Ten Telugu Books Re-released Under CC-BY-SA 3.0 License
(by Rahmanuddin Shaik, June 22, 2014). For the first time in the
history of Indian books, 10 Telugu books by a single author were
released under Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA 3.0) on June 22, 2014
at 10 a.m. at Golden Threshold, Abids, Hyderabad.
CIS-A2K has collaborated with Telugu Wikipedians in convincing Indu
Gnaana Vedika to re-release 10 of their books under CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
which is compatible with Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Unlike
the predominant digitization efforts (which only makes scanned images
available), these books will be uploaded on Telugu Wikisource
and converted into Unicode (searchable) text. This will ensure that
these books are freely read, both online and offline in various formats
like PDF, epub, mobi, text, etc. This is a major milestone initiative by
CIS-A2K to make the sum of all knowledge in Telugu freely available to
all Telugus over the internet and is part of its Telugu language area plan.
CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage:
Wikimedia Foundation has funded A2K to anchor the growth of Wikimedia movement in India. The A2K team consists of six members, four based in Bangalore: T. Vishnu Vardhan, Dr. U.B. Pavanaja, Subhashish Panigrahi and Rahmanuddin Shaikh. One team member Nitika Tandon is based in Delhi. We also have one Advisor Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana working with us. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed here. Wikipedians from various communities can request for outreach programs, technical bugs, logistics-merchandize and media, public relations and communications here.
The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities.
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu@cis-india.org.
CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.