Interacting with two members of Swecha’s team we gather what the developments are in the organisation’s community centric AI project, the forthcoming release of the data sets that they are trained on, and the application that is presently in development and would be released to the public soon.

Praveen Gorla is directly involved with Swecha since 2013 as a student at Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University, and is presently a Research Scientist at Swecha’s community centric AI project.  - Swecha has multiple initiatives in the free and open source software domains. While at JNTU he was part of a GLUG GNU Linux User Group that was conducting activities for SWECHA there. The AI initiative of the Swecha activities is Vishwam which is a centre for excellence in AI in the Global South. Their website can be found here. For Swecha, Praveen, Ranjit and Raja look after the student, developer, activities and the faculty. The faculty for engineering and non-engineering institutions such as pharmacy colleges, are the ones who collaborate with Swecha and are themselves regular employees in colleges. They involve students in activities such as corpus collection initiatives, and shape the research ecosystem of Swecha.

Swecha itself, even before being established in 9^th Feb, 2005 started with the question of how the digital divide can be bridged and to spur innovation. Efforts towards this began from 2002 onwards.  Free and open source softwares with community licences were thought to be the way to go, as opposed to Windows. So the goal was to make software available in local languages, moving towards building a Telugu operating system which would require a glossary of words. The word for the internet for example that is used in Telugu is antarjalam etymologically meaning “within the water”. Swecha Gonthuka, an initiative to create a speech to text recognition software that could understand Telugu, was launched in 2021.

However in coming back to the licence itself, what would that consist of? The Software Freedom Law Centre on the 31st of January would host a panel discussing community AI. Suggestions from the assembled would be welcome. The licence would also be a collaboration between SFLC, Swecha and IIIT. We should note that the presently available licences such as the General Public Licence were originally meant for code and not for massive data sets, which is perhaps another reason why a new licence is being worked towards.

AI’s that are commercially available as of now have not made publicly available the data sets and the large language models that they were trained on, this is something that Swecha is presently in the process of undertaking. Let us take Gotuka as an example, the data sets and LLM’s that it has been trained on has not been made publicly available so far as an appropriate people’s licence is still in the making. There is however the Swecha Telugu Automatic Speech Recognition dataset that is available here, though it does require login access to download. This corpus was collected as a part of the Swecha Gontuka drive.

Ranjit Raj, who was mentioned earlier outlines the tools that Swecha are to release on the 17^th. These include the Swecha Telugu Corpus which is also being used within closed groups and developers. It is a tool that features, transcription and proofreading abilities. Apart from this there is also a peer review feature which allows peers to edit descriptions and the release rights of a file. The corporate server application, which is yet to be released can be thought of as the back end of the corporate user application which is the app itself. The server would be the repository of the uploads from users and where the processing of the information, for example the extraction of a transcript from an audio file happens and this is then relayed back to the app itself, where it can be accessed by the user.

Apart from this there is also plans that are underway for an AI based corpus review. The story generator that was launched earlier built on the Small Language Model of uploads of Chandamama Kathulu is also being updated. It may be found here.

Subsequently the latest version of Swecha’s operating system which is AI enabled will be launched on the day of the organisation’s foundation commemoration. The data sets that this AI would be trained on would include the corpus collection undertaken by volunteers during the Sumer of AI internship programs. These include a collection of audio and text files consisting of recipes, customs, songs and places, rural professions apart from the folk tale collection Chandamama Kathulu. These would be used for example to train the speech recognition system. Apart from this the Summer of AI dataset preparation handbook is available hereon a site run by Swecha but requires sign in credentials to access.

12.01.2026

The AI Days 2024 conference, held in Hyderabad on the 30th and 31^stMarch, championed a people-centric approach to Artificial Intelligence, aiming to demystify AI and leverage its potential to solve real-world problems for the common person in India. The conference featured a diverse array of speakers from leading tech companies, academic institutions, and government, all converging on the theme of "AI for Society."

Challenging the Narrative: AI for the Commons

Y. Kiran Chandra, Founder of Swecha, opened the conference by addressing common misconceptions and fears surrounding AI, particularly the notion that it will lead to widespread unemployment. He emphasised that AI is an inevitable tool for solving societal problems and highlighted a key product launched at the conference: a Telugu language assistant designed to empower farmers and agricultural labourers, enabling them to access information and communicate in their mother tongue, regardless of literacy. This initiative underscored the conference's core message: AI should serve the commons and improve the lives of everyday citizens, from farmers to sanitation workers.

Hyderabad: The Emerging AI Capital

Chaitanya Chokkareddy, CTO of Ozonetel, articulated the vision of establishing Hyderabad as the AI capital of India. He cited the city's robust ecosystem of IT and product companies, research institutes, educational institutions, and a thriving startup scene as key factors. Chokkareddy also presented an alternative model for AI development, challenging the dominance of mega-corporations like OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He advocated for a community-driven approach to data collection and model building, emphasising open-source licenses to protect data from misuse.

He shared the success story of "Chandamama AI," where 7,000 stories were collected within six hours using student power. Another groundbreaking initiative involved collecting 1.5 million Telugu voice samples through a unique concert where entry was granted in exchange for voice contributions, demonstrating how society can collectively contribute to building massive datasets at a fraction of the cost incurred by large corporations. This data was then used to develop a small, open-source Telugu speech model that runs efficiently on mobile phones, showcasing the potential for AI solutions that are accessible and do not require extensive computing power.

The UPI Approach to AI Innovation

Professor Gaurav Raina from IIT Madras presented a compelling "UPI approach" to AI innovation, drawing parallels with the success of India's Unified Payments Interface. He distilled three key ingredients for solving complex problems and driving innovation:

- Identify a Challenging Situation: Start by addressing one of the most challenging real-world problems within a specific context. For UPI, it was enabling an auto-rickshaw transaction. He underlines that the success of UPI was largely built on the Immediate Payment Service. For AI in India, identifying a challenging situation means focusing on problems relevant to the Indian populace, such as those in education, healthcare, agriculture, and financial services.

- Bring Unlike Minds Together: Foster collaboration between policymakers, government, industry, and academia. The success of UPI was a testament to this collaborative spirit, where diverse perspectives and interests converged to co-create solutions.

- Work Towards a Democratic, High-Quality, Scalable, and Affordable Solution: The goal should be to create solutions that are accessible to everyone, regardless of their socio-economic background. This often necessitates developing smaller, more contextualised models that require less compute power, making them more affordable and scalable for a diverse nation like India.

Professor Raina emphasised that by adopting this framework, India can develop at least "10,000 solutions, 10,000 dreams, 10,000 problems, 10,000 opportunities for innovation" that not only serve the Indian context but also inspire similar adoptions globally. He redefined AI as "Intelligence for the auto-wallah," highlighting the human-centric amplification that AI can provide in various sectors, from education to justice, while also touching on the architecture of AI which can be described as built around three layers, computing, data and models.

AI and Law Enforcement: Addressing Emerging Crimes

Shikha Goel, IPS, Additional DGP, Telangana, provided insights into the intersection of AI and law enforcement. She acknowledged her non-expert status in AI but underscored its pervasive influence on every aspect of life, including the emergence of new-age crimes. Goel highlighted how AI is being used as an accomplice by criminals, citing examples from airline ticket cancellations to impersonating CFOs for financial fraud. She emphasised the need for law enforcement agencies like the Telangana Police to be well-equipped to deal with these evolving threats and expressed a desire for collaboration and learning within the AI community to ensure public safety in the digital age.

Making Science More Accessible with AI

Dr. Somdatta Karak, a scientist at Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biologyand a science communicator, advocates for using AI to make science more accessible. She highlightedthe inequity of information in society and aims to bridge the gap between scientific research and the public, including policymakers and non-experts. Dr. Karak emphasizedAI's potential in content generation and platform development for science communication, particularly for creating inclusive and engaging content in various languages. She also addressedthe challenges of fighting misinformation and building science-empowered communities, suggesting AI tools can help democratize reliable information and alert experts to viral misinformation.

Dr. Jaideep Ganguly's keynote at AIDAYS 2024 covered 50 years of AI development, emphasizing that we still don't fully understand intelligence. He discussed early knowledge-based systems and machine learning, highlighting that ML is primarily classification, not intelligence. Ganguly then delved into neural networks, explaining their simplistic model compared to the complex, digital and analog functions of the human brain. He critiqued the current understanding of neurons and synapses in AI models, noting their limitations in replicating true cognition.

The talk concluded with an analysis of GPT, explaining it as a statistical machine that predicts words based on probabilities, not genuine understanding. He cautioned that GPT is prone to "hallucinations" (statistical errors) and doesn't grasp complex concepts like "African elephant" as a unified entity as it grasps that as two separate words and builds a statistical analyses based on them.Ganguly stressed that the future of AI lies in better understanding brain functions and translating that into more realistic computational models, rather than relying solely on current statistical approaches.

In essence, AI Days 2024 served as a powerful platform to advocate for an inclusive, community-driven, and contextually relevant approach to AI development in India. The conference underscored the immense potential of AI to transform lives, provided a roadmap for home-grown innovation, and highlighted the critical need for responsible AI development to address both societal challenges and emerging criminal activities.

***

Google announces Workspace Studio to help users create custom AI-powered agents, December 4^th2025

Google announced Workspace Studio to enable businesses to leverage custom generative AI models—known as "agents"—for automating workflows and transforming business processes. The core functionality of the platform acts as a centralized toolkit that integrates Google's large language models (LLM) with a user's proprietary data and systems (APIs). Workspace Studio is designed to make the creation of these custom agents accessible, allowing users without deep coding knowledge to configure specialized AI tools. These customized AI agents can be deployed across popular Google products like text Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Meet to handle specialized tasks such as generating reports or automating customer support summaries. The move aims to cement Google's position in the enterprise AI market by facilitating the development of secure, tailored AI solutions that respect data privacy and enterprise security protocols. The launch accelerates the shift toward personalized, domain-specific AI that goes beyond general-purpose chatbots, allowing organizations to maximize productivity and efficiency within their existing infrastructure.

A smarter way for large language models to think about hard problems December 4, 2025

The Problem with Current LLMs is that existing methods give LLMs a fixed computational budget for reasoning, causing them to waste resources on simple questions or fail on intricate problems requiring more "thought." The solution is dynamic allocation. MIT researchers developed instance-adaptive scaling, a technique that enables LLMs to dynamically adjust the computation they use based on the difficulty of the specific question. The method utilizes a Process Reward Model PRM to score the likelihood that a partial solution or reasoning step will lead to the correct answer. By reducing the number of reasoning trajectories when the LLM is confident and expanding them when the problem is complex, the new approach usedhalf the computation while maintaining comparable accuracy to existing methods. This increase in efficiency couldreduce the energy consumption of generative AI systems and make smaller, less resource-intensive LLMs perform as well as or better than larger models. The ultimate aim is to create AI agents that can "learn on the job" and understand "what they don't know," allowing them to operate safely and adapt to new, high-stakes situations.

News Brief: Google DeepMind Releases Open-Source Medical AI, 3rd December, 2025

Google DeepMind has launched MedGemma, a powerful new family of open-source models for healthcare AI, signaling a dramatic shift in the industry's economic landscape. Released quietly on Hugging Face, MedGemma is capable of reading and interpreting medical data like X-rays, CT scans, pathology slides, and EHR notes with the competence of a senior clinician. The model, available in 4B and 27B parameter versions, is free to download without paywalls or API limits, immediately collapsing the economic barrier for advanced medical AI from proprietary licenses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. This open-source approach allows hospitals to run the model on their own servers, fine-tune it locally, and deploy it in weeks, addressing previous nightmares related to vendor lock-in and patient privacy compromises. The model demonstrates strong performance, scoring 87.7% on the MedQA exam and producing clinically sufficient chest X-ray reports, proving that the future of medical AI may be decentralized, localized, and led by thousands of developers globally.

The Software Freedom Law Centre, in collaboration with Vishwam.ai, Free and Open Source Software and the Linux Foundation organised an event consisting of consultations between stakeholders under the title 'Understanding Trust and Safety in AI from: Code to Creativity.   This began with an introduction to two round table discussions on harvesting open source AI and on AI innovation and copyright. The opening remarks were delivered by the director of IIIT Hyderabad Professor Sandeep Kumar Shukla. A chief concern he raises is the findings from a conference on neural information processing systems where there was evidence of hallucinatory references found in papers that were in all likelihood the result of an improperly developed AI system. Another issue that was raised was the question of which data sets AI has been trained on and whether there are biases in there.

Subsequently, the founder of Swecha Kiran Chandra said that data is the key driver and that it requires to be verifiable, and that the owner of the data should be acknowledged. Further, he presented that the questions which are required to be considered are how do we protect the interests of those who produce the data and how does that data contribute back to society.

Mishi Choudhary the erstwhile legal director and founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre, Addressed the Gen AI Copyright Report, specifically critiquing the Department of Promotion of Industry and International Trade’s proposal for a "hybrid licensing model." She argued that it removes creator autonomy by legitimising data scraping under the guise of innovation.

Poruri Sai Rahul the Chief Executive Officer of the Free and Open Source Software United represented the developer community's interest in maintaining open weights and transparent methodologies, especially when public money is used for AI research.

Before addressing the conference itself, consisting of the two round table discussions, we should mention a concerning problem that appears which is that of dark patterns, which are deceitful interfaces that try and solicit users into buying overpriced insurance or signing up for recurring bills. Regarding these, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Consumer Report created a tip line to collect information about dark patterns and to provide them to the public.

In a panel discussion Professor Rahul De presented his observations regarding how for a while, until just six months, companies were unwilling to commit to a particular model but this had  recently changed. The other issue which came up is the issue of transparency which could potentially mitigate risks by providing for the opportunity to researchers and authorities to audit model performance, as well as the need for incentives for these audits to be conducted. There is also the risk that open source AI if dispersed without restriction may potentially fall into the hand of bad actors. Further, the scale of investment in AI particularly in research and development in India has not kept pace with developments in China. The worry was also presented that developments in India might be reduced to API wrapper companies. There is also the issue of how AI is to be regulated. What if AI were to be tasked to learn something wrong? What of the possibility of AI companies copying data?

It is primarily to address these latter concerns that a new Open Language Justice Licence has been created which seeks to meet the challenges of the responsible attribution of linguistic data and its relation to AI development. There was an evaluation of existing regulatory models and an assessment of what may be required in a hybrid model.  What was said to be required was legally ordained access to data so that developers could feed their AI models to learn from, fair compensation to copyright holders, rate setting via a quick transparent process, a mechanism to review these rates, upholding the basic principles of copyright and reward for creativity, and to limit the risk of litigation and dispute. A worrying scenario is that data companies may harvest from the commons, create black box models and not share their weights or parameters with the public so that it does not contribute back to the commons. Having said that there may be advantages and indeed necessities of closed and private channels of communication between businesses in the interest of industry so that competitors do not misuse that data, misrepresent agents, or sell insider information to influence stocks. The verifiability of the origins of the data is key in inculcating data provenance.

The key contributors to the discussion were Nidhi, who managed logistics and timing updates, Ana Enriquez and Jatin Gandhi who tested audio and asked about sessions logistics, Swaraj Paul Baruah who shared copyright sources, and the admin who shared the links for the data licence draft for collaborative review.

A point of deliberation that came up was the relation between journalism and tech companies and how AI has been changing this situation. The question of whether journalism can survive in the present economy was a concern that was brought up and the example was presented of Australia where tech companies actually pay journalists, as a possible model that may make the industry sustainable via synergy.

There was a pronounced interest by the audience in the transcripts and recordings so that the discussion may be revisited.

The  “Jallianwalla Bagh massacre”  in which General Dyer opened fire on a  peaceful assembly resulted in the death of more than a  thousand people. This incident, that shook the nation was a result of the inhumane colonial British policy that sought to divide us and continue to rule. Today, we are witnessing a revival of the same divide-and-rule policy, enforced through the systematic spread of misinformation and the forcible imposition of Internet Shutdowns.

On the 26^th of January,   farmers of India undertook a massive one lakh tractor parade from all over the country towards the national capital. This is the culmination of the long and arduous struggle they have been leading since November  2020, against the new Farm Laws which seek to privatize the Indian agriculture sector and destroy the farmers’ livelihood.

On the day of the tractor parade, the farmers were stopped from entering the routes planned for the rally, attacked with tear gas shells, and treated with nothing but brutal violence injuring thousands in the process. During the rally and in the aftermath, the central government imposed an Internet Shutdown in parts of Delhi followed by the state government of Haryana suspending internet services in 17 (out of 22) districts. SMS services have been stopped too.

In 2019, India topped the list of countries that shutdown Internet with 121 shutdowns [1].

What do Internet Shutdowns achieve ?

The govt says that it is suspending the Internet to protect  ‘law-and-order and regulate misinformation in social media. If that is the intention,  Internet Shutdowns are vague as they cannot tackle specific cases of misinformation and completely ineffective tools as they completely block the exchange of information  Regulation of social media and spread of fake news can be achieved by implementing a strong data protection framework with precise laws and commensurate measures.  No effort has been made in this regard even as the spread of misinformation on platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook continue to plague us. Moreover, Internet Shutdowns make it difficult for people to communicate and avail necessary resources such as food and medical supplies of which the farmers are in great need.

Internet Shutdowns violate the freedom of speech guaranteed in the constitution of India. The Supreme Court of India ruled that an undefined restriction of internet services would be illegal and that orders for internet shutdown must satisfy the tests of necessity and proportionality. The court said that the government must establish a  possible goal and assess the existence of any alternate mechanism in furtherance of the goal and impose a shutdown only as a last resort. The goal of ‘maintaining law-and-order during a peaceful protest and the hasty imposition of the shutdown both, go against the ruling of the apex court [4].

Misinformation – no, Mal-information.

While the govt cautions us of misinformation, what we are indeed seeing is a case of rabid mal-information. This is nothing but misinformation deceit purposely cloaked as information and news. The recent accusations that the farmer's movement is a front for Khalistanis and that they are  Pakistani terrorists [7], the public media-trial on the death of the actor Sushant Singh Rajput orchestrated on TV channels, are the prime examples of mal-information, It has become impossible for anybody to access even a glimmer of objective truth because we are bombarded constantly with a barrage of mal-information by TV news channels. The seeming choice we have in these channels is but an illusion as all these channels are owned by a handful of media corporations. Reacting to the farmers protesting against Reliance, the company said that ‘it had nothing to do with the farm laws’. It is evident that this statement was a lie and the farmers were impeccably prescient in this issue as  Network-18, the largest news network owned by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest man [2], with all its media outlets, enthusiastically participated in maligning the farmers’ movement.

The Internet as it exists today is a more democratic medium than the TV  but, let us make no mistake, the digital monopolies act as restrictive and manipulative gateways to it. With Google showing each individual different information for the same query, we are already put in  ‘filter bubbles filled with repetitive content. Facebook on the other hand has recently blocked without any warning, the page of ‘Kisaan Ekta  Morcha’ represents the farmers’ movement and has lakhs of followers. Whatever information that could seep out of an ever-tightening filter can be censored arbitrarily lawlessly by these social media companies.

While the mal-information is being systematic disseminated and broadcasted,  the Internet shutdown makes it extremely difficult for the farmers to  provide any information about the events unfolding during the protest.

Internet Shutdowns in the Age of Mass Surveillance

Not only was the internet suspended in the midst of a peaceful protest on Republic Day but, this was also accompanied by anti-riot drones [5].  Suppression of freedom of speech is not the only issue here but,  stifling farmers’ voices while deploying military-grade surveillance on them coupled with tracking their online activity creates a situation where the protesters can neither coordinate among themselves nor communicate with people outside the location. At the same time, it gives the government unprecedented control over the protesters and the narrative.

Our online social media activity includes the Facebook pages we like, the friends we talk to, the events we attend, the places we visit, the news we read, the terms we search, the videos we watch, and much more. All this activity is used to build a profile on us. With this profile and the profiles of those who are associated with us, our behavior can be predicted accurately. This is the data that the social media companies use to show us advertisements and sell us products. As they also share this data with the government, on the day of protest, while the farmers themselves are deprived of the internet and hence made information blind,  the government already has detailed profiles of all of them and the movement as a whole. The government can anticipate the immediate future of the situation and control it whereas the farmers are kept in the dark.

The farmers need not be enclosed by walls for the govt to exert this level  of control, just by suspending the internet they can largely achieve it.  This is a prison in all but name.

Internet Shutdowns as a tool to crush protests : A threat to our unity

The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act,  was introduced to crush even the whisper of Independence. The British formulated this to label any and every activity, even a peaceful gathering as a ‘conspiracy’ and used it to justify numerous arrests, impose severe restrictions, and suppress any activities of the Independence movement brutally. Crucially, press freedom was severely curtailed and no information about any of these activities was allowed to be published.

“  … The spread of revolutionary propaganda must be checked forthwith;  violent and seditious crimes must be promptly punished; the men behind  them must be removed and interned; the mischievous activities of  newspapers must be curtailed, and every precaution must be taken to  ensure that the poisonous teaching of open rebellion was kept both  from the army and from the people .. ” - General O’Dwyer  Lieutenant  Governor of Punjab, quoted in The Anarchical and Revolutionary  Crimes Act of 1919, popularly known as the Rowlatt Act

The restriction of the Independence movement became indistinguishable with the surveillance and censorship imposed on the people. Even under such repression, protests continued with vigor and hunger for national integration and unity. Hiding under the shadows of this act, On  13^th April 1919,   General Dyer and his troops opened fire  in Jallianwalla Bagh on a  peaceful gathering resulting in the death of a  1000 people.

The horrific incident of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre isn’t an aberration or an isolated incident but it is a result of the British policy to keep India in shackles at all costs. The mass firing of peaceful protesters was in fact repeated by the British in Ireland and Kenya. The  Jallianwalla Bagh massacre itself is an act of brutality carried out as a result of colonial determination to divide the increasing unity of the Indian people across the religious differences and rule them in the ensuing chaos.

The divide-and-rule policy was then carried out to create chasms between Hindus and Muslims. Today, these Internet shutdowns and mal-information campaigns intend to make it impossible for us to know the ground truth and interact with the farmers. It precludes the possibility of an ‘informed’ citizen which is the foundation of our democracy. With allegations that the whole movement is a conspiracy  [6], denouncing farmers for their supposed lack of patriotism,  attributing violence to a peaceful protest, today’s situation is reminiscent of the days of the colonial past. The new divide-and-rule policy effectively divides the citizens at large and the farmers who are struggling for their rights. That the government chooses to divide us on Republic day while boasting empty words of patriotism is a cruel irony.

Censorship of press suppresses freedom of speech by arbitrarily deciding what can be published and what cannot be. An Internet shutdown during a protest is a blanket suppression of the voices of protesters. It isn’t just a censorship, it is a declaration of a martial law on information. It is effectively, an imposition of Emergency. At this time, it falls on us to oppose this inherently divisive move and a terrible restriction on the people. We have to demand that the shutdowns be lifted and that further shutdowns are never imposed.

Please sign FSMI's statement condemning the use of Internet Shutdowns to suppress Farmers' protests : https://struggles.in/MobilisationCampaign/StopInternetShutdown

Akhil Reddy Patolla

Business Intelligence, often called BI, is the process of exploring precious insights or trending in data to make more efficient decisions in the business/organization.

Primary component to implementing a BI solution is the raw data. This data can be anything like sales data, log level data, advertising portfolio etc. Then a data warehouse is the logistics platform that connects to all the different operational databases withholding the above-mentioned raw data and allows use to create relationship between them. Once all the data is connected and communicating to each other in different data models, it is time to analyze it and extract actionable insights. This step often blends well when a BI tool is overlayed on top of this because of the ability to present the tabulated data in a pictorial format. This interactive dashboard enables us to perform business decisions and the ability to track, monitor and report on our data.

How are BI tools applicable in a real-world use case?

BI tools are correct example of the “80-20 Principle”. In an organization/business 80% of your results come from 20% of your actions/platforms. Implementation of a BI can enable and guide one to decrease the amount of time it takes to do a sale, identify customers purchase behavior, planning successful marketing strategies, Improve operations etc.

Using BI tools to build modern analytics Platform.

Problems in Solutioning a modern Platform

A human mind holds more data through examples and visuals when contrasted with perusing or considering numbered documents. In the business world, perception is basic in understanding the importance of information. Let us comprehend with a model.

An online business organization gets a huge number of requests every day. For considering the week by week execution, a graphical plot demonstrating the quantity of requests every day will bring about quicker understanding than a bookkeeping page including the request subtleties.

Subsequently, visual information portrayal is a ground-breaking strategy. It helps organizations in dissecting patterns and increasing important experiences which further aides in dynamic.

Open-source Business Information platform like Redash, Metabase, and Apache Superset are picking up fame as the expectation to learn and adapt is not steep for non-specialized clients. Countless new businesses are utilizing Metabase, Redash, and Superset to question, work together, and envision.

In the above scenario maintaining an open source BI also enable the organization to make better decisions which will help the organization to grow.

Powering BI requirements

• Democratize Analytics and Enable Self-Serve
• Ease of Use and Low Learning Curve
• Speed and Connectivity to Varied Databases
• Build a Modern Client Facing Platform
• Provide Actionable Insights on Platform
• Decrease Development Time
• Maintain Metrics Integrity and Reduce Copies

Platform Development Requirements

• Ability and Ease of Embedding – A BI tool should be able to export the charts that are created via iframe or JavaScript rendering
• Flexibility in Embedding Dashboards / Charts –
• Ability to Appear Native – User Experience should be as seamless as possible.
• Cross Chart Interaction –
• Ability to Pass Filters to Preload Data –
• Chart Customization –

How to select a BI Tool? (Tool selection methodology)

BI tools must be chosen based on final desired design / goal of the platform. Here are few examples of the features that you might need to look to select a BI tool for your use case. Keep in mind that they might vary based on your end goal / platform.

• Mobile Friendly – Charts should be responsive when embedded and viewable on a mobile device.
• Easy Chart Building – level of complexity to build and develop charts.
• Cross Chart Interaction – charts ability to Interact with the users actions.
• Coolness Factor – This is purely a UI / UX choice.
• Connection to Live DBs – Tools ability to connect to multiple databases such as mysql, postgres, druid, mongo etc.

• Embedding  – Ability / options to embed the charts on a Web Platform.
• Speed  – Loading time for a chart when embedded.
• Stability – How stable are the charts when embedded. One must be cautious of any Error message that is being displayed from the Embedded chart.

Solutioning the Analytics Platform

• Embed Charts with Parameterized Filters -
• OAuth 2.0 Authentication
• Angular 8 / REACT + NODE (Tech Stack)

Solutioning Open-Source BI tools In Contrast to other Enterprise tools:

Domain of data & business intelligence have emerged rapidly for the past few years and this unfold a new chapter of enterprise and open source alternatives. For an example Tableau is an Enterprise BI tool and Superset is an excellent alternative to it. Here is an one to one comparison of the tools features and pricing.

Authentication is an important element for reception of BI dashboard into an endeavor. Here is an outline of upheld verification backends.

Pricing might vary based on multiple factors, but according to multiple source the below mentioned is an average quote.

Superset – FREE

Tableau Desktop - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Desktop Professional - $70 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Server - $35 per user per month (billed annually)
Tableau Online (hosted server) - $42 per user per month (billed annually)

Conclusion

• Model Data in Warehouse before Ingesting/Presenting in  a BI tool is the key to be able to have a successful and smooth presentation.
• Design & Speed is Bound by the Embed Strategy
• Choosing right BI tool with required Embed strategies is the Key
• One can Leverage a BI Tool to Release Analytics Platform in Record Time as well as maintain.
• Embedding is Powerful and Easy to Use

(Akhil has been associated to Swecha since 2012, currently working with Madison Logic for more than 2 years, and dons both a Big Data engineering and Data Science role. Prior to Madison logic, Akhil was working as a researcher at US department of Energy: Argonne National Laboratory. He graduated with a Masters in Data Science from Northern Illinois University. His expertise are in NLP, game designing, and building analytical platforms. Akhil has developed analytical packages for the MIRA supercomputer.)

Hari Sai

Code For Change (C4C) is an initiative of Swecha - with an aim to develop and increase the usage of free software based social projects in the public domain. Why Free Software? Incorporation of free software based technologies is the only way for progressive development of the society. As part of C4C, there are many projects related to each and every section of society. These projects are developed by Students and IT developers. Here are a few projects which have been initiated under Swecha:

Swecha OS:
Swecha is a project that aims to localise GNU/Linux and other Free Software to Telugu. The project bridges the language barrier that is a major reason behind the digital divide.

We have a working system in which most common tasks like writing and printing documents, browsing the web, sending/receiving emails, chatting, editing graphics etc. can all be in Telugu. The screen shot below shows you the Swecha desktop, a GNOME desktop localized to Telugu. Most of this work will ultimately reach all the GNU/Linux distributions. It is also packed into an easy to use LiveCD distribution. The project has also developed a Telugu text-to-speech system and integrated it with the desktop. Since, one can hear the text on the desktop or web page by pointing at it, illiterate people may use it to access the desktop, read news on the web etc.

BalaSwecha OS:
BalaSwecha is a Swecha initiative which focuses on bridging the digital divide at the school level. The primary objective of BalaSwecha is to bridge the growing digital divide in education between privileged and underprivileged in India. Schools for the underprivileged in India, for example the government schools, face a lot of problems including lack of continuous electricity, infrastructure and personnel. However, the government has invested in providing computers and other infrastructure to some of these schools. Proprietary software have been installed on these computers, the licenses for which have expired a long time ago. Teachers in corporate schools are equipped with digital resources to teach students, while the teachers in the schools for the underprivileged do not have access to such resources and the students from government schools do not have access to computer-aided-education which enables an experiential approach to learning.

BalaSwecha is a GNU/linux based operating system which is developed by students under the guidance of academicians and IT employees. It is packaged with multimedia content and GPL applications which create interactive lab environment. Students are exposed to interactive applications which provide them with an opportunity to learn and explore beyond their books.

Eswecha OS:
We know that colleges spend huge amounts of money on purchasing licenses for the proprietary OS and tools. E-Swecha is an operating system for the engineering students, by the engineering students. It consists of all the free software stack required by the engineering students of all disciplines. E-swecha is an operating system which can be used by engineering students to IT professionals

At this stage it aims in covering all the syllabus of JNTU and it has the plans of generalising it for all the universities. This project consists of reading material for all the branches along with lab manuals and free software tools for simulations such as octave for signal processing, vscodium ide, free cad etc.

For details: Visit Here

Free Software Conferencing and Streaming:
A greater portion of the world’s work is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcare and educational platforms, and more. It’s important to be aware of the ways these tools may impact your digital privacy and security during the COVID-19 crisis.

Remote work has become an integral part of our life during this pandemic. This has been enabled by conferencing and streaming solutions. However, the privacy and security concerns of proprietary platforms are striking and are of great importance. At Swecha, we enriched the existing Free Software conference technologies and built a completely free software streaming solution.

virtual.swecha.org is a BBB(BigBlueButton) instance which is a Free Software web conferencing tool. This has a wide variety of features for online conferencing. Our work developed a low latency live conference tool which runs seamlessly on any device which can handle thousands of users.

For Details: visit here

(Harisai is a coordination committee member at Swecha and a Software Engineer)

Ranjith Raj

To study any program to know it works, access to source code is a precondition. While we enjoy many features of popular apps, it is intrinsic that to verify the privacy claims of these apps is by exploring their source code, for which public access is a precondition. We never know what's being tracked, and what's being not tracked if it is proprietary software where source code is not available.

Users have to be cautious about the dangers of proprietary software seeping into the 'privacy market' with vicious claims of not collecting the user's personal and sensitive data, but their actions say otherwise. With growing resistance against surveillance capitalism, corporations instead of offering them actual privacy alternatives, they are jumping into aggressive marketing sprees to deceive people, in various forms, like dubious & unsubstantiated claims or half-lies.

Starting with dubious claims of making source code publicly available, but indeed never doing what's publicly announced. Let's look at the famous case of Aarogya Setu app which has more than 160 million downloads.

Aarogya Setu is a contract-tracing app released by Govt. of India in partnership with Private parties.  The app didn't solve the problems that the govt. claims it can (it's design technically can't achieve the stated purpose), and the government's mega-campaign to force feed it to citizens by making it mandatory (to an extent services are denied for not installing it) is a live example of how the state gaslights its own citizens to push them into a dystopia built on the fabric of surveillance capitalism.

To avoid the criticism coming from strong resistance movement against force-feeding, led by hacktivists demanding to make the source code public, the CEO of NITI Aayog performed a fake PR stunt to deceive people that source code is made public, but indeed hacktivists have exposed the fakery by finding out that the android version source code released is different from the app in Google Playstore; and from the release it's turned out to be a dead repository on the very first week with no pull requests merged.

(https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/aarogya-setu-not-open-source-in-real-sense-claim-cybersecurity-activists-say-server-code-must-be-made-public-8480011.html)

Let's assume someday soon with increasing pressure from hackitivists, the govt. might make the source code of the client-side software publicly available, still the problem won't be solved. The server-side code of Aarogya Setu is not yet released, and no one exactly knows if it will be released ever. Aarogya Setu is not alone in following such model or pioneer of this trend.

Here we come to look at next-level of same problem, in which 'Only client-side code is public, but never the server-side code' : Welcome to the world of 'proprietary platforms'

To understand this model, we can consider NewPipe & Invidious, which are best examples of clients with publicly available source code to access the proprietary platform Youtube. It's good that at least in-app tracking can be avoided by switching to these apps, in unavoidable conditions where we don't have an option to skip platforms like YouTube.

Here comes the Unicorns like Telegram & VC-funded DuckDuckGo trying to seep into 'privacy market' by piggy-backing on user's everyday struggle to protect them from surveillance dystopia we are living in. It should be seen as malicious attempts by these corporations to dilute the widely growing movements against the surveillance capitalism and to curb the trend to switching to Free Software alternatives, and deceive people by making them believe in illusionary sense of privacy offered by these services, by their 'creative' marketing campaigns.

Shady networks of monopoly-backed 'privacy organisations'  NGO/NPO-Industrial Complex) and media outlets play key role in increasing the credibility of these proprietary apps by funding them (or promoting their fund campaigns), and promoting these proprietary applications in their circles in the garb of privacy alternatives.

The widely growing privacy awareness is an outcome of struggle of hacktivists in people's movements across the globe and can't be allowed to be appropriated by the same surveillance capitalism mafia which benefits from doing aggressive surveillance on general public.

Proprietary Software and Surveillance Capitalism mafia - aka Digital Monopolies are co-opting the movement and iconography of the same people it marginalised and oppressed (before they were seen as profitable) in order to de-fang free software movement and preserve their own hegemony. We can't allow this. It's our responsibility as hacktivists to educate the larger sections of society about everything these monopolies do under their criminal business models to hinder the progress of our society.

(Ranjith Raj is an Executive Committee Member of Swecha and a General Council Member of Free Software Movement of India. He is currently a researcher at International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad)

M V Sri Harsha

Introduction

Consuming large sets of data isn’t always straightforward. Sometimes, datasets are so large that it’s downright impossible to discern anything useful from them. This is where Data Visualizations come in. The most integral part of data visualization is to present the data in such a way that it can be easily understandable and interactive to non-technical professionals.

Creating data visualizations is rarely straightforward, it will take dozens of hours with a dataset having thousands of entries to create visualizations from scratch. That’s where data visualization tools come in.

Data visualization tools provide data visualization designers with an easier way to create visual representations of large datasets. Apache Superset is such a data visualization tool with easy to use and customizable data visualizations.

Apache Superset

‌                                              ‌

Apache Superset (incubating) is a modern, enterprise-ready business intelligence web application. It is fast, lightweight, intuitive, and loaded with options that make it easy for users of all skill sets to explore and visualize their data, from simple pie charts to highly detailed geospatial charts.

Apache Superset is a Free Software application under the Apache 2.0 license which is written by the Apache Software Foundation. It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license.

‌    

Key features of Superset

• An intuitive interface to explore and visualize datasets, and create interactive dashboards.
• It has a wide array of beautiful visualizations to showcase your data.
• Easy, code-free, user flows to drill down, slice and dice the data underlying exposed dashboards. The charts act as a starting point for deeper analysis.
• SQL editor/IDE exposes a rich metadata browser, and an easy workflow.
• Integration with major authentication backends (database, OpenID, LDAP, OAuth, REMOTE_USER, ...)
• A lightweight semantic layer, allowing to control how data sources are exposed to the user by defining dimensions and metrics
• Fast loading dashboards with configurable caching

Privacy and Scalability

Since Superset is a Free Software application. Unlike other data visualization tools, it can be deployed on your machine(s) which ensures that your data stays private.

Scalability is the biggest concern today as the datasets are huge. Hence Superset is designed to scale out to large, distributed environments and works very well inside containers. You can try superset simply from your laptop to deploying it in a complex distributed environments. There’s virtually no limit to scale out the platform.

Superset users in the wild

• Airbnb
• Faasos
• Lyft
• American Express
• Netflix
• Udemy
• Twitter‌‌The list goes on…

Where can I use it today?

Let's take an example of COVID-19. Since the pandemic started, many government agencies and data scientists started to map and build dashboards of the COVID-19 data to see and predict its growth. Now as a data science enthusiast, even we can build a simple COVID-19 dashboard using Superset.‌                              

With 3 Steps let's build a simple dashboard. Upload, Visualize Table and Publish

Step 1: Loading CSV Data

Upload the CSV dataset, enter the Table Name and click on the Save button.‌                          

Step 2: Table Visualization

Step 2 is more of a two part series

Step 2.1: Import datasource and Select chart

To create a new chart, select New > Chart then choose a data-source (in our case covid_data) from the dropdown list.

‌Now select the visualization type, then select Create new chart to go into the chart view.

Step 2.2: Choose filters or Run Query

Now apply the filters or run custom queries on the data. Here, a saved query is called a Slice. Select Run to see the visualization.

Now click the Save as button near  top-left corner . A up should appear, asking to name the slice, and optionally add it to a dashboard. Since we haven’t yet created any dashboards, we can create one and immediately add our slice to it.

Step 3: Publish

Now that you have the dashboard ready with the line chart. It's ready to get published so that it's available to other users. To Publish simply select Draft next to the title of your dashboard on the top left to change your dashboard to be in Published state.

Hurray!!! We have created a COVID-19 Dashboard...

This example is just taken as an introduction to Superset. There are many more charts to explore which are beyond the scope of this article.

Tags

• Data Visualization
• Apache-Superset

M V Sri Harsha,
Hacktivist at Swecha,
Data Engineer Newsclick

Bhuvan Krishna

We live in a digital world and constantly consume or create data. Under the hood there is software which makes it possible for the data to be created or consumed. This software, in other words, apps, tools, programs etc are the creation of and by people over a period of time (generally it takes years for a piece of software like Operating system to evolve). In this process developers and users of the software get into an agreement which governs the use, modification and redistribution of the software also called license agreement.

When it comes to Free Software licenses the users and developers have the freedom to do what they wish to do in contrast proprietary licenses restrict users/developers are are told what they can not do.

Other than these two variants of licenses there is a third category of licenses called Open Source licenses. OSS (Open Source Software) claims that their licenses are more open and less restrictive than FS (Free Software) licenses, But the reality is that these licenses are created in such a way that the parts of software created with these licenses can be closed giving a huge advantage and control to the giant corporations which mix OSS with propitiatory software. OSS licenses were derived from Free Software licenses. It is these licenses which are popularised widely undermining the importance of ideology of Free Software.

In the age of data the underlying license matter since its not just about using, modifying or redistributing the software but also the data which is generated using the software. Take for example Android OS the underlying software starting from Linux kernel to various apps though released under some sort of Free Software or OSS license the data that is generated or consumed is not protected or is not in the interest of the user along with some parts of the software like drivers for modem, camera various sensors. When a user first switches on the smart phone a series of Agreements show up and we are forced to agree them without which the full potential of the smart phone can not be used. Though in the recent times Google, Facebook, Apple claim that they are very concern about privacy of the user but in the license agreements that they claim to take user data and store it with them. Users don’t have a choice or even if a choice is given its hard for a normal users to opt out of the situation where these companies collect data.

Free Software licenses on the other hand are more user/developer centric and give more flexibility for the user/developer to not only develop the software but also protect user privacy. The core freedoms that govern Free Software licenses are.

Free Software means users have four essential freedoms:

(0) to run the program of any purpose,

(1) to study and change the program in source code form,

(2) to redistribute exact copies, and

(3) to distribute modified versions.

Software differs from material objects—such as chairs, sandwiches, and gasoline—in that it can be copied and changed much more easily. These facilities are why software is useful; we believe a program's users should be free to take advantage of them, not solely its developer.

Software licenses can be broadly categorised in this way

GPL-Compatible Free Software Licenses

These licenses qualify as free software licenses, and are compatible with the GNU GPL like.

GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3

This is the latest version of the GNU GPL: a free software license, and a copyleft license. We recommend it for most software packages.

Please note that GPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2 by itself. However, most software released under GPLv2 allows you to use the terms of later versions of the GPL as well. When this is the case, you can use the code under GPLv3 to make the desired combination.

GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2

This is the previous version of the GNU GPL: a free software license, and a copyleft license. There are some limitations which are covered under GPL v3 and it is always recommended to use GPL v3 instead of GPL v2.

GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 3

The GNU Project has two principal licenses to use for libraries. One is the GNU Lesser GPL; the other is the ordinary GNU GPL. The choice of license makes a big difference: using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs.

GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3

This is a free software, copyleft license. Its terms effectively consist of the terms of GPLv3, with an additional paragraph in section 13 to allow users who interact with the licensed software over a network to receive the source for that program. We recommend that developers consider using the GNU AGPL for any software which will commonly be run over a network.

Other noteworthy licenses include Apache License, Version 2.0, FreeBSD license (This is the original BSD license with the advertising clause and another clause removed.), Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 2.0

GPL-Incompatible Free Software Licenses

The following licenses are free software licenses, but are not compatible with the GNU GPL.

Affero General Public License version 1, Apache License, Version 1.1 and below, Eclipse Public License Version 2.0 and below

Nonfree Software Licenses

The following licenses do not qualify as free software licenses. A nonfree license is automatically incompatible with the GNU GPL.

Apple Public Source License (APSL), version 1.x, Microsoft's Shared Source CLI, C#, and Jscript License.

Licenses For Documentation

These licenses cover for documentation of the software.

Free Documentation Licenses

GNU Free Documentation License, FreeBSD Documentation License

Licenses for Works of Practical Use besides Software and Documentation like artwork images, music, videos etc.

GNU General Public License

The GNU GPL can be used for general data which is not software, as long as one can determine what the definition of “source code” refers to in the particular case. As it turns out, the DSL (see below) also requires that you determine what the “source code” is, using approximately the same definition that the GPL uses.

GNU Free Documentation License

The GNU FDL is recommended for textbooks and teaching materials for all topics. (“Documentation” simply means textbooks and other teaching materials for using equipment or software.) We also recommend the GNU FDL for dictionaries, encyclopedias, and any other works that provide information for practical use.

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY)

This is a non-copyleft free license that is good for art and entertainment works, and educational works. It is compatible with all versions of the GNU GPL; however, like all CC licenses, it should not be used on software.

Creative Commons publishes many licenses which are very different. Therefore, to say that a work “uses a Creative Commons license” is to leave the principal questions about the work's licensing unanswered. When you see such a statement in a work, please ask the author to change the work to state clearly and visibly which of the Creative Commons license it uses. And if someone proposes to “use a Creative Commons license” for a certain work, it is vital to ask “Which Creative Commons license?” before proceeding any further.

Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 4.0 license (a.k.a. CC BY-SA)

This is a copyleft free license that is good for artistic and entertainment works, and educational works. Like all CC licenses, it should not be used on software.

CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible with the GNU GPL version 3: this means you may license your modified versions of CC BY-SA 4.0 materials under GNU GPL version 3, but you may not re-license GPL 3 licensed works under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Many of the parts of this write-up are taken from these links:https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html
https://creativecommons.org/

(Bhuvan Krishna is the General Secretary of Swecha, and the lead developer of e-Swecha)

Bhavabuthi Bobby

Normalizing through shocks:  A global strategy

Every few years, there will be a media sensation that will tremble the society. Be it Cambridge Analytica or the Aadhaar data breach. The news on how corporations are indulging in dark patterns to collect data. The news on how data breaches leading to sensitive data of users being exposed in internet. The list goes on.

This has become so prevalent that it became a norm in the digital era. The practice of media resorting to shocking people for the sake of sensation creates despair and is pervasive. There are several instances in our conversations with engineering students that we see this despair and helplessness. We see that they are reliant on the internet for many of their necessities. But due to proprietary technologies engulfing discourse of the commons, they are finding it difficult to explore alternatives.

The corporate media went hand in hand with these corporations to supply stories that might be presented to be most shocking but doesn't address the over arching problem. They end up suggesting limitations in social media usage. The same thing happened in a recent popular Netflix documentary 'The Social Dilemma'.

This is definitely against the logic of human interaction. For example, you want to meet and talk with your friend and call them over to a place. If the place is noisy, would you abandon the place and go to a less noisy place or would you abandon the talk altogether? A person with common sense would choose another place with less chaos to have conversation with their friend. This is somehow missing in the conversation when they sensationalize the news. The pervasive data collection by the corporations for profits at the cost of our sensitive data is being normalized by blaming people for their social media usage.

Do companies like Facebook snoop on us? This question has been answered in 2013. We don't need an answer every year or two! Snowden revelations have shown us that companies like Google, Facebook and Apple are complicit in sharing data to NSA without the consent/knowledge of users around the world.

Pervasive corporations is not a new phenomenon

Corporations taking data for their profit even at the cost of people's lives is not a 21st century phenomenon. It has been there since the early age of corporations. A very good example is one of the most powerful corporations in the mid 20th century, IBM.

You would have read about a German leader, Hitler, who killed millions of Jews. Hitler created a plethora of prison factories to support his War economy (which boomed during WWII). These camps were for forced labor which is literally work to death. This massive data of prison labor was tough to organize and maintain on paper. It needed 'smart' computation to organize the data and hence organize the labor. And IBM, a powerful corporation, came to his rescue with its Hollerith system. This system is used to collect, identify, sort, assign and transport millions of people in Europe during the Holocaust.

Privacy by Default

The fight for privacy in this context would not just be about individual for their sensitive data but would also be about communities fighting against the model of monetizing through privacy invasive micro targeting.

Corporations have been trying forever to narrow down the fight for privacy to individual responsibility. To confuse people, there is a set of people (of course backed by corporations) who brought the slogan "Privacy by Design". This is a deceitful slogan as they advocate the design of privacy code but they  support the method of opt-in. It resulted in design of privacy extensions or software to be explicitly opted by users who in many cases will not be aware of them. This is not a privacy-first approach. Its very important for us to embrace the slogan "Privacy by Default" which means that privacy for an individual should come out of the box.

"Privacy by Default" over "Privacy by Design".

Privacy ultimately is a collective effort. If I'm using a free software that doesn't spy on me but my mom uses an Alexa for home assistant then the outcome is that I'm being spied along with my mom. Hence narrowing the responsibility of privacy to an individual defeats the purpose of the privacy movement itself.

(Bhavabhuthi Bobby is a Co-ordination Committee member of Swecha, a hacktivist and works as a Software Engineer at a multinational firm)

People around the world continue to look towards Aaron Swartz and take inspiration from him. For people who don't know Aaron, he was an important figure in the open access movement. Aaron contributed his life for the movement and his tragic death was an important loss for the movement. His contributions to the internet and commons were large and is known for helping create creative commons license, RSS (Rich Site Summary) spec and was one of the co-founder's of reddit.

Aaron is also known for writing the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in July 2008, an important work that continues to inspire people around the world. The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto was a call for scientists, researchers and intellectuals to fight back the anarchic system which was locking up all the knowledge and culture in the world. In Aaron's words:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier”.

There is a Telugu proverb written by the great poet Gurazada Apparao “మతములన్నియు మాసిపోవును - జ్ఞానమొక్కటి నిలిచి వెలుగును” which translates into “All religions shall fade away but knowledge will flourish”. This along with one more saying was something common in our household "seek knowledge and not money, as it is something people can't steal from you". In this information age of social media, people in power don’t want you to be aware and want to stop spreading knowledge, it serves their political interest to have ignorant people. It is in the vested interest of large corporations and politicians to decide who can have access to information. Again in Aaron’s words, you will agree to this, but what then?

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back.

Yes we can fight back, there is no justice in following unjust laws. It's time we fought back, we declared our displeasure with the system and its functioning. Research budgets of several universities are from government funding, not-for-profit foundations primarily and yet all the results of research are closely walled within foreign and private gateways. Who are these firms to decide who can have access to the work done by our colleagues, countrymen with our own tax money? It is time for Guerrilla Open Access and in Aaron's words:

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”

As we fight for open access for knowledge and research carried out for the progress of humanity, we need to remember that misinformation is the new normal of our generation. It becomes important for us to not only open up information locked up in silos, but also important to spread scientific temper and tackle misinformation. We need to identify misinformation farms and develop guerrilla practices to stop them. Specially when BigTech profits from these practices and will not stop the spread of anti-scientific propaganda and misinformation.

BigTech is as much a threat to our society as large publications are, they have successfully evaded all legislations regulating them and have claimed protections of software patents and copyright. Their censorship of the web under copyright act while ignoring to censor any hate speech or Fake news has caused enough damage already. Digital Publishing houses with help of digital rights management (DRM) are gaining monopoly over knowledge.

BigTech has gained virtual monopoly over information and internet infrastructure. With the push of the Internet.Org Facebook is becoming a gatekeeper for the internet in third world nations. India has shown the way to challenge these systems and we need to continue to spread these practices across the World. Indian copyright act too doesn't support publishers rights over education of the masses. We can build a future in India where knowledge is free and accessible while promoting scientific temper.

To build this future for our society, we need to adopt Guerilla Open Access Manifesto to inverse the information asymmetry between citizens and Big Tech, Big Government. This can only happen if we build alternative networks of information infrastructures that support open access. These information networks can’t be built overnight, but we need to strive towards it. Sci-hub, LibGen are some of the examples of these information infrastructures and not only we need to support them, we need to build more of these.

Gorla Praveen* and  Dr. Sridhar Gutam**.

Free and openly available scholarly literature is called Open Access literature which is almost free of copyright restrictions. The open scholarship arising from the public funds is public good and should be available to the public without any charge and technical and legal barriers.

Free software movement whose objective is to build and make the software which is free to use, study, share and build upon is helping Open Access, Open Data, Open Education etc.

Many of the Open Access Initiatives across the world had expressed the need for having supported “tools and assistance" for the establishment of repositories (literature archives and data archives), and to launch open access journals, as many as possible. However, the need for complete freedom to publish and disseminate the knowledge resources without the restriction is only possible when the end-to-end system is built on the principles of Free Software and Knowledge commons. Although, initially the DSpace and Eprints were created as free and open-source software for repositories and the OJS (Open Journal Systems) for journals. The Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which had released the OJS as Free Software in 2001 under GNU General Public License has become the default and widely used publishing system for any Open Access Journal. Currently, OJS is released as OJS 3.2.1 version and is available in eleven languages besides development in other 25 languages including Hindi.

With the growing momentum of Open Access, the communities and organizations who believe in Open Scholarship and Public Good are contributing for the development of e-infrastructure which is available as free as in freedom.

Now there are a growing number of authors who are sharing/releasing their first draft of the manuscripts before submitting the journals with an aim to share their research findings with the world as soon as they are ready via Preprint Repositories. The recent release of Open Preprint Systems (OPS) by the PKP is another milestone in the scholarly communications after OJS.

With the Public web, Public Software, Public licensing and Public infrastructure, we see there are no barriers for the open scholarship unless the authors are willing otherwise.

When we speak about Knowledge, we speak about sharing it without restriction. When we speak about  Knowledge sharing, we are referring to its progress. When  we refer to Knowledge progress, we are referring to societal progress. Like all, Aaron Swartz is the one who has spoken about it deliberately.

Aaron Swartz in the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto (2008) writes “Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations”. He then ends asking us to join him and others to “send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge’.

Lets join and build the tools and means for making ‘Open Scholarship as Public Good’.

*Research Fellow, BITS-Pilani, Working Group Member, Open Access India.

**Senior Scientist, ICAR - Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Working Group Member, Open Access India.