data governance

2020

The Data Governance Network (DGN) was established by the IDFC Institute in 2019 to bring together some of India's leading policy think-tanks. It identifies policy gaps in data governance and seeks to bridge them through policy interventions, research and advocacy. IT for Change was selected to be one of the four research nodes in the DGN for…

2020

Since at least 2012, tech firms have consistently topped the list of companies in terms of market capitalisation, indicating the enormous financial power that the business of data wields. At the same time, governments around the world – including in South Asia – have been harvesting their citizens’ personal data and perfecting methods of…

2019

Parminder Jeet Singh published a research paper as part of the Data Governance Network project titled, ‘Data and Digital Intelligence Commons: Making a Case for Community Ownership’, questioning the ‘open access’ paradigm for data and developing a theoretical basis for asserting community ownership of data.

Read the paper here. 

2019

Most people still see data as ordinary knowledge or information best subject to 'open access' regimes. This is also the moral basis for the advocacy of free global flows of data. It is an argument that many, if not most, civil society activists worldwide often fall prey to.

This research paper attempts to develop a theoretical basis for…

2018

For long, Internet activists considered the Internet as being beyond law, politics and governments. J.P. Barlow made the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. It was fine when this phenomenon was just shaping up and challenging established institutions. But with the Internet and data becoming central to new social and…

2018

Current trajectories of the network-data complex relying on corporate partnerships cast data and intelligence as purely market goods. Investment by state in public data architectures could show the way for new possibilities in this direction. Read more for  Anita Gurumurthy's take on 'data for development partnerships'.

This post was…

2017

In our response to the timely consultation paper by TRAI on  Privacy, Security and Ownership of the Data in the Telecom Sector we advocate for a broad spectrum of safeguarded data including 'collective/social data' in light of its commercial value. The paper recognizes that consent based ownership frameworks are inadequate for various reasons…

2017

This paper, 'Digital Industrialisation in Developing Countries: A Review of the Business and Policy Landscape', developed for the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, examines, the nature of digital economy in a developing country context, focussing the study partly on Bengaluru, often called the Silicon Valley of the South. It distinguishes…

2016

Anita Gurumurthy, Executive Director, IT for Change was a Panelist at the IGF 2016 Main Session, Connecting Human Rights - Emphasising Economic, Social and Cultural Rights for the Internet. In her intervention, she stressed the critical imperative to move beyond the binary of the online and offline, in our imaginary of rights…

2016

Anita Gurumurthy participated in the 2016 IAMCR Conference, held in Leicester, UK between 27th -31st July 2016. The theme for this year's conference was Memory, Commemoration and Communication: Looking Back, Looking Forward.

Anita was invited to speak at the…