WikipediansSpeak: On Openness and Wikimedia

An interview in the Centre for Internet and Society’s WikipediansSpeak series, on openness and the Wikimedia movement.

Gautam John heads the Karnataka Learning Partnership at Akshara Foundation. Prior to his involvement with Akshara, Gautam was at Pratham Books in the primary education space. He has been part of the Wikimedia movement in India for some time.

Transcript

This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

I studied to be a lawyer. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer, so I was a lawyer for a very short time. I was an entrepreneur post that for about 5 or 6 years.

And after I had sold the company that I was running, I decided to spend some time in the non-profit space. I didn’t have any clear idea as to why. So I met around a bunch of non-profits and Pratham Books had been interesting enough for over 6 months.

So I spent 6 months there. And then the intention was always to go and study. But I enjoyed it so much that I ended up staying another year.

And it’s been 5 years, nearly 6 years since I started at Pratham Books. I finished with Pratham Books in December of last year. I now remain an advisor to them.

And over the course of the 5 years that I was with them, I kind of helped put together the idea of an open publishing model as opposed to the traditional publishing model, which is driven by a very closed universe. The idea really was to help Pratham Books achieve its mission of a book in every child’s hand. And we leveraged the idea of open source creative commons licenses and communities to help put together what we call an open or social publishing model to actually help drive the mission of a book in every child’s hand.

Since January 1st of this year, I’ve been with the Akshara Foundation full-time, where I manage the Karnataka Learning Partnership platform, which is really a multi-stakeholder, data-driven platform that brings transparency and accountability to public pre-schooling and primary school. I have to admit, I haven’t been engaged with the open source movement in any significant way. To a limited extent, my work at Pratham Books was around the idea of openness, but that was limited to content, not necessarily software.

And the idea was to use open licenses or creative commons licenses to help foster an ecosystem to create more books so that we could actually put a book in every child’s hand. Largely in India, the open source movement, I assume, is fairly strong, and I don’t really know, but one has friends and they all seem to be interested in open source. At KLP, pretty much all of the work we do is in the open source, and uses open source tools and an open source development stack.

It’s a fairly powerful idea, and I think the idea manifests itself not just in the software universe, but across multiple other streams as well, education, health, we even talk about open government, open data, so open source is a fairly powerful idea that has moved away from purely being driven by software, to multiple other mediums as well. Do I believe in it? Yes.

My central passion is building on access to information, so the open source philosophy is something that I identify with very closely. I think it’s also important to see the legislative history of how this came about. We’re not the only country where, by default, everything produced or funded by government is copyrighted.

Our Copyright Act has roots in the British Copyright Act, or at least in the British copyright experience and history, and Britain for the longest time has had the notion of the Crown Copyright, which is pretty much everything produced by the British government or funded by the British government is copyrighted to the Crown, not the government of the United Kingdom. So we’re not unique in the sense that this exists. I think the United States is actually the outlier in this case, where they have a very strong rule that anything publicly funded is in the public domain.

That said, in India, I think the conversation with the government has been evolving and we’ve had some successes, and you have to build upon that. For example, UP Media India Chapter and other open content and open educational resource activists have been working with the Ministry of Human Resource Development and Minister Tharoor for a long time to get NCRT content, or the textbooks and the syllabus, under an open license. And about a month ago or so, they actually moved to a Creative Commons share-alike, attribution share-alike license.

So it’s not that there’s resistance to the idea, but I think it’s a conversation that needs to happen. It’s unfair to expect that the government will wake up one day and say, oh, let’s just do this. You need to engage in that discussion, you need to show the positives and the benefits that are true.

And I think once you’re able to engage with the government and different ministries in that conversation, this will happen, because it’s an idea that’s fairly powerful, not just to us as activists, but to the government as well, to encourage and foster the creation of a larger ecosystem around their software and their content. And actually, this is where this happens. I don’t know if you know the Open Source Drug Discovery Database that’s piloted by the Centre Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research.

But that is an open drug discovery database that’s openly licensed and run by the government of India. The data portal for the government of India, the code is open source. These things happen.

Maybe in India, the conversation really should be around the fact that having access to something isn’t necessarily that it’s open. Sometimes in India, we conflate the fact that because something’s accessible online or wherever, that it’s open, but we actually need to say that being accessible is one step of openness, but being under the right license so that it can be reused, essentially so that it can be reused and remixed, is the next step of that logical discussion. The conversation is ongoing in multiple areas.

I don’t know, it’s certainly not as black and white as the US is good and India is bad. We just haven’t had the conversation, and I think we’ve started that, and we’ve had successes. So build upon that.

It’s a damn good question. I don’t necessarily have an answer to it. Is it hard?

Yes, it’s incredibly hard to do because the incentives that unpaid volunteers have could be very different from the incentives that paid staff have. So it’s always a challenge. If unpaid volunteers see their pool being depleted and move to paid staff, their point is, then why should I do this for happiness, joy or meaning?

Why can’t I get paid to do this? It’s a very, very tricky balance that one needs to strike between community-driven and paid member-driven. I don’t think it’s possible to run something in scale without paid staff because there are certain functions that maybe the community either cannot do or does not have the wherewithal or requires a constant level of commitment that does not necessarily happen with the community-driven volunteer model.

And for that, paid staff are needed. But I think the challenge really is when paid staff essentially do the same thing as volunteers, there is a challenge. So maybe one way of trying to separate the two is in terms of distinct pools of what they work on.

So for example, what the community works on is purely the domain of the community in that the paid staff just perform a supporting function of what the community does rather than trying to do what the community does as well. Because without that clarity, it’s a bit challenging. The other thing, of course, is decision-making.

Community-driven decision-making is very different from organizational decision-making. So there is a challenge if communities make decisions that are also what the paid or staff organization has. And again, I think the ideal case would be to set up clear, transparent rules at the outset as to how these two interplay.

But it certainly is challenging. It’s not a trivial method. Can you do away with one or the other?

No, you can’t. So it’s an evolving discussion that will need to happen between the paid staff of the organization and the community. But in general, avoid cannibalizing each other in terms of function and…

So in that sense, like I said, the U.S. is a fair outlier to me in some ways that publicly funded materials are in the public domain. They have a very strong notion of fair use. It’s a very strong notion of fair use.

And the thing is, I think a lot of these evolve out of the nature of the discourse that those countries have. Like I said, this is not to say that these things are norms set in stone. In India, we’ve been discussing more important things before we come to copyright and things of that sort.

And we’re now getting there. And I have to admit, like in India, we’ve had tremendous successes. The Right to Read campaign was incredibly successful.

I think we are now an outlier in terms of the fact that print-impaired community in India has unfettered access to large amounts of material without necessarily going through copyright negotiation loops and hoops. And we’re an outlier in that sense. So these norms evolve from within communities and nations and the nature of the conversation that’s happening there.

So is there some broad direction in which they’re all headed? No, there isn’t. Like for example, in the US, the audio and video lobbies are very, very strong.

And for them, copyright is a business model. So they tend to exert a great deal of influence there. Whereas in India, we haven’t yet seen that.

And they exert some amount of influence. But they’re not as strong lobby groups as they are in the US. Which is why the Right to Read campaign was so successful in India.

There was no great opposition to it. Similarly with the NCRT things. They evolve.

Yes, they’re grounded in some sort of norms and discussions that are happening in the countries themselves. But broadly speaking, I think there are some things that will just take longer in other countries. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Like for example, there’s NPTEL and a few education-related projects. But the thing is, they’re not necessarily under open-source licenses. They’re available online, but they’re not necessarily properly licensed.

And I think in India, that’s part of the discussion that we need to have. Making something available is step one. And it’s a great step.

But making it available for reuse is step two. And that’s the true nature of being open. So there’s the open-source drug discovery database.

There’s the NCRT. But in terms of properly licensed stuff, from the government, not very much. So here’s the thing.

I don’t necessarily know how this happened. But I think using the UK as an example is a great battle for India. Because the UK has had the same notion of crime copyright or government copyright as we have in India.

And from 2006 or so onwards, the Guardian newspaper ran a fairly exhaustive campaign called Free Our Data, which was essentially saying that we need access to the data and proper licenses. And the conversation wasn’t as much around do away with crime copyright as much as openly license the data. And the UK government came up with their Open Government License, version two of which came out I think just about a month or two ago.

And that was great because the current version of the Open Government License is fully compliant with the notion of openness or the definition of openness. And they’ve evolved a broad model where they have crime copyright, so we haven’t done away with that. But the data is put out under an Open Government License which is fully compatible with the notions of open and with other open source licenses as well, like the Creative Commons License.

In India, similarly, I think it would be futile to press for the, not necessarily futile, but self-defeating to press for the removal of government copyright. More importantly, we should press for the addition of an Indian government license to the Open Government License where the data is then available under these licenses. Of course, there are challenges of whether ministries have to voluntarily sign up for this or is it mandatory?

But that’s a discussion that one can have. But broadly speaking, I think trying to abolish the notion of government copyright will hit too many walls and it’s far, far, far easier to do this around the idea of creating an Open Government License for India. So, what are the open licenses looking like?

So, every state government and the national government, their big thing is we want to put all of our cultural and linguistic things online. So, in the government of Karnataka, we want to do some sort of Kanaja, right? That was the name they supposed in Kannada Wikipedia.

Every government wants to do this. I mean, the government of India has this large library digitization project that they’re doing. So, a lot of this stuff is coming online.

To me, the question to ask is that’s great that it’s coming online. How are people supposed to access it if internet penetration isn’t growing? And most importantly, is it coming online in open formats, right?

Or standard driven format? Just because you scan a book and put the PDF up online doesn’t necessarily mean anyone will find it. It’s not indexable, searchable, etc.

So, to me, a big challenge in India has been the slow penetration of standards compliant open fonts, creation of open type fonts. Because so much of our content is still print and to bring that online means there has to be standards compliant for it to be searchable and indexable. And it’s taking much longer to happen than it should.

So, which is why there is some amount of local Indic language stuff on the web. But it isn’t as big as it is simply because a lot of it is just not discoverable. I think the idea of Wikipedia like many people have said it’s a model that should not work but works and it mixes open platforms, open standards, open content and open licenses along with an open community to create something that’s truly remarkable.

And I think Wikipedia can be examples of any one of these different limbs of Wikipedia for so many different models from education to healthcare to governments. So, yeah, I don’t have anything but I think it’s a great example. Sure, it has downsides as well but there’s no large project in the world that does it.

So, I’d like to imagine it would increase the availability, not just the availability but the accessibility of language, of knowledge in local languages. But I think something that to me is quite important is that it will kind of also preserve languages, right? That these repositories of these languages exist.

It will be widely spoken and in a way it serves as a codex for that language. So, preserving and not just distributing knowledge but preserving language as well.

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Originally published by Centre for Internet and Society on 6 October 2013. View on YouTube →