Information Society Watch

Day 2 of CSTD featured two half day panels on-

1. "Mobile Technology, Convergence and Social Networking Tools for
Development and Poverty Eradication" and
2."Delivering innovation in global public health"

in the form of "Follow-up to the World Summit on the Information
Society: Joint CSTD-ITU-GAID panel discussion"

The second panel was quite different from 'usual' panels on ICTD - most

Women's empowerment and gender equality are no longer theoretical notions with hard-to-grasp meanings. They are terms bandied about by development agencies, not just implying different things to different people as was the analysis a few years back, but also more or less unburdened of their reference to 'power', and transformed into what Andrea Cornwall, in her essay - Pathways of women's empowerment - refers to as “today’s softer, more conciliatory, calls ..... that have none of the rough edges of older demands for justice and equality."

This posting is part of a larger discussion on a list serve and is in response to a previous email which challenged the notion of ‘Right to Development’ and collective rights as a concept. This writing talks about why collective rights are important.

Rights to me are a set of basic conditions and purposes of political association of human groups. They are basic, and therefore they cannot be each and every thing which is decided by the concerned political community. However at the same time the nature of political association, and of a political community, is not static. Its members today have the same right to pull together some ‘basic’ conditions and purposes of their association as someone had in say circa 1823.

This is a posting on an electronic mailing list for discussions on Internet governance in response to Milton Mueller's article 'Info-communism? Ownership and freedom in the digital economy' in the online journal First Monday.

I think that the notion of info-communism is a red herring, (excuse the pun) and can't be taken seriously - there is a some kind of radical chic at play there in the iconography - Che Guevara has become a mainstream icon used ironically by all comers, including business advertisers for their own purposes.

It may be easier to judge the success of a project – like Akshaya – than to judge the factors behind its success. And when I see the enormously success of Akshaya project, my mind of course goes toward seeking to explore the crucial factors that made Akshaya possible, and more, made it successful. Two factors are often mentioned in this regard. One is the level of literacy, and the value placed on literacy in Kerala. Computers appeared to many as just the next level of literacy, and truly so in today’s age.

This is a response to an email on the community radio forum, seeking reasons for slow take up of community radio among NGOs.

Excerpts from the original e-mail in response to which this posting has been written have been reproduced below.

This musing is in response to an article on Internet censorship which I read today morning. ( The article is posted below ). The article talks about the fact that a man who was arrested for allegedly tainting the image of ‘Shivaji’ – a prominent Maratha(Hindu) ruler, over Orkut was finally released after 50 days… because they had got the wrong guy and he in fact was innocent…

What is disturbing is the fact that this person was behind bars for 50 days… I mean we know that there are probably hundreds of thousands of people in India and all over the world even who are behind bars for donkeys years without facing any kind of trail/not knowing why there are in there in the first place… however there are 2 aspects to this story which appalls me

Introduction
The debate on Free and Open Source software versus proprietary software has often got bogged down in ‘its free’ versus ‘it is not free’ arguments. However there are other critical aspects that need to be considered. The argument for FOSS is looked at from different perspectives in this note.

So what does blogging entail and why should one take it up or not take it up…. I think (and I could be wholly wrong even) that the word ‘blog’ arrived from the word ‘weblog’ which literally means maintaining an online dairy. (Note: MS Word refuses to acknowledge the word ‘blog’… it gives me a spell check error and instead suggests that I replace the word ‘blog’ with ‘bog’… quite emancipatory I must say… but seriously what else would you expect from MS Word) Somewhere along the way …some person decided to give it a jazzy name and hence the word ‘blog’ evolved. Pretty catchy I must say… A blog could relate to anything… your thoughts about life capturing different emotions, hues, various moods etc etc…in essence it is a personal diary which reveals much about you (or does it J)