards also exhibit path dependence: once you go with one technological format, it is difficult to change over to another even if that other format is superior to the first.  Thus, clearly, standards benefit when there is a 'natural monopoly'.  The challenge really arises when faced with the question of how to ensure a monopoly in a technology without the supplier of that technology exhibiting monopolistic tendencies.  This can only be done when the technology is open and developed openly, of which the web standards and the W3C are excellent examples.  If the technology or the process are semi-open, then because of the few intellectual property rights attached to the technology, some would be better off than others.  Just as governments cannot insist on driving a particular make of cars as a prerequisite for access to them, they cannot insist on using a particular proprietary standard as a means of accessing them.

Many interesting questions arose when the floor was thrown open to the audience.  "Should governments only mandate a particular standard when it is certain that market maturity exists?"  Not really, since governmental decisions also give signals to the market and help direct attention to those standards.  It would be best if roadmaps were provided, with particular under-mature standards being designated as "preferred standards", thus helping push industry in a particular direction.  Examples where this strategy has borne fruit abound.  This is also the strategy found in the Australian GIF.  On the issue of multiplicity of standards, Sir Tim was very clear that they have to be avoided at all costs.  He gave the example of XSLT and CSS, which are both stylesheet formats.  He noted that their domain of operation was very different (with one being for servers and the other for clients), so having two standards with similar functions but different domains of operation does not make them multiple standards.  Multiple standards defeat the purpose of the standardization process.

It was noted that governmental choices are of practical importance to citizens.  During the Hurricane Katrina emergency, the federal emergency website only worked properly if Internet Explorer was used.   How do we move forward?  We must move forward by having policies that strike a balance between allowing for the natural evolution of standards and stability.  The Government Interoperability Frameworks must be dynamic documents, allowing for categorization between standards and having clear roadmaps to enable industry to provide solutions to the government in a timely fashion.  Governments must be strong in order to push industry towards openness, for the sake of its citizens, and not let industry dictate proprietary standards as the solution.  Some opined that since there are dozens of domains that governments function in, maintaining lists of standards is a time-consuming process that is not justified, but others rebutted that by noting that for enterprise architectures to work, governments have to maintain such lists internally.  Opening up that list to citizens and service providers would not entail greater overheads.

Sunil Abraham talking Open Standards at IGF09

(Video added on December 30, 2009)

The workshop drew individuals affiliated with the arts in many different ways, making for a rich exploration of how legal governance has come to shape art as praxis, influence modern conceptions of “art” and alter the ecology of creativity. The two-day workshop offered artists pragmatic legal tools and advice, as well as the opportunity to discuss the friction between artistic freedom, legal rights, and juridical power in the art world. Judging from the workshop, artists appear to be increasingly concerned with their legal rights. With this said, they also seem to be equally critical of how legal systems may be shaping modes of artistic expression. This ambivalence made for an interesting two days of discussion.

Upon first glance, intellectual property regimes governing the sale, use and production of artistic work may appear wrought with ambiguities for those unfamiliar with legal technicalities. As the globalized nature of legal and technological infrastructures has given rise to complex new challenges for the governing of the art world, there was no shortage of questions from the group in attempt to crystallize their understandings. What does one do when a rights holder has not responded to a licensing request? Can an artist copyright their work when drawing from the public domain? The multiplexicity of the questions made one thing clear – the modern artist must be legally literate if they are to fulfill their rights and obligations under the law. Determining who owns the rights to what, and under what circumstances, can prove more challenging than one may initially assume.

How, and to what extent, the legal system is used by an artist depends on a host of factors. Some of theses factors may include whether or not the artwork has the potential to be commercially exploited, holds intrinsic or traditional cultural value to the artist, or whether or not it can be easily reproduced and distributed using digital technologies. Some participants were interested to learn how they could use the law to protect their work from illegal distribution, while others were keen to how they can contribute to the public domain, while maintaining certain rights to their their work. The increasingly commercial nature of museums and galleries and the risks they pose to artists seemed to be a pressing concern for many. Individuals cited cases of galleries buying the rights to entire bodies of work, thus rendering artists unable to reclaim their artistic rights and integrity.

The monetary value placed on artistic expression, coupled with a technological infrastructure which enables the dissemination of artistic works, appear to have artists seeking greater ownership of what they create. Furthermore, the threat of commercial exploitation seemed to have many artists questioning the possible implications of placing their work in the public domain. The exploitation of art for commercial gain strongly illustrated the need for legal rights to protect the moral and economic rights of artists, and it is within this context that a discourse of rights and proprietorship came to dominate much of the workshop. While only briefly touched upon, A a more nuanced discussion of the rights an artist may obtain under a creative commons license may have led discussion in more open directions. With such emphasis placed on how an artists is to protect their legal rights, the importance of public domain for the art world received little discussion.

While learning how to protect legal rights seemed to be a focus, a leveling sense of ambivalence prevailed as many began to critically questioned the role of the law in shaping artistic expression. From the dominance of the intellectual property framework to the very nature of legal language, legal structures appear to play an increasingly influential, yet ill-suited role, in answering the classic question “what is art?”. In the early 20^th century, legal and peer censorship played a prominent, yet more traditional role in determining what did or did not constitute art. India's 1954 nude art scandal involving Akbar' Padamsee's painting “The Lovers” and the similar ostracism of artist Marcel Duchamp for his Dada piece “The Fountain”, demonstrates these more traditional forms of legal and peer censorship, respectively. Today, a more nuanced method of censorship appears to have evolved alongside the complex legal structures governing artistic work. Under the intellectual property rubric, judges and lawyers, as much so as artists, are critiquing the integrity of art and, consequentially, shaping modern perceptions of authorship and creativity.

Many participants found the epistemological power of law in the contemporary art world to be questionable. As new art forms continue to transgress traditional boundaries of creativity and legality, copyright law is becoming an increasingly complex arena. To what extent does the pop art of of Andy Warhol blur the lines between artistic expression and trademark infringement? Does a series of painted lines a canvas demonstrate “some labor, skill and judgment”? Should conceptual artists be able to copyright their installations and freeze performances, however impermanent these works they may be? The work of artist Jeff Koons clearly exemplifies how copyright law may classify adaptive works as extralegal. His sculpture “String of Puppies” –a playful and colorful adaptation of a photograph, was determined by American courts to be an infringement of copyright, even though it had been clear that a great deal of “labor, skill and judgment” had been poured into the piece. Through the artistic gaze, the work was seen as “original” in its own right. To the legal eye, it was a clearly an infringement of copyright. Such a case demonstrates how juridical authority can, and is used, to impose rigid notions of creativity and authorship.

The role of intellectual property regimes in exacerbating power imbalances within the art world was another theme of concern for artists throughout the two days. Participants gave many examples which demonstrated the cumbersome processes artists must undergo to secure a performance license from foreign rights holders. While one performance manager thought they had secured the rights to a show, they were kindly notified by authorities that they had only in fact been given rights to the script, but were never granted permission to use the music. One can imagine how the increasingly globalized nature of intellectual property law can impose financial restrictions on small time performance artist in Bangalore to acquire all the licenses necessary to “legally” perform a classic Broadway show. Considering that shows are normally performed for smaller audiences and do not garner substantial profits, these legal structures often work to reinforce an asymmetric balance of power in the art world.  Other participants noted how emergent Artists Guilds in India are taking almost draconian measures to ensure copyright law is respected by artists and performers in and around the art scene in Bangalore.

The politics of power also permeated discussions of how governments are protecting traditional forms of artistic expression through geographical indication. Geographical indication seems to preserve the spatial contextuality intrinsic to the production of traditional art forms. However, bringing “traditional art” under the umbrella of intellectual property law also raised a host of questions. Considering the disjuncture which exists between supranational systems and local practice, who should hold the power to decide how folklore is protected? These methods of protecting the intellectual property of “the local” often present new tensions between geographical fluidity:rigidity, individual:communal modes of production, and legal representivity:invisibility.

It is evident that the law plays a necessary and functional role for governing the art world and protects many artists from undue exploitation. However, legal structures continue to gain greater epistemological power within the art world as a consequence. This has many questioning how the law may stifling artistic expression; notably as new technologies continue encourage new art forms through the use, adaptation, and remixing of copyrighted works. What will the future of art look like if judges, and artists alike, continue to survey the practice through the lens of legality to the extent they do today? As artistic and legal practices continue to evolve, it may become increasingly difficult to disentangle art from the complex political economy of interests that governs it.

Drawing from such concerns, I am compelled to question why a discourse of rights and protection, rather than one of obligation, continues to dominate discussion of the art/law nexus? If artists are concerned with these increasing legalisms, why aren't they encouraged to preserve the creative commons as often as they are advised to assert their proprietary rights? Wouldn't a discourse of artistic “responsibility” rather than “rights” set the art world on a path towards redefining the role of law and and reclaiming the power of influence over artistic expression? There is a clear need for the art world to recenter the line between legal rights and creative subjectivity, and I feel that more focus on protecting the public domain, rather than individual property rights, would be a proper step towards achieving this. Only by doing so do I believe that artists will be able to ensure that copyright law continues to serve its functional role without becoming a new form of creative censorship.

If the opinions I have expressed raise important questions for you, A.R.T. will be holding another workshop exploring art in the context of social media. As more artists are using the internet and social networking tools to promote their work, new benefits, as well as challenges have risen within this domain. A date for the workshop has not yet been set, however it is planned to take place early on next year.

The question in the title is the driving force behind a joint research initiative the Centre for Internet and Society has recently undertaken in collaboration with pioneering institutions, LexUM,and the South African Legal Information Institute.  Over the past fifteen years, institutions providing free access to legal materials have transformed the modes in which legal information is produced and used. However, there have been few analyses of the ways in which legal information repositories operate. Lessons learned, best practices and successful models have not been systematically documented, and administrators may not have access to useful guidance or peer support. The study will bridge this gap by analyzing a variety of free access to law initiatives around the world in greater detail.

In 1992, the first Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University began to place primary sources of law and interpretive legal materials online, free of charge.  The Free Access to Law Movement soon expanded to form a broad network of LIIs who shared the belief that legal information is digital common property and should be accessible to all. Today, citizens around the world can access legal information in multiple languages through easily searchable databases. Among the resources available are statutes, bills, court decisions, bilateral treaties, law journal articles, legal reform documents and much more. This freely available legal information has helped make the law more accessible to audiences previously underserved by costly commercial databases, and has allowed comparative legal research to become more practicable than ever before.

Research will focus on gauging the broader societal effects of free access to law initiatives, as well as on understanding the diverse factors which contribute to or undermine their sustainability.The CIS will be overseeing research in Asia, while SAFLII and LexUM will cover South and West Africa, the South Pacific, Canada and Australia. The global scope of the study will facilitate the sharing of expertise and best practices within the global network of LIIs.

The value of creating a legal information commons has been clearly demonstrated. Access to legal materials helps to strengthen judicial systems, improve legal expertise, guide policymaking and maintain the rule of law. Legal transparency helps businesses assess risk and encourage entrepreneurship. Citizens and civil society actors require access to law to participate in the political process and assert their rights. These audiences form an important constituency for open access to legal scholarship and demonstrate the need to further examine the core benefits of free access to law initiatives.

Online free access to legal materials has also been an indispensable tool in underserved regions where a host of factors often undermine access to legal information. The following examples, derived from preliminary CIS research throughout Asia, demonstrate how free access to law can bridge various gaps in legal information accessibility. In some cases, laws may be completely unavailable. For example, bureaucrats may demand bribes before allowing access to copies of a law, or governments may wish to keep certain implementing guidelines or regulations a secret. In other cases, a law might have simply been lost through lack of proper storage or record-keeping.

A second problem occurs when laws and case law are available only in certain locations or certain forms. A law may be available only in hard copy or in one or two libraries in the capital city, for example. This causes difficulties for citizens and practitioners in remote areas who lack the resources to travel. Sometimes, the libraries containing the legal information also may require special permissions to access. In other instances, legal materials may have been digitized but not properly stored or networked.

Digitizing and uploading laws to organized, searchable databases presents its own challenges, and some governments lack the technical capacity to do so. However, digitizing and uploading laws does not guarantee general public access. In some countries, laws may be online but placed in pay-per-use databases. And some governments retain a copyright or similar intellectual property rights in their laws and other documents. This may mean that NGOs or LIIs cannot copy, consolidate, or re-post certain legal information without exposing themselves to copyright liability. The commercialization of legal information also restricts access to individuals and firms able to pay costly subscription fees.

Copyright and the commercialization of legal information can inhibit the free flow of legal information—notably when legal information can be better organized, preserved and disseminated further under more open standards. Because of the importance of free access to law, a significant focus of the research will be to identify factors that contribute to the sustainability and success of free access to law initiatives. This is of great importance in Asia, where the local capacities of LIIs require further strengthening before their databases can begin to rival their commercial counterparts.

Many challenges remain for the development and sustainability of free access to law initiatives in the Asian region. Searchable legal information must be provided in both English and regional languages, while local technical capacities require further development. Mariya Badeva-Bright of SAFLII also notes that LIIs need to secure working partnerships within the judicial branch of government in order to reduce the burdens of digitization and to promote common standards in preparation of legal material. The AsianLII has only begun to scrape the surface of valuable legal information that is potentially available and must continue to develop and strengthen partnerships in the region.

The study will have several concrete results. Upon completion of the study, a Free Access to Law Best Practices Handbook will be published and will serve as a comprehensive knowledge resource for both existing and nascent free access law initiatives. The handbook will outline various steps in creating and maintaining successful free access to law initiatives, while ensuring that important aspects of design and sustainability are not overlooked. Also, a comprehensive online library will host current and future materials relating to the free access to law movement, including a collection of free access to law case studies.

Research by the CIS, LexUM, SAFLII, and their respective team of researchers is expected to commence within the next few months.  In the end, the free access to law study will provide future initiatives and existing LII networks with proven and adoptable best practices. This research will increase the chance that nascent initiatives will be successful, and support the continued growth of the thriving legal information commons.

 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free; - Rabindranath Tagore

 ಜ್ಞಾನವೆಂಬುದು ಯಾರೊಬ್ಬರ ಸೊತ್ತಲ್ಲ. ಅದು ಎಲ್ಲರದೂ ಆಗಬೇಕು. ಮಾನವಕುಲದ ಒಟ್ಟು ಅರಿವು ಪ್ರತಿಯೊಬ್ಬರಿಗೂ ಸಿಗಬೇಕು, ಜ್ಞಾನವನ್ನು ಮುಚ್ಚಿಟ್ಟು ಅಥವ ಹಿಡಿದಿಟ್ಟು ಪ್ರಯೋಜನವಿಲ್ಲ. ಹಂಚಿಕೊಂಡ ಜ್ಞಾನ ಮತ್ತಷ್ಟು ಬೆಳೆಯುತ್ತದೆ - ಇದು ಒಂದು ರೀತಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಯೋಜನೆಯ ಹಿಂದಿರುವ ಸಿದ್ಧಾಂತ.

ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಒಂದು ಮುಕ್ತ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ. ಎಲ್ಲರೂ ತಮ್ಮ ಅರಿವು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಬಹುದಾದ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ. ಯಾರೊಬ್ಬರೂ ಎಡಿಟ್ ಮಾಡಬಹುದಾದ ಪುಟಗಳ ಗುಚ್ಛ. ಇದನ್ನು ನಡೆಸುವುದು ಜಗತ್ತಿನಾದ್ಯಂತ ತಮಗರಿವಿರುವ ವಿಷಯಗಳನ್ನು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತ ತಾವೂ ಹೊಸ ವಿಷಯಗಳನ್ನು ಅರಿತುಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ಉತ್ಸುಕರಾಗಿರುವ ಆಸಕ್ತರ ಸಮುದಾಯ. ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾದ ಕೆಲವೇ ವರ್ಷಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದ ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಪ್ರಮುಖ ವೆಬ್ಸೈಟುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಒಂದಾದ ಯೋಜನೆ ಇದು. ಅಂತರ್ಜಾಲದಲ್ಲಿ ಇಂದು ಅತ್ಯಂತ ಬಳಕೆಯಾಗುವ ಮೊದಲ ಐದು ವೆಬ್ಸೈಟುಗಳಲ್ಲಿ ಇದೂ ಒಂದು.

ನಾಲ್ಕಾರು ವರ್ಷಗಳೇ ಈ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕಳೆದವರಿಗೆ ಎಲ್ಲರೊಡನೆ ಕುಳಿತು ಒಂದು ದಿನದಲ್ಲಿ ವಿಕಿ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವುದು ಬಹುದೊಡ್ಡ ಸವಾಲು. ಏಕೆಂದರೆ, ವಿಕಿ(ಪೀಡಿಯ) ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳಲು ನಮಲ್ಲಿರುವ ವಿಷಯಗಳು ನೂರಾರು. ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ರಾಜ್ಯಮಟ್ಟದ ಮೊಟ್ಟಮೊದಲ ವಿಕಿ ಅಕಾಡೆಮಿ ಆಯೋಜಿಸಿದಾಗ ನಮಗೆದುರಾದ ಸವಾಲು ಕೂಡ ಇದೇ. ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಅಂದು ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದ ಇನ್ನೂರಕ್ಕೂ ಹೆಚ್ಚು ಜನ ಆಸಕ್ತರ ಸಮೂಹ ನಮಗಿದ್ದ ಸವಾಲನ್ನು ಇಮ್ಮಡಿಗೊಳಿಸಿತ್ತು.

"ಮಂಗಳೂರು ಆಸ್ಟ್ರೇಲಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ಕೂಡ ಇದೆ. ಅದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಲೇಖನ ಉಂಟೋ?" ಎಂದು ಸಭಿಕರೊಬ್ಬರು ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆ ಮುಂದಿಟ್ಟಾಗ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ನಡೆಸಿಕೊಟ್ಟ ನಮಗೂ ಕುತೂಹಲ. ಅಲ್ಲಿಯೇ ಆಂಗ್ಲ ವಿಕಿಯ 'ಮಂಗಳೂರು' ಪುಟ ತೆರೆದು ನೋಡಿದಾಗ ಆಸ್ಟ್ರೇಲಿಯದಲ್ಲಿರುವ 'ಮಂಗಳೂರು' ಎಂಬ ಊರಿನ ಬಗ್ಗೆಯೂ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಓದಿ ಹೇಳುವಾಗ ಎಲ್ಲಿಲ್ಲದ ಖುಷಿ. ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರ ನಡುವೆ ಇರುವ ಮಾಹಿತಿಯ ತುಣುಕುಗಳು ಒಟ್ಟಾದಾಗ ಮಾತ್ರ ಹೀಗಾಗಲು ಸಾಧ್ಯ ಅಲ್ವ? ಇಲ್ಲದಿದ್ದರೆ ವಿಕ್ಟೋರಿಯ, ಆಸ್ಟ್ರೇಲಿಯದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಮಂಗಳೂರಿಗೆ ಒಂದು ರೈಲ್ವೇ ಸ್ಟೇಶನ್ ಕೂಡ ಇದೆ, ಒಂದು ಏರ್ಪೋರ್ಟ್ ಕೂಡ ಇದೆ ಎಂಬುದಿರಲಿ, ಮತ್ತೊಂದು ಮಂಗಳೂರು ಪರದೇಶವೊಂದರಲ್ಲಿದೆ ಎಂಬುದೂ ತಿಳಿದುಬರದು.

ಇದೇ ರೀತಿಯ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳು ಉತ್ಸಾಹದ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮವನ್ನಾಗಿಸಿತು ಆ ದಿನ. ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನಲ್ಲಿ ನಡೆದ ವಿಕಿ ಅಕಾಡೆಮಿ ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರ ಮನಸ್ಸಿನಲ್ಲಿ ಅಚ್ಚುಳಿಯುವಷ್ಟು.

ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಎಂದರೇನು, ಅದರ ಸಿದ್ಧಾಂತ ಏನು, ಅದರಲ್ಲಿ ಯಾರು ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಬಹುದು, ಹೇಗೆ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಬಹುದು? ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಲು ಬೇಕಾದದ್ದು ಏನು? ಇದೇ ಮೊದಲಾದ ವಿಷಯಗಳೊಂದಿಗೆ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭಿಸಿದೆವು. ಸೇಂಟ್ ಅಲೋಶಿಯಸ್ ನಲ್ಲಿ ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದ ಆಸಕ್ತರು ನೆರೆದ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಒಡ್ಡಿದ ಸವಾಲು ನಮಗೆ ಅಷ್ಟೇ ಉತ್ಸಾಹ ಮೂಡಿಸಿದ್ದು ಹೌದು. ಬಿಳಿಗಿರಿರಂಗನ ಬೆಟ್ಟವನ್ನು ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ಷೇತ್ರವಾಗಿ ಮಾಡಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಡಾಕ್ಟರರಾದ ಪ್ರಶಾಂತ್ ಎನ್ ಎಸ್ ನನ್ನ ಜೊತೆ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ನಡೆಸಿಕೊಟ್ಟವರು. ಇವರ ನಿತ್ಯದ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಎಡಿಟ್ಸ್ ನೋಡಿದರೆ ಅದಲ್ಲಿರುವ ಅವರಿಗಿರುವ ಆಸಕ್ತಿ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ತಿಳಿಸದೇ ಇರದು.

ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಯ ಜನಪ್ರಿಯತೆಗೆ ಕಾರಣವೇನು? ಇದು ಹೇಗೆ ಇಷ್ಟು ದೊಡ್ಡದಾಗಿ ಬೆಳದದ್ದು? ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಎಂಬುದೊಂದು ಇಷ್ಟು ಅದ್ಭುತವಾದ ಯೋಜನೆಯಾದದ್ದು ಹೇಗೆ - ಮುಂತಾದ ವಿಷಯಗಳ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ನಾವು ಬೆಳಕು ಚೆಲ್ಲುವ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ ಮಾಡಿದೆವು. ಸಹಯೋಗದಲ್ಲಿ (Collaboration) ಮಾಡಿದ ಕೆಲಸ ಹೇಗೆ ಜಗತ್ ಸ್ವರೂಪ ಪಡೆದು ಉತ್ತಮವಾಗುತ್ತ ಹೋಗುತ್ತದೆ ಹಾಗು ವಿಶ್ವ ಮಟ್ಟದಲ್ಲಿ ಇದು ಹೇಗೆ ಕಾಣುತ್ತದೆ ಎಂಬುದರ ಕುರಿತು ಮಾತಾನಾಡಲು ಪ್ರಯತ್ನಿಸಿದೆವು. ರಾಜ್ಯಮಟ್ಟದಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭಿಸುವಾಗ ನಮ್ಮ ಭಾಷೆ ಕನ್ನಡದಲ್ಲಿ ನಾಲ್ಕು ವರ್ಷಗಳ ಹಿಂದೆಯೇ ಪ್ರಾರಂಭವಾಗಿರುವ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಆವೃತ್ತಿ ಮರೆಯಲಾಗದು, ಅದರ ಕುರಿತು ಕೂಡ ಚರ್ಚೆ ಮಾಡಿದೆವು. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಹುಭಾಷಾ ವಿಶ್ವಕೋಶ್ವವಾಗಿ ರೂಪುಗೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತಿರುವ ಕುರಿತು, ಅದರ ಪ್ರಾಮುಖ್ಯತೆ ಕುರಿತು ಕೂಡ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದೆವು.

ಮಧ್ಯಾಹ್ನ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಬಳಸುವುದು ಹೇಗೆ, ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಳ್ಳುವುದು ಹೇಗೆ ಎಂಬುದರ ಕುರಿತು ಕಾರ್ಯಾಗಾರವಿತ್ತು. ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಂಡವರು ಸ್ವತಃ ಮುಂದೆ ಬಂದು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದಲ್ಲಿ ತಾವೂ ಒಂದು ಅಕೌಂಟು ತೆರೆದು ಎಡಿಟ್ ಮಾಡುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡಿದೆವು. ಇದು ಸಭೆಯಲ್ಲಿ ನೆರೆದಿದ್ದ ಹಲವರಿಗೆ ಬಹಳ ಖುಷಿಕೊಟ್ಟ ವಿಷಯವೆಂದು ಈಗ ನಾನು ಹೇಳಬಲ್ಲೆ. ಏಕೆಂದರೆ ಯಾವುದೇ ಯೋಜನೆಯಾಗಲಿ, ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನವಾಗಲಿ - ಅದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಕೇಳುವುದು ಸುಲಭ, ಆದರೆ ಬಳಸಿ ನೋಡುವಾಗ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆ ಎದುರಾದಾಗ ಕಷ್ಟ! ನೇರ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮದಲ್ಲಿ ಪಾಲ್ಗೊಂಡವರನ್ನೇ ಭಾಗವಹಿಸಲು ಕೇಳುತ್ತ ಅವರ ಕೈಯಲ್ಲೇ ಅಕೌಂಟು ತೆರೆಯುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವುದು, ಪುಟವೊಂದನ್ನು ಎಡಿಟ್ ಮಾಡುವಂತೆ ಮಾಡುವುದು - ಸಭಿಕರಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳ ಸರಮಾಲೆಯನ್ನೇ ಹುಟ್ಟುಹಾಕಿತು! ನಮಗೂ ಅದೇ ಬೇಕಿದ್ದದ್ದು. ಎಲ್ಲರ ಪ್ರಶ್ನೆಗಳಿಗೆ ನಮಗೆ ತಿಳಿದ ಉತ್ತರ ನೀಡುತ್ತ ಅವರಿಗೆ ಎದುರಾದ ಸಮಸ್ಯೆಗಳನ್ನು ಪರಿಹರಿಸುವ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನ ಮಾಡಿದೆವು. ಒಟ್ಟಾರೆ, ನಮಗದು ಬಹಳ ಖುಷಿಕೊಟ್ಟ ಕಾರ್ಯಾಗಾರ!

ದಿನದ ಕಾರ್ಯಕ್ರಮ ಮುಗಿದ ಮೇಲೆ ವಿದ್ಯಾರ್ಥಿಗಳು, ಉಪನ್ಯಾಸಕರು, ಪತ್ರಕರ್ತರು - ಎಲ್ಲ ನಮ್ಮಲ್ಲಿ ಬಂದು ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದೊಂದಿಗೆ ಅವರ ಅನುಭವ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುತ್ತ ಕಳೆದ ಸಮಯವಂತೂ ಮರೆಯಲಾಗದ್ದು. ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞರಾಗಿ ನಾವು ಕಾಣುವ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಎಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ತನ್ನದೇ ಮುಖವನ್ನು ಕಾಣಿಸುತ್ತದೆಂಬ ಅರಿವು ಈ ಯೋಜನೆಯ ಸಮಗ್ರತೆಯ ಪರಿಚಯ ಹೆಚ್ಚಿಸಿತು. ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರಿಗೂ ಮತ್ತಷ್ಟು ಹತ್ತಿರವಾಯಿತು.

[ವಿಕಿ ಅಕಾಡೆಮಿಯನ್ನು ಸಾಧ್ಯವಾಗಿಸುತ್ತಿರುವ ಸೆಂಟರ್ ಫಾರ್ ಇಂಟರ್ನೆಟ್ ಎಂಡ್ ಸೊಸೈಟಿಯವರಿಗೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಸಮುದಾಯದ ಪರವಾಗಿ ಅಭಿನಂದನೆಗಳು. ಹೆಚ್ಚಿನದೇನೂ ಅಪೇಕ್ಷೆಯಿಲ್ಲದೆ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯದ ಸ್ವಯಂಸೇವಕರಿಗೆ ಪ್ರೋತ್ಸಾಹ ನೀಡುತ್ತಿದ್ದಾರೆ. ವಿಕಿ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರ ಪ್ರಯತ್ನದಲ್ಲಿ ಇವರ ಪಾತ್ರ, ಕೊಡುಗೆ ಗಣನೀಯವಾದದ್ದು.

ಮಂಗಳೂರಿನ ಆವೃತ್ತಿಯನ್ನು ಆಯೋಜಿಸುವಲ್ಲಿ ಪ್ರಮುಖ ಪಾತ್ರವಹಿಸಿದ ಮಂಗಳೂರು ಆಕಾಶವಾಣಿಯ ಸಾತ್ವಿಕ್, ಸೇಂಟ್ ಅಲೋಶಿಯಸ್ ಕಾಲೇಜಿನ ಉತ್ಸುಕ ಉಪನ್ಯಾಸಕರೂ, ಸರಳ ಜೀವಿಯೂ ಆದ ರೆವರೆಂಡ್ ಫಾದರ್ ರಿಚರ್ಡ್ ರೆಗೋ ಇವರಿಬ್ಬರಿಗೂ ನಮ್ಮೆಲ್ಲರ ಪರವಾಗಿ ಹೃತ್ಪೂರ್ವಕ ಅಭಿನಂದನೆಗಳು.

ಇದೆಲ್ಲದರ ಜೊತೆಗೆ ವಿಕಿ ಅಕಾಡೆಮಿಯನ್ನು ಕುತೂಹಲದಿಂದ, ವಿಶ್ವಾಸದಿಂದ ನೋಡುತ್ತ ವಿಕಿ ಕುರಿತು ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವಲ್ಲಿ ತಮ್ಮದೂ ಒಂದು ಪಾತ್ರವಿದೆ ಎಂಬಂತೆ ನಡೆದ ಪತ್ರಕರ್ತ ಸ್ನೇಹಿತರಿಗೆ ನಾವೆಲ್ಲರೂ ಕೃತಜ್ಞರು. ಇವರಿಲ್ಲದೆ ನಾವು ಕೈಗೆತ್ತಿಕೊಂಡಿರುವ ಅರಿವು ಹಂಚಿಕೊಳ್ಳುವ ಅಭಿಯಾನ ಅಪೂರ್ಣ.

More information available here

Seminar held at Managlore - slides available here

CIS has been following the drafting of the national policy on open standards for e-governance with much interest.  Last year, we offered our comments on the first draft of the policy.  The policy has since gone through two more iterations (copies of which are kept on the Fosscomm site), labelled versions 1.15 and 2, and we have again offered comments on the latest version.  The evolution the draft policy has been mired in controversy, as documented by Venkatesh Hariharan of Red Hat.  It seems that the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) has been trying to nullify the effect of the policy by pushing for recognition of proprietary standards within the policy, and that too without consultation with its members. 

We believe that proprietary standards go against the interests the government, which as the primary consumer of the standards would have to pay royalties and would face vendor lock-in, of small and medium enterprises, which provide direct and indirect services to the government, since they would be required to invest in those closed standards to service the government, and most of all, of the citizens of India.

Based on that view, we have noted four deficiencies in version 2 of the draft policy: the possibility of following the letter of policy while violating its spirit; the possibility of patenting and closed licensing of government-developed standards; that no framework provided for review or phasing out interim standards; and certain problematic definitions in the glossary to the policy.

All these points are elaborated upon in the comments we submitted to the Department of Information Technology.

The state of Karnataka has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Microsoft under which three IT academies have been established in the state, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga, in 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained at these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum at these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers. This MOU will expire in the coming academic year. Therefore, Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India are sending a letter to the Education Secretary for the state of Karnataka, advocating the adoption of a FOSS-based curriculum in these IT academies, and explaining why this would be a useful move.

The Centre for Internet and Society is one of the signatories to this letter, which is reproduced below.

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To

The Education Secretary

Government of Karnataka

MS Building

Bangalore, Karnataka.

Sub – Microsoft IT Academies in Karnataka

Dear Sri Nadadur,

Karnataka has a MOU with Microsoft under which three 'IT Academies' have been established in the State, in Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga during 2004-05. Government school teachers are being trained in these academies. As per the MOU, only Microsoft decides the curriculum in these academies, and only Microsoft software applications are being taught to the teachers.

There are a couple of issues with this program.

Firstly Microsoft does not allow the teaching of software other than their own proprietary products. This deprives the teachers from learning alternative Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There are compelling pedagogical, economic, social and political reasons why the education system needs to adopt and promote FOSS. Free software is software which gives the users the freedom to use, study, modify and share, while in the case of proprietary software, the vendor prevents the study, modification and distribution of the software. The freedoms of FOSS provide users and the rest of society with several important advantages, which are briefly listed below:

a. With proprietary software, the teachers only learn be superficial 'users'. This is because, proprietary software companies prevent access to the “source code” that goes into the creation of software. With FOSS, students can learn not only how to use software, but also how create and modify the software applications. Hence with FOSS, students will not just be passive users but will actually construct knowledge. As we know, 'Constructivism' is a key feature of the National Curriculum Framework 2005.

b. FOSS supports the creation of local language versions of the software. For example, Kerala has locally created software in Malayalam for its IT@School program. Similarly the Kannada community Sampada has created a complete Kannada distribution by customising existing FOSS software.

Though Microsoft has provided Windows and Microsoft Office gratis at these academies, it does not provide the same software to the teachers who are trained at the centre. Hence the teachers who intend to purchase computers would need to shell out considerable amounts for the software which they have become used to in the schools. However, if the teachers are trained on FOSS alternatives to Windows and Office, at at negligible price (the cost of a CD which is around Rupees ten), each teacher can be a given a copy of the software. The training can also cover the installation of the software, if required. In this way, the teacher training can lead to the actual use of computers in the schools and teachers homes and make the training meaningful and lead to the greater dispersion of ICTs. Currently, most teachers learn to use these products but have no continuity of learning which makes the training futile.

Of course, the issue of FOSS is not only one of cost. Even if proprietary software were offered free of cost, our nation will eventually have economic losses, due to permanent dependency on software monopoly.

These are some of the reasons why Karnataka has chosen FOSS in its own ICT@Schools program. The computers in Karnataka schools run on GNU/Linux platform under this program. We would like to submit that the teacher training in the IT Academies at Bangalore, Dharwad and Gulbarga also need to be aligned to the IT@School program, and hence teachers should be taught on the same FOSS software platforms as well.

We had a meeting with Ms Vandita Sharma last November, along with Dr Richard Stallman, the founder of the global Free Software movement, and explained these issues. She was sympathetic to these arguments on the public benefits from FOSS and mentioned that the department would take appropriate action in this regard as is consistent with the public interest and those of the teachers and children in our government schools. She mentioned that the MOU with Microsoft is expiring in the coming academic year and and requested us to formally write to her in this regard, hence this letter.

We request that the Government take a firm stance in favor of adopting and promoting FOSS and chose FOSS in its software procurement to align the department to the government schools.

A few months back, organisations that are working to promote FOSS came together to establish a 'Coalition of the FOSS Community in India' whose goal is to collaborate with governments and other organisations to promote the adoption of FOSS, specially in the public sector. Several of the member of this coalition are based in Bangalore, including the Centre for Internet and Society, Sampada, Swatantra Malayalam Computing, Deeproot Linux, IT for Change etc. Faculty from IIM-B, Bangalore University as well as other academic institutions are also members of this coalition. Members of this coalition are willing to provide any technical support or guidance that the government may require in this regard. For eg, FOSS curriculum for both schools and for teacher training is available in Kerala and can be adapted to Karnataka schools. It should be noted that FOSS is already being used in many institutions in Karnataka, including IISC, IIIT-B, IIIT-H, IITK and many engineering colleges.

We hope our submission will be considered by the education department as well as by the government and we look forward to working with you to help bring these ideals into reality. If you think it would be useful, we could plan a small workshop / interaction, or even a series of workshops for different stakeholders, to discuss the issue in more detail and look at the implications of the choice of the software platforms for the ICT programs in the department.

We look forward to your response.

Yours truly

Gurumurthy Kasinathan and members of the FOSS community in India (list of signatories is provided overleaf)

May 9^th 2009.

Copy - Commissioner for Public Instruction, Sri Kumar Naik

Copy - State Project Director, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, Sri Selva Kumar

Copy - Principal Secretary, DPAR (Dept of Personnel and Administrative Reforms) e-Governance

Copy - Principal Secretary, Department of IT

enclosed:

Why Government of Karnataka should adopt and promote FOSS

Kerala IT@Schools project

In 2002 Arjen Kamphuis co-authored a parliament motion to mandate open standards for all government IT in the Netherlands. The motion was unanimously accepted and, in 2007, became policy. The Netherlands thus became the first western country to make the use of open standards in public sector IT mandatory. Arjen is now working to export this set of policies to other European countries with the help of local political parties and business partners.

Arjen discussed his experience of lobbying for this policy change and some other questions related to his work as a consultant on IT strategy and the implications of nanotechnology and biotechnology in an email interview with the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Centre for Internet and Society: What is the Dutch government's policy on FOSS and Open Standards specifically and intellectual property rights in general? Provide some history, name the main lobbying factions in the Netherlands and their policy positions. What was your role in the formulation of these policies?

Arjen Kamphuis: The national action plan 'The Netherlands in Open Connection' is the government's answer to a unanimous vote in parliament in November 2002. The parliament stated that the market for desktop software was not functioning as it should and that significant vendor lock-in effects were harming both individual citizens and society as a whole. It requested maximum efforts from the government to change this situation. The suggested method for changing was mandating open standards in all public sector IT and actively supporting the adoption of open source software wherever functionally and technically feasible. 

I was one of the people who got this process started by contacting a member of parliament from the Green Party. This was triggered by my inability to access the website of the national railway on 1 January 2002. The website had been redesigned and only allowed access to visiters with Internet Explorer. As a Linux user, I had previously had comparable problems with local government websites and electronic tax forms (usage of which was mandatory for small businesses like my consulting start-up).

After the unanimous vote in parliament, several people in the Dutch open source community, including me, kept the pressure on the government by monitoring major procurements and writing questions for the Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to ask the government. In 2004 this led to a breakthrough when the Justice Ministry ran a project to procure 147 million euros' worth of desktop software without going through a proper multi-vendor selection process. They only talked to one vendor, and that is against European Union regulations. Since some of the civil servants working on this project were gagged, we can conclude that some people were aware they were breaking the law, yet went ahead anyway.

When the news broke we made sure the MEPs were armed with the proper questions the next day, and the contract was dropped. In reply to questions asked to the government by the MEPs, the responsible ministers admitted that the government was very dependent on Microsoft for basic functioning of its office environments; that this was a problem; and that the government would take active steps to remedy this situation by moving forward with the requests made in 2002 by parliament.

Two-and-a-half years and an election later, a new under-Minister for Economic Affairs, Frank Heemskerk, took up the challenge and promised a comprehensive policy. I gave input for this plan in mid-2007 and it was formally published and adopted later that year as a national policy for all government and public-sector (i.e. tax funded) organisations.

The policy has three objectives:

• improving interoperability between public sector organisations;
• lowering the vendor-dependence of the public sector;
• improving the functioning of the software market and supporting the Dutch knowledge economy 

Some of the practical measures are the mandating of the use of open standards in all public sector organisations. Whenever software is procured, open source should be considered and preferred whenever functionally adequate. These two very basic rules change the entire market for IT in the Dutch public sector (40% of the entire market) and is having a profound effect on the way software vendors offer their products as well as the negotiating power of the client organisations.

I continue to advise both the decision makers and the civil servants overseeing the implementation of the policy.

CIS: What is the current status on the implementation of these policies?

AK: After a slow start the government organisation that is responsable for overseeing the implementation is now up and running. The basic problem is lack of awareness about both the practical value that open standards and open source software can contribute and the underlying political reasons for making it the preferred option for government information processing.

Thus a lot of the work for the next few years will be communicating these ideas to civil servants (be they IT professionals or managers who have other jobs). The policy helps a lot because it puts some serious weight behind the whole process. The fact that government organisations have to support Open Document Format for instance significantly heightens their interest in the technical subject matter!

So the policy gives the drive needed to get things moving and now it is up to us to communicate the how and the why in a way that is understandable for people who are new to these concepts.  I have no doubt it will be a long process, we have over 20 years of proprietary legacy built up in our public institutions. Replacing those systems with open alternatives will take many years. All the greater a reason to proceed with some urgency. 

The complete policy document has been translated into English and released under Creative Commons Licence:
http://appz.ez.nl/publicaties/pdfs/07ET15.pdf

In December 2007 I gave a talk in Berlin. Here a summary, slides and video are available:
http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2387.en.html 

CIS: What can a country like India learn from the Dutch government's experience in eGovernance and ICT in Education?

AK: I am not familiar with the Indian political process but these are some of my lessons learned: 

- The government will not do anything unless constant and significant pressure is applied by citizens. Politicians and civil servants only act if the pain of acting is less than the pain of not acting. Change is achieved by citizens standing up and working on these problems without guarantee of any reward or even achieving any results (it took us five years to get from a unanimous vote in parliament to an actual policy). 

- Big IT companies may be your friend or your enemy. But even if they are your friends they generally will not be at the forefront of political action that could be seen as controversial. Once policies are pushed beyond the controversial stage and have been adopted as official policy some of them will support it. Others, with much to lose, will fight you and the policy every step of the way. The more money or loss of market share is involved the more radical the methods that are employed. Massive lobbying, applying political pressure through foreign governments, bribery and all kinds of other activities are well-funded, well organised and very common. 

- In moving forward with these policies it's the lack of knowledge and vision with the the management of institutions that is by far the biggest bottleneck. Without a clear policy from the top it is impossible to get things moving in most organisations.

- Another big problem in switching over local governments and other smaller organisations is the fact that many of the advantages of such a switch is national and/or macro-economic in nature while the initial cost and risk is micro-economic in nature. Hence again the need for a national policy. 

- The funding required to make significant improvements is often not that large compared to the existing operational budgets. Investing in the smart use of IT in education for instance is something that can pay for itself very quickly. This is generally also true for adoption of open source and open standards in general. By just reducing the yearly spend on software licences by 1% the entire government program can be funded.

- Simply stopping the procurement of new licences (while continuing the use of those already paid for) can often free up enough money to finance a migration process. This has been the case in the city of Amsterdam and the French Gendarmes.

- The actual value of better government services or education is hard to quantify in monetary terms. How do we value improved responsiveness, transparency, national sovereignty in information processing and supporting local service companies instead of foreign software companies?

- IT education should focus on understanding methods and principles, not products. The product life-cycle is 18-36 months, the educational process takes many years and the length of a career is decades. Any education with a focus on products leads to knowledge that is irrelevant by the time the degree is finished. Teach people to drive a car, not just a Volkswagen or Tata.

- The cost of physical books per student per year in the Netherlands is now greater that the cost of a laptop. This is insane since the content of those books is generally written by teachers who get paid very little for it. Using the funds to pay those teachers instad of the publishers and releasing the content under a free licence will free up resources to develop better educational programs and provide all students with computational tools to use them. All without increasing the total cost compared to our current situation. The financial numbers will be different for India but the basic principle is the same and works even better given the larger scale of India. The cost of producing and distributing electronic educational content will drop practically to zero when compared to physical on a per-student basis. Using funds to support teachers in the use of e-learning with open content is the way forward. 

CIS: How can a local support environment for open technologies be created? Can local SMEs ever substitute for the transnational proprietary giants?

AK: Whether SMEs can supplant multinationals depends on the product being replaced. CPU manufacturing requires a very high upfront investment in R&D and manufacturing capability. This is usually far beyond any but a handful of companies. With software development and services things are very different. Software development only requires a human with programming skills, a good idea and a computer. The Free Software Movement has shown clearly that distributed methods of software development can lead to high quality products with excellent local support systems. Local organisations (or communities that are not even organisations) can often understand local needs and respond to local changes much better, faster and cheaper than large, lumbering corporations. If local organisations work together globally to share knowledge (and code) for those parts they all need they can beat any centralised system.

What many senior business and government leaders are struggling with is the realisation that many of the 'truths' they have learned while studying economics or business management or some such subject turn out to be empirically incorrect. For example: it has become clear there is no causal relationship between the cost of software and its quality or utility. This must be a fact that is difficult to truly understand and accept if you have been brought up believing the gospel of the Anglo-Saxon economic worldview. The current economic crisis is a great help in questioning some of those beliefs and opens up room for new ideas about economic vs. societal value of technology and its relationship to businesses trying to earn a living.

CIS: Could you tell us about the Dutch government's rollback on electronic voting machines? What is your opinion on the use of electronic voting machines in the upcoming elections in India?

AK: From the mid '80s onward, voting computers were introduced in the Netherlands. By 2006, the vast majority of all elections were being performed by proprietary computer systems. Citizens would press a button and then go home to watch TV. Some software that no-one could control, monitor or properly audit would spit out a result and that would be it -- new government. Only a handful of engineers (all working for the companies that made the voting computers) actually knew what the software did and could make the computer system say anything they wanted. 

When the city of Amsterdam (the last holdout using paper ballots) announced in 2006 that it was moving to voting computers, a group of activists organised a campaign to ban voting computers. We felt that the very nature of democracy was under attack by running the election process in a way that makes it impossible for ordinary citizens to check the validity of the election. It also makes fraud a lot harder to detect. Detectability of fraud is the one of the primary properties any election process should have. We all know election fraud is also possible with non-electronic means but keeping it a secret is much harder in such cases (as we saw in the US and Zimbabwean election over the last years). There was a actual case of suspected voter fraud in a Dutch municipal election and the judge concluded that while the fraud seemed likely it could not be proven. Regrettably for the suspected council member the fraud could also not be disproven. This shows very clearly that such a method is wholly unsuitable for application in real democratic processes. 

Through lots of media attention, a few spectacular hacks showing the technical insecurity of the systems, and legal pressure, we forced the government in 2007 to reverse the approval of the voting computers and go back to an all-paper balloting system. This reversal is part of a global backlash against electronic voting systems. Comparable changes have been going on in many US states and all over Europe. 

I think India should have voting process that can be understood and monitored by its citizens. This understanding and monitoring should be possible without requiring advanced degrees in computer science, software engineering and electronics. The only way to have such a process is when there is a paper ballot involved. Such a ballot could be printed by a computer to increase the ease of use but all-electronic solutions are ruled out by the basic demands of what a democracy is.

India should move to either all paper systems or voting computer backed-up by a voter-verified paper trail. 

Are more extensive telling of the tale can be found here: http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl/English

This is a link to the Berlin CCC conference of Rop Gongrijp's 2007 presentation (with video): http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2342.en.html 

 http://www.blackboxvoting.org has a wealth of information on this subject.

CIS: What are the services provided by Gendo? Could you describe some of the projects that you have undertaken?

AK: My company (gendo.nl) also provides consulting services in the area of IT strategy, development of open IT architectures and implementing those in mixed open source/proprietary environments. We are currently advising both national and local government organisations in the implementation of policies and plans to move to open standards and open source software. We are also involved in projects where we do the actual development and implementation of new systems to enable innovation and lessen the dependance of our client on proprietary systems. Currently we are involved with a healthcare organisation where we are assisting in re-architecting their entire IT environment to allow service innovation, lower cost and increase information security. 

We have also been involved in information security work and other auditing in the financial services and government sector. Here our activities focus on the grey area between technology and process. 

Outside the field of IT we also do other consulting work such as scenario planning and strategic future studies, mostly for large corporate clients. Most of the big Anglo-Dutch multinationals such as Shell or Unilever are on our client list. We also have a large number of clients in the financial services and insurance sector.

For all of these clients we organise presentations and brainstorming sessions, often preceded by research. This helps the leaders in those organisations think about the nature of rapid, technology-driven changes in their markets and the world in general. These insights are then translated into new products, services and ways of delivering them. 

Forgive me if this all sounds a bit vague but with many of these clients there is some confidentiality agreement involved.

CIS: Could you tell us more about yourself? Maybe you would like to share some formative experiences.

AK: Writing my first paper on black holes at age 11 showed me that grown-ups usually also don't know what is going on in the universe either. Despite rumours to the contrary parents, teachers, senior managers and politicians are not all-knowing and are stumbling about just like most two-year-olds where complex issues are concerned.

Over the last quarter century I've had this intuition reconfirmed again and again. In a world that is changing faster and faster experience becomes obsolete rather quickly and wisdom is no longer the sole purview of older, more senior, people. We need young smart-asses who have not yet learned what is impossible, so they go out there and do it.

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I was in Amsterdam for the International Repository Infrastructure Workshop, with Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam of CIS and other participants from UK, USA, Japan, and Australia.  The workshop was funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER Project.  The aim of the workshop was to draft plans for the future course of international repositories’ action.

The workshop started with a keynote speech by Norbert Lossau of the DRIVER project. Much of his talk focused on DRIVER experience. Beyond individual repositories and related services, he explained the need for an internationally coordinated repositories infrastructure. Soon after the keynote, participants were divided into four breakout groups to enage in parallel discussion and to draft action plans on the following topics:

I participated in the Repositories ‘handshake’ group.  The handshake group, which consisted of mostly repository practitioners and service providers, was moderated by Peter Burnhill of EDINA, University of Edinburgh.  Initially, there was a bit of effort in reaching the definition of ‘repositories handshake’ and what it was actually intended for. After deliberations on service requirements, ingest support services, machine interoperability and workflow enhancement, the group settled on 'deposit opportunities' as its focus. Two-side handshakes were considered: one with authors, where the handshake action naturally twisted to a ‘begging’ action (in the present global repository scenario) and on the other side, handshakes with service developers by ensuring (minimally sufficient) quality metadata and interoperability.

On the second day, our group continued its discussions on creating conducive 'deposit opportunities' on the principles of more (content), better (quality metadata), easy (uploading) and rewarding (for depositor).  The group agreed upon eight purposeful handshake use cases and multiphase action plan. There was a consensus on a first phase work plan which would achieve, in six months' time, at least a few key use cases like:

We had two breakout group presentations during the course of the workshop, in which moderators discussed the progress made by each group. This helped members of the groups to understand what the other groups were doing.

Finally, all participants assembled at the plenary session of the workshop, at which moderators of each breakout group presented the product of the one and a half day deliberations. In my view, there was considerable progress made by the Citation Services group.  Leslie Carr, who was the moderator of the group, talked about the plan of setting up a repository based citation test bed and developing a competitive text mining algorithm to cull references from a document in repositories.

The next impressive development came from the Repository Identifiers group. The moderator of the group talked about strategies of using existing resources to build identifiers for people, repositories, organisations and objects (see presentation here). Dale Peters acknowledged the contribution of Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam at the ‘International Organisation’ group’s final presentation.

Clifford Lynch of CNI summed up of the outcomes of the break out groups in his closing remarks.  He envisioned repositories as a component of a larger knowledge sharing infrastructure rather than as mere archives of institutional outputs.  He also prioritised 'Identifier Infrastructure' as the need of the moment and asked for a quick action on it. 

There was a funders' meeting after the workshop, the outcomes of which are yet to surface.  With pre-workshop wiki discussions on repository use cases and tweets (Twitter messages) during the program, the very form of the workshop was different from anything I had previously experienced.

During the workshop, I met a few key people involved in the DRIVER project, particularly Dr Paolo Manghi from ISTI-CNR, Italy, an organisation that takes care of repository validation. I learned a little about DRIVER, which has come up with a set of crisp metadata and interoperability guidelines to ensure smooth exchange of data between European repositories and service providers. The guidelines have been translated into three other languages, showing their international acceptance. To streamline repository developments in India, the time is right (since the number of repositories are small) to start a DRIVER-like initiative to ensure metadata uniformity in Indian repositories for easy exchange.

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Guest blogger Madhan Muthu has a Masters in Library and Information Science, and has worked at the National Institute of Technology as an Assistant Librarian since March 2004. He is heavily involved as a volunteer in India's open access movement. Presently, he is coordinating the Oriya Books Digitisation project in partnership with other libraries. Prior to NIT, he was at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), Chennai, for about six years.

On 26 March 2009, the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Aeronautical Laboratories, in collaboration with the Centre for Internet and Society, organised a day-long conference on 'Scholarly Communications in the Age of the Commons', as a way to highlight the need for Open Access in Indian academia and research.  The speakers and panellists included Prof N. Mukunda of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Prof John Willinsky of Stanford University, Dr D.K. Sahu, MD and CEO of Medknow Publications, Prof Leslie Chan of the University of Toronto, Prof Subbiah Arunachalam, Distinguished Fellow with CIS, Dr A.R. Upadhya, Director of NAL, Mr N.V. Sathyanarayana, CMD. of Informatics, and Mr Sunil Abraham, Director of Policy at CIS.

Prof N. Mukunda gave the keynote address, which is reproduced below.

Invited key note address at the Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons (Open Access)’ on 26 March 2009, National Aerospace Laboratories, Bangalore

N. Mukunda, Editor of Publications, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore

1) Dr. Upadhya, Dr. Goudar, Prof. Arunachalam, Dr. Poornima Narayana, Prof. Chan, Prof. Willinsky, Prakash, Chandramohan from the Academy, distinguished invitees, ladies and gentlemen, may I on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences express a warm welcome to all of you to this one day Conference on ‘Scholarly Communication in India in the Age of the Commons’. This is the Academy’s Platinum Jubilee Year, and for NAL it is the Golden Jubilee; and it is a pleasure for the Academy to join NAL and the ‘Centre for Internet & Society’ in hosting this meeting. Thanks also to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for their initiatives in organizing this event. I am here substituting for Prof. D. Balasubramanian, President of the Academy, as he has to be at a meeting at Chennai today. If only the fanciful Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics were correct, the world could have split into two copies, and Prof. Balasubramanian also into two copies, one in Chennai and one here; and he could have spoken in both places simultaneously! In the tea break, I can tell you more about this interpretation of quantum mechanics, if any of you are interested.

I am used to giving seminars and colloquiua, on subjects of my research, but never have I given a key note address or an Executive Summary. These are new to me. Also, as you all know, President Obama always needs a teleprompter while giving his fine speeches. Similarly, I cannot speak without a written text in front of me, so please permit me this luxury. Let me also add that I believe in the well-known saying — levity is the soul of wit.

2) The Academy’s efforts in the Open Access direction go back to 1998. It was then that the journal Pramana was made available on the Academy website completely free for all to read. Thereafter all the other Academy journals have also been made freely available online, so now all ten Academy journals are available. Quite recently the speed of access has been considerably improved. In 2006 the Academy entered into an agreement with Springer to co-publish the international online and print editions of the ten journals, but with the proviso that world-wide open access on the Academy website would continue. So now there is the version on the Academy site, which is accessible world-wide and free, and also the value-added SpringerLink version available to paid subscribers. This arrangement is working quite well. The download figures from both sites are quite encouraging, and in any case the visibility of the journals world-wide is much better than it used to be. INSA by the way has signed the Berlin Open Access Declaration and its journals are also freely accessible.

3) Two important things happened in April 2008, just about a year ago. INSA arranged a meeting on Open Access and Copyright issues on 26th April, 2008, again thanks to Prof. Arunachalam’s initiative; and Prof. Balaram wrote an editorial in Current Science on 10th April 2008 on the subject ‘Science Journals: Issues of Access’. I must confess I am completely ignorant and totally naive in all these matters, so whenever necessary I turn to one of Prof. Balaram’s numerous beautiful editorials – and get educated about the finer points of English literature at the same time – I also read some of the steady stream of emails from Prof. Arunachalam which arrive each day. He is constantly exhorting us to do various things – like Mr. This or Mr. That we should give him the honorary title “Mr. Open Access”, it is a onepoint agenda with him. So I learn a lot from both these sources which are at least openly accessible to me. Incidentally a collection of Prof. Balaram’s editorials is likely to be published soon, and several of us have been asked to write editorials to introduce his editorials on various subjects. Science journals are proliferating in number and spiraling in costs. So these raise difficult problems of affordability for libraries and institutions. There are also issues of judging quality, and looking at the economics of the entire process, the whole information chain – overall costs of dissemination of research results, journal publishing and production, refereeing, circulation… who pays for what, who profits, is it reasonable or exorbitant? There is the impact of technologies on all this – these are times of extremely rapid changes, with new undreamt of opportunities appearing all the time. These are true of other arenas of life as well – in education, governance, entertainment, in news communication and so on. As a physicist I cannot help remembering that all this began in 1948 with Claude Shannon’s Classical Theory of Information – a major conceptual revolution which showed that information could be measured, and so could its transmission and fidelity and so on. Such a beautiful set of ideas – a fascinating mathematical structure embedded within the classical theory of probability. And this was accompanied and later followed by technical advances, transistors (1947), semiconductors and so on. Balaram’s view is that Institutional Repositories are more easily achievable than Open Access. This may greatly change the structure and traditional roles of libraries as we know them, at least as far as the sciences are concerned. He mentioned the recent much-heralded Harvard University faculty decision which ‘authorizes Harvard to place a faculty member’s work in a repository that will be available to all at no cost’. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken a similar even wider step very recently, on the 18th of this month.

There is also discussion of who pays – or should pay – for the costs of publishing research results – a shift from the traditional ‘researcher pays’ era through ever increasing subscription costs to a new ‘author pays’ arrangement. The idea is that agencies that fund research – whether private or public – should include costs of publication in their support. Balaram mentions that for some high impact journals, the cost to the author for one paper can be as much as Rs. 2.5 lakhs! When I saw this, I could not help wondering – what would someone like Albert Einstein do in such a situation? He was working in a Patent Office in Berne as an assistant third class about a hundred years ago, and of course he had no research funding of any kind; but in his spare time he wrote papers that revolutionized physics! His papers were all published, he even received free reprints – but how would he fare today? One gets the impression that subscription costs for well-known journals in those days were quite reasonable; and in historical accounts one reads that people like Julius Springer were in frequent contact with figures like Arnold Sommerfeld and others in a mutually beneficial and enlightened atmosphere.
It seems we have to accept and acknowledge that the methods of doing science, the costs, the sociology of the scientific enterprise, have all changed enormously. It has become intensely competitive, one can even say that cut-throat methods are common, it seems the scientific enterprise is no longer the domain of scholars alone. Claims for priority are severe. In a piece that appeared on 9th February 2009 in the New York Times, celebrating the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin, the writer said:

“One of Darwin’s advantages was that he did not have to write grant proposals or publish 15 articles a year. He thought deeply about every detail of his theory for more than 20 years before publishing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859; and for 12 years more before its sequel, ‘The Descent of Man’, which explored how his theory applied to people.”

The old times are gone forever, the times of Darwin and Einstein. The game has become a game, with new rules of play. The new patterns and methods however seem more natural for the younger generation to adjust to, but some of us of an older generation cannot forget the past so easily.

4) The INSA meeting discussed many aspects including the need to educate working scientists about their rights with respect to copyright. There is a recent email from Arunachalam on this from Amsterdam. Again I think younger scientists are aware of their rights more than old fogeys like me, we are the ones needing education. There is a need for change in Copyright patterns, especially for books out of print, to decide when something should move into the Public Domain, and so on. Some of the major INSA recommendations are to granting agencies to mandate Open Access for results of publicly funded research, and to scientists to publish in Open Access journals by choice.

Some tasks are set for the Academies too, such as setting up Institutional Repositories, and to work toward Open Access in all possible ways. In this context, it is possible that the three national Science Academies of India – IASc, INSA and NASI – may try to cooperate in these matters, as they have been doing in the case of science education recently.

5) From its inception, publication of journals has been a major effort of the Indian Academy of Sciences. There has always been a striving to maintain standards. Today we can say about our ten journals, they are reasonably good, about the best from India. The main concerns – in these times of very rapid change and impact of new technologies – are: how do we maintain refereeing and review standards, how to tackle increasing cases of plagiarism, and while coping with all these how do we move in the Open Access direction? Quality of journals is most precious for the Academy, this is hard to achieve and to maintain, the whole enterprise seems to be under pressure.

6) Let me end by returning to Balaram and INSA and mention a recent initiative of the Academy. With generous help from the Indian Institute of Science, we are trying and hoping to set up an Institutional Repository covering all publications of all Fellows past and present. Starting since 1934 – the total number of Fellows is about 1500, 900 present and 600 past. And the total number of research publications may be around 60,000 or 75,000. The hope is that in this Platinum Jubilee year this effort should get started and make some progress. We should try to get a substantial number of entries into the Repository within this year, catch up as soon as possible, then make it an ongoing automatic process. Otherwise many of us here today will also become past Fellows before the job is done. Getting titles and abstracts seems easy, with full text there may be problems, but here Arunachalam tells us authors have more rights than they realize. Let us see what we can do. It seems about 50 institutions in India already have set up such repositories, but we have miles to go before we sleep!

I am happy to have given the first key note address of my life today – I am sure the day’s discussions will be full of ideas and fruitful. It has been a pleasure to have been here, my thanks to Dr. Goudar and Prof. Arunachalam for inviting me, and most of all to Prof. Balasubramanian for asking me to be here in his place.

Thank you.

The grip software vendors have over courses in technology (at both the school and the university levels) is a matter for concern. Due to what can be termed institutional inertia, educational institutions often don't realise that alternatives exist in the form of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source software), as proprietary software is entrenched in the system (and is sometimes the market leader in that tech sector). To further tighten their grip, software vendors enter into commercial deals with governments and universities in attempts to penetrate the crucial education sector. This often results in students being taught courses on how to use particular (usually proprietary) software instead of being taught standard technologies. In turn, this denies them the opportunity to learn the concepts behind the software effectively, and ties them to the particular software that they were taught. For software vendors, getting their products into the curricula is very important because the supply of students trained in particular software also affects the demand for that software.

Students should be taught technologies first and foremost, and these technologies should be taught via the vehicle of both free and proprietary software (this is much easier if the technology itself is an open technology). That would allow students the opportunity to understand different implementations of the same technology and make an informed decision as to what they wish to use. It would also offer them more opportunities and choices in their future careers. The importance of FLOSS in the education sector is highlighted in a guide brought out by the United Nations Development Programme's International Open Source Network.

Against this backdrop, when news reports appeared in the Hindu (19 November 2008) and the Deccan Herald (20 November 2008) about a curriculum tie-up between Microsoft and Visvesvaraya Technological University, we filed a Right to Information application to get more details about it. The response stated that this matter was still under discussion and no agreement had been signed.

To read the application, click here; to read the response, click here. You can download a scanned copy of the response here.

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This entry was originally posted on 30 March 2009 and was updated on 3 April 2009.

Creating a barrier free internet is vital to creating a pluralistic and democratic virtual environment, where all groups irrespective of disability or levels of literacy are able to access culture and knowledge goods and services which are available on the internet today. Since its inception last year, CIS has been campaigning for legislative, administrative and legal interventions in the area of web accessibility for the print disabled and working with different groups towards the common goal of having a National Policy on Electronic Accessibility in India.

On 30 January, the Department of Information Technology (DIT) called a meeting of all stakeholders to discuss the issue of web accessibility for disabled persons and persons with special needs. The meeting was attended by 34 key persons from the Government and private organisations around India. Sunil Abraham (Director--Advocacy, CIS) and Nirmita Narasimhan (Programme Manager, CIS) were amongst the attendees (a complete list of attendees is given below).

The meeting was chaired by N. Ravi Shankar, Joint Secretary, DIT, who in his opening remarks briefed the gathering about the initiatives of the Government in this area. He talked about the Government’s goal of providing Universal Accessibility and Internet for all. He informed the gathering that the DIT had already initiated schemes for ICT empowerment of visually impaired/hearing impaired children; under these schemes, 21 ICT Vocational Centers had already been set up and 100 additional ICT vocational centers would be set up in phase II.  Additionally, he explained that the issue of Universal Accessibility had been internationally addressed at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) 2008 held in December 2008 in Hyderabad.  He stressed the need for initiating inclusive developmental activities in the e-governance programme of DIT and language initiatives of TDIL (Technology Development for Indian Languages), in order to increase coverage and diversity, culminating in education for all alongside Internet for all.

Dr. Govind, Senior Director and Head of Department, E-Infrastructure and Internet Governance Division in the Ministry, highlighted the issue of web accessibility for visually impaired and other differently able persons and the need for initiating a concrete action plan for the same.

Javed Abidi, Director, National Center for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People talked at length about the need for web accessibility and proposed that the government should set a time line within which all existing government web sites should be made standards compliant. All new web sites should be created keeping compliance with WCAG 2.0 in mind right from the start and proposed that for existing web sites, we should adopt a staged approach and aim at ensuring complete compliance at least by 2010-2012.

Ms. Neeta Verma, Sr. Technical Director, NIC gave a presentation on the issues related with making web accessibility universal. She said that NIC has formulated guidelines for government websites, in association with DIT and DARPG.  Compliance to these guidelines shall make Indian government websites Usable, User Centric and Universally Accessible.   She proposed that even the Manual of Procedures (MoP) used in the Govt. should mandate Universal Web Access for Government business and day to day activities.  Websites should not only be designed once for accessibility but also need to be sustainable in the long run.

All attendees gave their inputs on the issue of web accessibility. Shri Jaijit from Sun Microsystems stressed the fact that the need for standards was not essential for disabled persons alone, but was necessary for other groups as well, such as illiterate persons. Ms.Shilpi Kapoor from Barrier Break Technologies mentioned that most government web sites had to firstbe  be made html compliant in order to be standards compliant and stressed the need for training, resource generation and sensitization. Shri Minocha, Director, NAB felt that a law similar to the one in USA should be implemented which mandates that any web site developed had to be Universally Accessible.  He asked the Government. to look at daisy guidelines, digital library and procurement policy for differently abled persons.   He strongly urged the Government to take into account not merely standards of website accessibility, but also brouser standards, document standards etc, since an accessible web site was not of much use if the content posted on it was in an inaccessible format. He also appreciated the efforts of NIC and C-DAC towards working for open source and cited the example of the Venezualian Government. He proposed that DIT should initiate a technology development or customization project in this area. Shri Vijaiy Krishnamani  from Infosys stressed on the need for creating a common simple usable interface rather than multiple types. 

Shri Vijay Kapur from Microsoft proposed for implementation of WCAG1.0 & 2.0 standards to bring out interactivity in web content like Arya and the Clint side document accessibility through the daisy consortium. 

Shri Rajesh Aggarwal, CEO, NIXI offered complete support for all initiatives in the area of web accessibility and voiced the opinion that all software produced out of public funds should be made available in the public domain so as to encourage research and innovation. In addition to policy advocacy, he was also supporting a capacity building and awareness workshop on web accessibility for web developers from all over the country which was being organized by CIS in Ghaziabad from Feb 16th-18th. Smt.Jayalakshmi Chittor of CSDMS proposed that an audit process should be evolved to check government web sites for WCAG 2.0 compliance and cited the example of Malta for policy in this area.  Some other issues which were stressed time and again by other attendees were the legal mandating of adherence to standards within a fixed time period, adequate representation of Indian language in Unicode format, adherence to WCAG 2.0 and not merely 1.0, supporting voice enabled web sites etc. Sunil Abraham Director Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) lauded the DIT/MCIT  for the timely and critical accessibility initiative and  strongly endorsed the suggestion to create a national policy document mandating accessibility for all publicly funded electronic infrastructure.  CIS offered to provide a comparative analysis of national electronic accessibility policies from developed and developing countries and also prepare a draft policy for DIT/MCIT.  Further, he urged DIT/MCIT to advocate for the adoption of the proposed WIPO Treaty for improved access for the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled put forward by the World Blind Union and knowledge Ecology International.

After the round of discussions the following recommendations were made to the DIT/MCIT:

i)        The Government should formulate a national policy to mandate necessary guidelines so that the web sites are standards compliant for universal web accessibility.

ii)      Steps should be taken for sensitization  and awareness generation towards this issue through trainings, publicity, workshops, conferences.

iii)    R&D projects should be initiated for development of screen readers in Indian languages and other tools for universal web access.

Attendees

Shri N. Ravi Shanker, Joint Secretary, DIT, New Delhi - Chairman
Dr. Govind, Sr. Director, DIT, New Delhi
Shri Mohan Ram, ED,  ERNET India, New Delhi
Shri Rajesh Aggarwal, Additional CEO, NIXI, New Delhi
Shri Javed Abidi, Director, National Center for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP, New Delhi
Shri Dipender Minocha, Director, NAB, R.K. Puram, New Delhi
Ms. Neeta Verma, Sr. Technical Director, NIC,  New Delhi
Shri A. Bandopadhyay, GM, Webel Mediatronics Ltd., Kolkata
Mr. Sunil Abraham, Director – Policy, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
Ms. Shilpi Kapoor, Founder and Managing Director, Net Systems Informatics (I) Pvt. Ltd. and Barrier Break Technologies, Mumbai
Shri Vijay Kapur, Microsoft India, New Delhi
Mr. Rahul Gonsalves, Web Accessibility Consultant, Bangalore
Jyotindra V.Mehta, Advisory Systems Consultant, IBM Global Services India
Mr. Zamir Dhale, Sense International India Office, Ahmedabad Gujarat
Shri Jaijit Bhattacharya, M/s Sun Microsystems, New Delhi
Ms. Jayalakshmi Chittor, CSDMS, Noida, U.P
Shri Manoj Jain, TDIL, DIT, New Delhi
Ms. Gitanjali Sah, UN Solution Exchange, New Delhi
Shri Pradeep Gupta, Managing Director, Cyber Media India Ltd., Gurgaon, Haryana
Shri Vijay Krishnamani, Infosys, New Delhi
Shri Ajai Kumar, C-DAC, Pune
Shri Indranil Das Roy, M/s Webel, Kolkata
Shri Deepak Maheshwari, Microsoft India , New Delhi
Shri Vikas Goswami, Microsoft India, New Delhi
Ms. Helen Mahtani, Programmer, NCPEDP, New Delhi
Shri Muthamma B. Devaya,  Senior Program officer, NCPEDP, New Delhi
Ms. Nirmitha Naresimhan, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
Ms. Tejal Tiwari, ERNET India, New Delhi
Shri D.P. Misra, NIC, New Delhi
Shri Sachin Rizal, Sense International (India) Ltd., Ahmedabad Gujarat
Ms. Ritu Srivastava, CSDMS, Noida
Shri Santosh Kumar Gupta, CSDMS, Noida, UP
Shri Rajan Varada, UN Solution Exchange, New Delhi
Shri S.K. Aggarwal, Scientist ‘F’, DIT, New Delhi  -  Convenor
 

In November last year, CIS launched a nation wide signature campaign to support the treaty for the blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled proposed by the World Blind Union to the WIPO. The letter was, at that time, endorsed by 16 organisations in the disability sector throughout the country. The treaty is scheduled to come up again for discussion in a couple of months.

CIS has been carrying on its work of gathering support for the letter. The updated list of signatories is as follows.