 Hello. Hi. This works. So can you guys back here me? So I think it's about time to get started. So I've been asked to do a five minute introduction to Hasgeek. And we'll be followed by a five minute introduction to Rooma, followed by an introduction to the guests that we have out here, Sam and Carl. And hopefully then there'll be a lecture and there'll be more people here by then. So let's get started. How do you guys hear about this event? Twitter? Hasgeek? Anything else? Facebook? So some of these distribution mechanisms actually work in that you get to hear about these events. That's cool. So I'm going to start talking about Hasgeek. How many of you have heard of Hasgeek? Some of you haven't heard of Hasgeek. So how many of you have heard of Rooma? So some of you came from Rooma and not from Hasgeek. So I think it's then useful to introduce Hasgeek to the Rooma community and introduce Rooma to the Hasgeek community. I think that's a good place to be in. So just as a quick introduction, Hasgeek is a firm I co-founded along with Zainab, who's somewhere in the back over there, about seven years ago. So we started in 2010. It's something that I'd been working on for a little longer. In fact, exactly a decade ago, 2007, is when I started working on what became Hasgeek. And back then, one of the problems that I had is, as a software developer, I didn't have many places to go to to meet other software developers and understand what they were thinking. And this was sort of crucial for what I was doing at that point. So 10 years ago, between 2006 and 2008, I was, in fact, working for the government of Karnataka on digitizing land records and creating, digitizing the public distribution system. Some of the work that we did eventually became what you now know as Aadhar, except Aadhar started in 2009, but it was informed by the work we were doing in Karnataka back then by collecting biometric information from residents, creating a citizen database, working on the technology that powered all of this and so on. My work was not on biometrics. My work was on citizen services. So I used to help run telecenters where citizens could access information. And one of the things that was a defining aspect of the project was about saying that if you digitize services, you also eliminate corruption because of people on the ground who otherwise have discretionary authority and can misuse it. And this was the recurring thought behind the process. But one of the things that I realized working on the technology project is ultimate decision-making authority came from the programmers, not from the bureaucrats. While the bureaucrats set the direction and said, this is what we should do, it was ultimately a programmer who would say, but this is technically feasible, not feasible. And so a programmer's awareness of their own capabilities would ultimately inform the direction in which any of these projects went. And to me, this was somewhat horrifying because I was sitting in a situation where if something does not work, somebody on the ground has a very significant life event as a result. Like you're denied access to your own property. You probably miss getting a crop loan. You probably have downstream effects in the fact that you can't grow your crops for the following year. If a computer network fails, you're wasted half a day commuting to some government office waiting for being delivered a service. And they just say, computer's not working. Come back tomorrow. And for me, sitting in Bangalore, talking to the people who would develop the software, explaining to them that you can't tell me that you will think about this problem and come back tomorrow when you're in office. Because today somebody's on the ground unable to access the service. And what struck me most about them was these were people who were doing their jobs, working in the conditions that had been defined for them in a sense of saying that you report to an authority, you're working hours on nine to five, you're supposed to do everything. So it's not like they were doing anything wrong. It's just that they did not realize the significance of what they did. They were doing a job, but people's lives were affected by what they did. And what struck me was their decisions were what everybody else had to go with, but they did not realize the impact of their decisions because one, they had limited understanding of technology. All of us have the problem. You know, it's not like we're all gods. We don't know what we're doing. We do what we know and we consult others for help and we don't know something. So what struck me at that point was people in technology need to understand the significance of what they're doing because the world thinks that these people will solve all problems. And if they don't know what they're doing and the importance of what they're doing, then they're not going to solve those problems. So after I left working with the government, I used to work at a firm called Comet, which was a contractor that built most of these solutions. I spent some time thinking about what to do here. You know, how do you solve a problem like this where people in the industry don't understand the significance of what they're doing? And others believe that they're doing something very important. And while this was going on, I had also spent some time working with community meetups, specifically the Linux user groups that had mushroomed across the country in the, and then the bar camps that started off in 2006. I started one of the ones in Bangalore. So by 2007, it sort of struck me that creating forums where people could come and talk made a huge difference to their own self-confidence and their own understanding of the importance of their work, because now they were hearing from completely unexpected sources on what was happening as a result of the technologies they were building, would in turn then help people represent themselves better and be more thoughtful about what technologies they were building. So this is sort of the two ideas that I came from and figured, why don't I start a company that gets people who are programmers who are in the technology industry to talk to each other about what they're doing and showcase what they've done that has not been done before, that they think is new, get critical feedback from the audience, see how it affects both the technical quality of the work and the social impact of the work. So that was started off in 2010 and over the several years since then, we started by hosting conferences where people could come and talk. We started hosting public lectures like today's. We also had to deal with another problem that had seen coming out of community meetups, which is what I like to call the tyrant problem, which is that if I take this central position of saying that I am hosting meetups and I decide who comes to speak, then at some point, my biases start reflecting on what's happening in the editorial content of what we do. And so the second problem that we had to solve for after realizing that there was a problem to solve is to say, how do I get myself out of this picture? How do I create a self-operating community where people from the community come up and do things by themselves? And I only create a structure in which this happens, but I don't run it. So one of the ways that as a programmer you can understand this is you think of the design of a programming language. What's a popular programming language that you use today? JavaScript, who uses JavaScript here? So when you build something with JavaScript, can you, did you ever imagine that the person who created the language, Brendan Eich, created it over 20 years ago, could he possibly have imagined what you would do with it today? Clearly not, okay? At the same time, you're constrained by the rules of what he did 20 years ago. You're in the sense that while you can improve the rules of the language, you can't radically alter it. Same thing with say a popular language like Python, that's the language I use a lot. Created in 1991 by a Dutch man named Guido Van Rosso. No way he could have imagined in 91 what I would be doing it with it in 2017, okay? So what happens is that programming languages are generative systems in the sense that they create a framework in which the creator's imagination is not required for a user's imagination to thrive. That people can do what they want with it and create incredible works under the rules and the framework created by someone in the beginning without that original person's involvement any further. And so one of the things I had to solve for in Hasgeek is how do we do this? How do we create a community format where it self-perpetuates and more and more people from the community come in and do things that do not require me to be involved in any way at all? And I think to some extent we have achieved it going by the fact that Sam, you're here in an event structure that I created many years ago and we're not even been introduced and it was not. And that's something I'm extremely proud of. You know that we have created something that continues by itself with other people taking it up and building on the same framework. So that's really all I had to say about Hasgeek. If you want to learn more, you can go to hasgeek.com and see the website. We host open houses on Fridays. Anyone can walk in, sit in our office, talk to us about anything or talk to other people who don't hear or talk to us. So come by any Friday. The last one was two days ago. We had a discussion on design. We had a bunch of designers just talking about the conditions that they work under trying to define what is designed for themselves. We have one every Friday. It's open, walk in anytime. I'm going to pass on to Numa. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. Hi everyone. Okay, I'm on the stage. So I'm Clarice. I work at Numa as a corporate innovation lead. So before explaining everything about Numa, first I would like to thank Hasgeek for bringing such an interesting discussion here. We are really happy to host you guys today. So welcome. So what is Numa exactly? So we are a global network that supports tech entrepreneurs to solve problems of 2030. So it's like a big broad mission. So what is it exactly that we do? We are different in a lot of different tech ecosystems, exactly eight countries. And in each ecosystem where we are, we work with different actors that we call entrepreneurs to help them and support them into the day-to-day missions and to help them innovate and collaborate. So who are these entrepreneurs? First, we call them communities. So these are all the designers, developers out there who try to innovate. And for them, we conduct events. We bring community together and we also have a co-working space. Then we work a lot with startups. So we have a five-month startup acceleration program, which is more for like really early stage and the ideas to bring them towards fundraising at the end of the program. So we are industry agnostic and the idea is really to, for example, we started to do digital labs in the city of Paris by bringing together, cooperate, entrepreneurs and try to start sharing data and work from there. And in 2015, we decided to raise funds in order to go global because we thought that the work that we've done in Paris was really interesting and that we could probably help other ecosystems. So that's what we did, actually. We raised funds and now we are in eight different countries. So Bangalore is our second branch that we opened two years ago and we are really happy because right now we run all the three activities that define a full-fledged NUMA. The public agencies, for example, on the transportation, we will work with BMTC and the traffic police to define together the challenge along with the corporate partner. This takes three months and then we select the right startup who is able to solve the challenge together with the city and the corporate. And then we experiment using the data and the field of experimentation and of course the expertise that we bring together thanks to this whole ecosystem. And then, of course, we share together all the learnings that came up during the program. So the second main expertise that we bring in to make this program happen and that makes this program really unique is our capacity to bring together all these different actors. So startups, corporate, cities. You have a lot of different programs around smart cities and challenges. The idea here is that really, we help people work together and we act like the really neutral platform in between all those actors. And so what's really exciting about this program is that we started in Paris two years ago. We ran it in Casablanca as well in Morocco. And this year we announced the opening of the program globally thanks to the C40 cities and we are gonna announce really soon the opening of this program in Bangalore, in partnership with the city of Bangalore. So each of the public agencies will collaborate with us on that program. So these are just a couple of numbers that are quite interesting about the program. For example, in the last sessions in Paris and Casablanca, we managed to bring together more than 45 private and public data sets to feed all the challenges. We sourced more than 20,000 startups globally. We also identified more than 200 challenges together before converging towards just a dozen of them. These are just a couple of metrics. And so just to illustrate, to really explain what are the challenges we are trying to solve here. For example, we had one urban planning in partnership with Cisco and the city of Paris. The idea is that the city of Paris is trying to change the whole planning of a lot of different squares in Paris, more than 20 squares in Paris. And they reached out to us to understand what was the best way to do that. And we decided to do a challenge on how to use the data that is produced on that square to kind of understand the flows of the people and the behavior and how they felt about being in that square in order to then better organize and plan the construction work that was going on on that square. So we worked with, for example, Cisco data on that, as well as open data provided by the city of Paris. So another one, for example, was on understanding the tourist flows in the city of Paris in order to really bring dynamic models to understand how the city can adapt to the flows of tourists. And so we worked for that with SFR, which is one of the big telecoms in France. And we got data from Mastercard and Uber as well to understand the different flows according to the different data that were available to do that. So that's it about data city. So again, we are really excited about it. You're gonna hear about it a lot in the next month because we're gonna announce everything, the partners and all. So we are really happy to answer any question. I think now we're gonna go on with other talks, but I'm here until the end of the event, so please don't hesitate to reach out to me. Thank you. Thanks, Clarice. Our next speaker is Paige. He's gonna be, he's from Data Meet and he's talking about opening up data in India. On mood. My name is Paige Ish, you know, as an image and stuff. I'm not usable. So as community, what we have done over the years is like, if you see the GitHub of Data Meet, you could see that we have passed or scraped most of the PDF data. Hello, everyone. We'll resume in two minutes. Testing, testing. Okay, everyone, settle down, settle down. A little closer, it's much better. Okay, hello, I'm Pranish Prakash. I'm one of the co-founders of the Center for Internet and Society, which is a nonprofit public policy research organization. And because of my background in the open data and government transparency communities, I have been asked and I now have the distinct pleasure of introducing Sam Petroda and Karl Malmödd. Two people I really admire. Dr. Petroda is known to every person here in the audience as the one person who for more than the past 50 years has been at the forefront of the information and communication technologies and innovation revolution in India. As a close advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, he led not just the PCO revolution, which he's justly famous for, but as having astutely seen communication technologies as a key to development also led technology missions on everything from water, literacy, immunization, dairy production, et cetera. And in the first UPA government years later, he was again brought on board as the chairman of the National Knowledge Commission where whose recommendations on everything from open access to scholarly literature, open educational resources, free and open source software, we at the Center for Internet and Society would often cite back to the government in trying to engage them and trying to spread these gospels as they were. And in the UPA two government, in his role as the advisor to, sorry, I missed one part, that is he's been also pushing for open data even before that term was in vogue. In 2008, for instance, he was involved in encouraging the launching of data portals on biodiversity, environment, water, et cetera, which many of us still kind of take inspiration from and kind of kick started what was then the nascent open data community in India. And in his role as advisor to the Prime Minister on public information infrastructure and innovation, he pushed for open data as a natural extension to the right to information, even more strongly, which eventually took the form of the data.gov.in portal that was already mentioned earlier today. His thinking on development, on education, on innovation and technology has profoundly impacted the India that we live in today. So I for one, I'm very grateful for one more opportunity to hear Dr. Petroda and I'm very glad that he's here with us. And I'll quickly also introduce Carl Malamud who's someone whose work I have marveled at since I was a law student many, many years ago. His work through public resource or org in liberating US court cases and databases from the SEC, from the US patent office is the stuff of legend for copyright nerds like myself and for people working in the government transparency movement. He founded the internet multicasting service, a nonprofit group that created the first internet radio station in the world, push for decentralized messaging services before at a time in like what, 99? When that idea was what can now only be described as visionary, given how locked in we are to proprietary messaging services and forms of communication was one of the founding chairman, was the founding chairman, sorry, of the internet systems consortium which creates software like bind that actually includes the internet together and was the visiting professor at MIT Media Lab and at K.O. University. As those of you who follow him on Twitter know, he has read more of Mahatma Gandhi's works than probably anyone here in this audience and something that most of you wouldn't know is that while on a visit to Thailand in 1987, he got to taste first thing from the airport, I believe, many kinds of exotic fruits he'd only heard about earlier, things like, you know, fresh rambitans, lichies and the very pungent, potent smelling durian fruit. Inspiration besieged him and he created the durian cheesecake which with his friend, the food critic Bob Halliday who then wrote about it in his column and this mixture of east and west then went on to become a popular hit not just in restaurants in Thailand but in many places across the world. And he is one of the most interesting people that I know. So I feel very honored to be introducing them here today and to be able to hear what they have to say on right to information and right to knowledge. So please give them a big round of applause. Thank you. Friends, good afternoon. It is indeed a special privilege for me to be with you all. I didn't realize what I was getting into. Carl told me that we have a meeting this afternoon and he gave me a little background on what we are going to do yesterday. So I come in here, park, and I said, are you sure we are at the right place? But I am so happy to see you all. I am amazed at what you young people are doing in India today. I am so proud of you. I met someone who is working on tribal people. Met another one working on Kanun. Meet a lot of you who are really very interested in building New India. When I see some of you, I feel so excited about the future of India. My journey has been a long one. I was born in 1942 and 75 years old. And those were the early days of India's independence. Growing up, to us, Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Maulana Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose were the real idols in our mind. We grew up with Gandhian thought, inclusion, truth, trust, self-reliance, simplicity, sacrifice, courage. All of these words meant so much to us as little kids. My father had fourth grade education, but in our house we had five big photographs, that big of five leaders. And their idea of India was the key in our mind while we were going through schools and colleges. I went to U.S. in 1964 and as I learned little bit there in 60s, I realized that there are three fundamental issues in India. Disparity, demography and development. And I also realized that to really overcome these, first we need connectivity. In 1979 I came to Delhi and couldn't make a phone call to my wife in Chicago. This was from five star hotel. So little bit of arrogance and lot of ignorance said, I am going to fix this damn thing. And I spent next ten years of my life trying to fix India's phones. Rajiv Gandhi gave me the political will and I felt without connectivity there is no start. Then we had two million telephones. It used to take 15 years to get a telephone connection. You may not know but your grandfather would know. Your father also may not know. And today we have 1.2 billion phones. We are a connected country of billion. The key question is what do you do with this connectivity? Second challenge was knowledge. And to bring knowledge in open domain, you need to use this connectivity and democratize information. So we started with knowledge commission, write to information, write to knowledge. All of these things didn't mean much to people we were working with. They had no idea of what is that we were talking about. I remember when I started my work in telephones there were so many critical front page stories in India. Saying why are these foreign return guys trying to fix India's phones when you need to worry about food, agriculture. And my answer to them was I don't know how to fix agriculture. Find somebody else. I know how to do my job. I can try to fix phones. I don't guarantee I'll be able to do it. Every little thing in India matters. You do what you know how to do best. Somebody else knows something else. And we all add little drop here, little drop there. And then hopefully it adds up. All the things that we dreamt of many years ago, you are really making it happen. Without your support, all our work will be lost. Nobody will even understand. To me, open government is the key. Open data is the foundation. So when Obama came here, he and I spent half an hour. And I tried to explain to him what we are doing in India by putting more fiber to connect rural India. We connected him to Rajasthan. And when I explained to him the kind of platforms we are trying to build. Connectivity platform, GIS, UID, data centers, cyber security, applications. He was amazed. He said how do you all think about things like this? And my answer to him was, if we don't think like this, we cannot build new India. It is very difficult to build new India with old tools. The only hope we have is to use new tools and our younger talent. I am firm believer in young talent in India. When I started CDOT in 1984, average age of the organization was 23. They were the brightest kids. Hardworking, sincere, honest, committed, courageous, dedicated, nationalist. And they made things happen. People used to say, why are you hiring only young? I said because they are fresh, they are full of energy, enthusiasm and they are not corrupt mentally. We have lots of problems in India, but we have lots of challenges. So when people tell me about problems in India, I tell them you don't need talent to identify problems in India. Nor do you need talent to identify solutions in India. You really need courageous people who are willing to give something to go back and do something for the people of India. We have a long way to go. There is work cut out for next 50 years. For last 40 years I have been saying best brains in the world are busy solving problems of the rich who really don't have problems to solve. And as a result, problems of the poor don't write kind of talent. India is the only country where you will find talent comparable to anywhere else in the world that would have some feelings to solve the problems of the poor. India is the only country where you will find solutions to lift 400 million below poverty line and then that solution can be applied to other parts of the world. We are a land of contrast. Anything I can say about India you can say exactly opposite and you are 100% right. And that is the beauty of India. Diversity is a fertile ground for innovations. And we are the most diverse country in the world. You go to Northeast, they don't look like so-called Indian. I remember once I was in Mexico and I was looking for Indian ambassador. I was a keynote speaker with 500 people and somebody said Indian ambassador is coming. So I went to receive him and I couldn't find him. Finally I said where is he? The guy said oh he was waiting for you, he is sitting in the front row. I go and he looks like Chinese because he is from Northeast. And even with my background I sort of assumed that if he is an Indian ambassador he should look like me. The beauty of India. India has so much to celebrate but I worry at times when I look at the India of today. When people try to curb information, when people spread lies on social media, attack freedom. It bothers me and that's where you all come in. You have to really preserve this turf at least in the cyber space for development for everybody. No untouchability, no differences. Doesn't matter program is Harijan or Brahmin or Hindu or Muslim. We don't care. We are inclusive in every way possible. Information is for everybody. Today the kind of discussion that goes on in India is so very petty. We really need to raise the level of conversation in India. I am doing a book right now. I did a book on my life few years ago and I did that for my granddaughter. Because my granddaughter who is now 6 lives in San Francisco. Someday going to grow up and ask who was this old man who came to America 100 years ago or 75 years ago. And whatever her father who is born and raised in US tells her is going to be very different. Because her father has no idea of the kind of poverty I came from. He cannot even comprehend that I was born in a small little tribal village in India. Where my mother delivered 8 kids all at home. No doctor, no nurse, no hospital, no pharmacy, nothing. No schools. And even if I tell them this they think they are making it up. This cannot be reality. It is that India we have to change. If we don't use technology to lift 400 million below poverty line to something respectable. We haven't done our job. We don't want to build an India where there are more billionaires. If they are more power to them. I have nothing against them. But I want to use technology to transform everything in India. And that can only come from knowledge. That can only come from people like you. That can only come from openness. To me information brings about openness, access, accountability, network, democratization, decentralization. All of these things are Gandhian. If Gandhi was to arrive today he would be so happy to meet you. I am giving a talk day after tomorrow at Gandhi Ashram. This is in fact Karl and I spent last year October 2nd at Gandhi Ashram. And we tried to really focus on spreading Gandhi's ideas in the information age. And tell people the connectivity. How Gandhi is more relevant today than ever before in the history of mankind. So I lost track earlier while telling you about the second book. I am writing a book on redesigning the world. The world that we have designed today is completely obsolete. The last design was by US after World War II. UN, World Bank, NATO, IMF, GDP, GNP per capita income, balance of payment, democracy, human rights, capitalism, consumption and wars. All of these things don't make sense anymore. GDP don't mean a damn thing. But we still follow it. All of the measurements today can benefit from big data, cloud computing, analytics. Then it was not possible. So you said gross GDP. And everybody agreed. Today you can go and zero in on so many little details because you have huge data to analyze. I am so happy that someone here is taking all the data from the court, putting it on web. I fought for seven years with all our chief justices. Every new chief justice appointed, I will call him next day. Go to his house. We'll have tea with him and try to convince him that why does it take 15 years to get justice? Why can't we computerize all your courts and get justice in three years? And he would say, yes, Sam. We agree with you, Mr. Petroda. We are all with you. Terrific idea. Let's do it. And then nothing will happen. And in eight months there will be new chief justice. So I go to him again. And he would say, you are so very right. We are going to do it this time with all good intentions. They mean well, but they can do it. Why does it take 15 years to settle a court case in India with all the expertise you have? It can be done in a year, maybe two, maybe three. So you need to use it everywhere to transform. You got to transform the very fabric of this society from homes to work, to police, to court, to government, to education, to health services, agriculture. And your tools are basically information, information, information. Through information, knowledge, wisdom, action and courageous young people to go do something. In India you can write off anybody who is above, probably 45 including me. They are just not equipped to handle this world. Everyone in India talks about the past. Nobody talks about future. It's all about Ram, history. Immediately somebody will talk about Hanuman, somebody will talk about some, another God. Or we'll say this was our heritage. Nobody talks about future. Our heritage is important. We are proud of our heritage, our art, our culture, our music. And we are trying to computerize a lot of that in about 15 years today. You are sitting with gigabits and terabits, so much processing power just in your cell phone. And this is changing India. But it has to change in the way you want it to change. Not in the way somebody sitting in US wants it to change. We need local content, local applications, local solutions, Indian version of development and not western version of development. It's too bad that everybody wants to be like you are. That model is not scalable, sustainable, desirable, workable. We need to create Indian model of development. And that's where Gandhi leaves. So while I was talking to some young people here, I said, can you get me data set for every district? What I want is for every district, everything should be available online. Port cases, police, teachers, schools, hospitals, doctors. I don't care about Indian database. Of course, it's important. I'm not saying it's not important. But I want work at district level. At district level, if I have need for 500 teachers, I don't need to go to Delhi to ask, where do I go hire? I need to hire them right there. We need to decentralize everything. Today, power in India is in two places. Prime minister and chief minister. I had a meeting this morning with the mayor of Bangalore. And I said, look, first thing we should do is give more power to mayor. Mayor has no power in India. Nobody knows who is mayor. They are mayor only for a year. Funny. In a year, you don't even know where to go to the bathroom. You need three, four years to figure out what you are supposed to do. But the reason behind one year is we don't give you time to figure it out. So we can do whatever we are doing and you go cut ribbons. So I told him, push to get mayor five year term. Same thing in district. District head is who? Collector. There is no elected member at a district level. Why can't we have district level developmental model through all the stuff you are doing to really decentralize? I don't take too much of your time but I have lots and lots of ideas that I want to share with you. I want to remain connected with you. I am indeed very proud of what you are doing. I want to be of help. I am obsolete. I know that. I recognize that. I respect that. But I still want to work and be busy. So I start every day at 8 o'clock in the morning and I work till 11, 12 every day, Saturday, Sunday because that's the only thing I know how to do. I have no holidays. I've never taken vacation in 50 years because there is just too much work out there in India. It's better to be busy than go on a beach and have a drink. That don't excite me. And it's good to see so many of you on Sunday afternoon. And I really, really appreciate you are coming to Sunday afternoon because that's the only slot I had available. So I told Karl who is a friend of mine and Karl is an interesting character. I don't know whether you know Karl but you should Google Karl. You know Karl is a very close friend of mine. He and I do all kinds of crazy things. We just launched in San Francisco along with Booster at Internet Archives where he took 450,000 books from India and put it online. Government of India panicked and said wait a minute. How can you do that? It's a copyright. We said don't worry. They sue us. We'll decide. We'll worry about it because government of India is not going to tell us what to read and what not to read. And you need people like that globally to confront the system. Karl and I decided once to take all the Bureau of Indian Standards and put it online. I don't know whether you know Bureau of Indian Standards cost 14,000 rupees in India and 1.4 lakh for foreigners. These are safety standards, fire standards. These are laws and as a citizen you have no access to it but you are supposed to follow it. Is that a funny thing? And when you put it online, government says wait a minute you can't do it. The answer is tough luck. We are going to do it. And that's the attitude I want you guys to have. I want you guys to have fighter attitude. Don't get sucked into it. Don't let anybody tell you you can't do it. Fight it like Gandhi fought. The difference is you are fighting your own cousin. And that fight is tougher. So I wish you all the best. Thank you for giving me this little slot. I look forward to hearing Karl and then we'll have a broader conversation. I know I was given 15 minutes maybe I took 5 more but where would I get audience like this? Love you. Thank you Sam. Can you hear me? Good. This is a beautiful facility. I want to thank Numa for hosting us and especially Hasgeek for organizing this event. Sandhya Ramesh especially has done a wonderful job coordinating things. Thank you Pranesh for that very nice introduction. And Srinivasan Teejay for your very instructive presentations. And of course Sam for dragging me to India again. It's a great pleasure to be here. So I have a strange profession. I am a public printer. You may have heard of private printers, right? They do novels in Hollywood and they publish things. Public printing goes back many, many years. There was a public printer named Ashoka, right? The emperor, the dearly beloved who took pillars and edicts of government and spread them throughout India. And he did this so people would know the law and the dharma that they knew that animals should be treated properly, that different religions should be properly tolerated. In Rome a couple hundred years before that the people rebelled against their rulers and said you have to write the laws down. You can't simply make them up every time we go to court. And they took the twelve tables of Roman law and they inscribed them in bronze and in wood and they put them in every marketplace in the Roman Empire so the people would know what their laws are. And that's because public printing is something that belongs to all of us. It's different than private printing where you do something to make some money. And then maybe seventy years later or in this day and age a hundred and fifty years later it enters the public domain. The public printing is stuff that we all own. And I've been doing this for thirty seven years in the United States. Everything from cultural archives, I put six thousand government videos that the government had. We copied them, put them on YouTube, fifty million views. This stuff was just sitting there. Securities and Exchange Commission it cost thirty dollars to get the report of a public corporation to get their IPO report for example. We put it on for free. Hundreds of millions of people access that information. So about five years ago I started working on Indian data. I continue to work in the US but US and India are the two places I do my work now. And I maintain five collections. Photographs. The Ministry of Information has this huge collection of photographs that are online but they're hidden. You can't find them. There's an open index page and there's a thousand photos on there. You've got to click through to get the actual photos. So I harvested those. Took twelve thousand of the photos, slapped them up on Flickr. These are amazing things. This is pictures of Nehru from forty seven and forty eight and forty nine. Pictures of the Republic Day. Celebrations over the years. A thousand photos of people playing crickets. The Olympics. Animals. The temples of India. Beautiful stuff and there should be much more of this and it should be higher resolution. Bureau of Indian Standards. The building code of India, fourteen thousand rupees. Every engineering student in India, six hundred and fifty thousand every year need to consult this document. And they had to go down to the library and consult the one CD-ROM or go to the library and get that one book. And we put it online and we get millions and millions of views every month on those. And in fact, we have not been sued by the Indian government. We've been sued in the United States and in Europe by various standards organizations. But the Bureau of Indian Standards refused to sell us more. And the reason is because I sent them a letter. I was paying five thousand dollars a year to get the standards. And I ran it for a couple years and they sent me a renewal notice and I said sure I'd love to renew and by the way here's all the standards. Aren't they great? Can I give you the HTML? Because a lot of these standards we sent in to India, re-typed them into HTML, redrew the diagrams into SVG, coded the formulas into MathML. So you can see it on your cell phone. You can take a diagram. You can make it bigger. You can paste it in your document. So we're suing the government of India in public interest litigation. Srinivas Kodali is one of my co-petitioners. My friend Sushant Sinha who is also here who runs the amazing Indian Kanun, a service of all the court cases, is my co-petitioner. Nishith Desai and Associates is representing us for free in the High Court of Delhi. And Saman Kurshid is our senior attorney on the case. We are before the judge again in mid-December. It's all papered over. The Union government has failed to respond for the fourth time. We are hoping to get an oral argument and to win this case because in India, the right to government information is constitutionally based. And these standards are government documents that have the force of law. Third collection, Srinivas talked about it. The official Gazettes. We're just starting on this one. We've got the Gazettes of India up. I've got Gazettes now for Karnakata, Goa, Delhi, and a couple more kind of ready to start uploading. And we're looking around trying to figure out how to get the rest of them. Collection number four is Hind Swaraj. I went to see Sam one day, and he goes, you got a stick? What? I pulled out a USB drive, and he sticks it in his computer, and he hands it back to me about 15 minutes later. And I said, what's this? Collected works of Mahatma Gandhi, all 100 volumes, 50,000 pages. And I said, where did you get this? The ashram gave it to me. Well, what are they going to do with it? Well, they're going to put it on a website. And so I looked and I said, well, can I put it on a website? Go for it. Well, won't they be annoyed? It's not. Nobody's going to care. And so I put them online, and I decided since we were doing that collection, all 100 volumes, and you can search inside of them, and you can download them as an e-book. I went to another government server, and I found the selected works of Nehru. But they were missing three volumes. So I got all those, found the other three volumes. And those are online. So we now have the most complete collection of the works of Nehru. The complete works of Ambedkar. Dr. Ambedkar was on the Maharashtra server. But again, they were missing the six most current volumes. So I took the stuff off the server, bought the remaining volumes, and we now have the most complete collection of the works of Ambedkar. Again, on the Internet Archive in the Hinswaj Raj collection. There are 129 speeches in all India Radio of Gandhiji speaking. The last year of his life, every couple days he would speak after a prayer meeting. So you can actually listen to him speak in the last year of that amazing life. You can then go into the collected works and see the English version of that speech. And then you can go to the next day and see the letters he wrote. Go see the next speech he gave. It's an amazing walkthrough. We went to the Durdarsh archives and took Bharat at Kodj. The discovery of India, as told by Nehru from the 1980s, and all those episodes are now online. For several of those, we've added subtitles in Telugu, in Urdu, and we have five languages available as subtitles. And we'd like to do the whole thing that way. But I want to talk about the digital library of India, because that's the current hot button that we're working on. So there was this government server with 550,000 books. At least that's what they said they had. And a year ago, I was sitting with Sam. We had just finished our one week. And we were waiting for our, you know, late night flight to go back to the United States. And I was sick, and Sam was doing a million meetings. People come in 63,000 books that I was able to successfully get. Some of them I couldn't get. Some of them were broken URLs. But we got 463,000 PDF files. So this was December of last year. And in January, I did the upload of the Internet Archive. And, you know, these things take a while when you're doing that much stuff. And uploaded them. And so this collection, when I started looking at it in more detail, because I couldn't really tell until I actually had the data, this is books in 50 different languages. There are, I believe, 30,000 books in Sanskrit. There's tens of thousands of books in Gujarati, in Bengali, in Hindi, in Punjabi, in Telugu. You name it, it's all there. About half the books are in English and French and German. But it's a unique collection. Now, it had problems. When I went to mirror it, the server kept spitting out 500 errors. It kept breaking. And so my scripts kept breaking. And I'd go back the next day and I'd start the scripts again and I'd be able to get some data. And then they'd lose DNS. And so you'd ask for a DLI and it's a host not found. And so I started hard coding the IP addresses because that was the only way. I'd venture some on copyright. I looked at it and said, well, some of these are pretty recent. But you know, I lost that as you put them online and if people start complaining, you say, okay, fine, I'll take that stuff off. So I put it online. It went online in February of this year. We've gotten, I think, 8.5 million views on this collection so far. So this collection went online. Google started seeing it. People looked at it. We had a half a dozen people write to us and say, you've got my book there. You know, standard DMCA takedown in the United States. Not a problem. Fine, we'll remove the books. University of North Carolina Press wrote to us. They had a list of 35 books. And it was a very nice note. They said, look, we didn't mind that you had our books online before, but we're starting to put our back file online so we'd rather that you didn't have them. So we looked at their list and then we searched in our database and found a few more books that they hadn't found. Wrote them a nice note and said, you know, here we are if you have any more problems, let us know. So in total we took about 127 books off. Not a big deal. Now, there was a guy in Russia who found his father's book on the Internet Archive and he knew one of the professors that was involved in his digital library of India and he freaked out. He was going to sue. He just got very, very angry and in return the professors that had started this project off, very senior people, freaked out as well and they went to the government and the government got all upset and I started getting all these notes saying you must delete all the books. You must get rid of them. I was like, no, we're not going to do that. And so they actually took their server down. They had the only copy of the digital library of India on the Internet. I actually renamed it because they were worried that it looked like we were somehow affiliated with them. I said, okay, fine, we are the public library of India. So they removed their, first they removed all the books so you could search for the metadata but you couldn't get the book. And then they took that down and there was just this obscure note saying due to copyright violations this is not available we'll come back soon. And then the metadata became available again and then the server disappeared all together and then the copyright notice came back and now it's still gone. It's off the net. And what I understand is happening is a team of government officials has spread out to these 10 different libraries, these scanning centers where they got the books and they're going through the list one by one and they're deciding which ones will be available and which ones will not and they told us that they will notify us which books should be available. So when they first freaked out I went and looked at the system a little more and their initial feeling was that we would remove everything and I said no we're not removing 1 million views per month, 500,000 books we're just not going to do that. And they said, okay, remove everything after 1900 and that would have left us with 60,000 books and I said why 1900 and they just made up the date and so at first I said okay fine I'll remove everything after 1923 and that left me with 200,000 books and then I went through the remaining 250,000 and I had and I looked carefully at that list and many of them were official gazettes or they were the works of Mahatma Gandhi which we know does not have copyright or they were other things and so after looking at that list carefully I brought it up to about 314,000 books which is what you can see now and they still want to tell us to take everything offline and I just don't think it's the government's job to tell you what to read and what not to read and there's something even more important copyright is not a binary thing so for example all of those books I could make available to somebody who is blind because there's an international treaty says a copyright does not apply it's available to the blind it's one of the more progressive things in copyright law at some point there will be no copyright because copyright expires have no idea when that will be so we're certainly not going to delay them because eventually we can make them available you may be familiar with the Delhi University case and the Delhi University case cited the copyright act that says you can make it available for teaching between a teacher and a pupil so we could make all of these books available within a university campus so deleting the books is not the right answer managing the metadata and making it better working on translations doing better OCR because we can OCR some languages but others we can't making it better responding to copyright issues one of the things with the DLI server I actually tried writing them when I first started to mirror the thing I didn't get any answers and when the distinguished professor finally came to me he said you did this without talking with us and I said look this data has been spinning since 2015 we just assumed nobody was home we assumed nobody was there I would have loved to talk to somebody but nobody would talk and that's why I just went ahead and grabbed it and not only that these are books once it's on the internet I can't hack your server but if it's public data and public data is something run by the government then I have a right to take it and look at it now I obviously bear responsibility if there are subsequent copyright issues but we're ready to deal with those so that library is online now you may ask why does this stuff matter why do you need public printing the world right now is in disarray I don't know your feelings about the world now but inequality of income has been growing poverty disease India has a surplus of food 200 million people don't eat we can solve those problems climate change these crimes against our planet as you can see from global warming this is not some far-fetched idea this is real intolerance violence against people of other religions violence against people of other ethnicities violence against women and children intolerance intolerance against ideas the horrific shooting of Gorilankesh here in Bangalore fake news Nazis getting on Facebook coming up with fake stories in the United States and the question is what can you do about something like this I believe that every generation, every point in time has an opportunity if you're technical and it was the early 1960s you'd be like Sam, you'd help invent the digital phone switch or invent computers if you were in the 1950s you might have been working in aerospace same goes with social issues there are things we can do if you were living in the 1880s you would be battling against involuntary servitude you would be following Gandhi I believe that our opportunity the unmet promise is universal access to knowledge it's something we can do we can make it happen and the reason that matters is because a democracy is owned by the people and the key to democracy is the citizens and I believe the key to change you can't solve global warming today but if we all understand what's going on with our environment I believe we will start to take actions so I believe the key to change is two things now Gandhi told us that one of the keys to change is love when you see the Nazis you don't go beat them up one of the things I don't like in the United States is we have the alt-right and then we have people going in saying let's beat up Nazis well that's not the answer Gandhi and King both taught us that love is the answer but they also taught us something else which is that if we want to change the world they were invoking justice run a day here if we want to change the world we must educate ourselves and educate our rulers and Gandhi before they committed satchekra they spent an intense amount of time educating themselves and then educating their rulers before Gandhi left for Dandi for the grand march he spent a month in that ashram training himself and his fellow marchers he sent petitions to the government saying I am going to do this and so I believe education as well as love is a key thing Robin did not drop Tagore felt that way as well when Gandhi tried to remove basic education because he didn't like the British schools Tagore published his call to truth and he said our mind must acknowledge the truth of knowledge just as our heart must learn the truth of love you have to do both and so I believe that knowledge is the answer to fake news you don't solve fake news by censoring it because you can never do that but you can have better news you can have true news if we want to solve the problems of economic opportunity we have to take our government back because that's the only way we're going to solve those kinds of problems if we want to solve intolerance and bigotry we have to educate our children to understand that that's not the answer right so that when they grow up they don't tolerate that and society starts to change and I believe that the propagation and diffusion of knowledge is the only systematic path to change that's the only way you're going to change your government but this isn't going to happen just by itself Gandhi was a big fan of what he called bread labor that comes from a bible quote and for him bread labor at first was printing when he went to the phoenix ashram he had to use that printing press every day everybody did manual labor with the printing press later on it was the spinning wheel well today Gandhi would say that coding open source software every day is bread labor it really is it's manual labor and it makes your world better you're making something real the other thing that Gandhi taught us is about public work that we must spend part of our time it's fine to have a business it's fine to make money that's good but we also if we want to own our governments which we do in a democracy we have to be part of it on the front of every one of the standards that I published there's a cover sheet and it's got elephants and it's got you know logos and stuff like that but at the bottom is a quote from the Niti Shatakam and it says knowledge is such a treasure which cannot be stolen and I totally agree with that knowledge has to be shared and I think that's our opportunity so thank you very much I think Sam and I will take questions now alright try to use a microphone because we're live on the internet so that way people will be able to hear your questions and we got about half hour so you know we'll field anything you got it was a great talk thank you so much one of the questions I had was about the kind of philosophy we have these days so the discussions are of course I mean if you meet in this kind of communities you're having discussions about innovation and data and all of that but otherwise the discussion the mood of the country has changed from you understand right there's a lot of false news there's a lot of false propaganda and I think it's affecting the kind of economy we are living in how do you think we should counter it and how should we go forward I mean if you were to advise not just at this level at our level even the higher levels what would your advice be first of all I am biased so let's start with that I am biased with the idea of India that our founding fathers had so my approach to this would be first focus on building inclusive India inclusive India does not necessarily mean just Hindu, Muslim women tribals everybody has to have a stake in India and at times being a majority I must over do something for minority it is like having a handicapped child in the house other people would feel jealous that you are giving too much importance to a handicapped that's what you have to do this is your family you cannot ignore a part of your family so I would focus on inclusion I would then focus on new technologies today with new possibilities in the future as the core of my thinking and not worry about past I am not interested in drivers or jobs for the drivers anymore I am interested in driverless car and its impact on India I don't want to look at old jobs that doesn't mean I am going to ignore old jobs but I want to look at new jobs of tomorrow I want to make sure that 650 million people below age of 25 have a dream their dream cannot be based on what all these politicians are saying they have no clue okay but these young people have been sucked into their narrative you need new narrative new narrative has to be that look everything we are doing is obsolete we want to create new India with new tools new technology new future like he said why with all the food in India 200 million people are hungry why our children don't have enough nutrition are we using technology to take that food to the right people 7 years ago I started food bank in India just one guy I don't have money like other rich people have 7 years to get 10 food banks in India okay every district should have a food bank every district should take responsibility to feed their hungry forget about government it is not government's job government is not equipped so as we begin to decentralize as we begin to use this new instrument we are basically empowering every human being you could be teacher you could be doctor and you don't need to follow all the government norms and you could be helping other people beside making your own living this world has created a model where greed is the most important thing I have discussion with my own children sometimes my friend would say dad why haven't you a billionaire all your flunkies are billionaire you know why do I have to work you know I am Sam Pitura's son I said too bad okay you got to do what you got to do I will never make a phone call to get my son a job I will never call anybody for my daughter to have an admission no way I just don't do that okay how do we build people with character we have lost character in India everybody is corrupt and then everybody complains that everybody is corrupt you know right to complain okay because everybody wants instant gratification nobody wants to put in Dhiruba Ambani was a good friend of mine I used to tell Dhiruba Dhiruba biggest problem in India one who has something to give wants to take more one who wants to give has nothing to give how do you find people who have something to give ready to give that's the kind of narrative I would have again I am not a social scientist I am not an economist so don't take me too seriously I am just an engineer thank you I hear from you please I hear from you about decentralized decentralized microphone I can't hear you I hear from you about decentralized but if you look at technology everywhere technology is actually centralizing things whether you look at media like Gmail Facebook basic question is that I am talking about decentralization but technology is centralized including in India also if you look at it where it is becoming centralized no not true I will finish it when it becomes centralized the worry of the people as you talk about in districts and everything the center thinks you know I am doing an amazing job he doesn't care about what happens in the district because he says my job is just to build the central technology and do technology I just observe this and when you say about decentralization I agree with you but I see the other thing and you also talk about technology so I just want to hear you here good question first of all on one hand information is democratized on the other hand information is centralized so you have this contradiction information is democratized because you and I can go get whatever information you want information is centralized because Google and Facebook has all the information we need but those are two or few companies but with information which is decentralized I can do lot for myself I can find out that there is traffic in Bangalore I can find out where is the next restaurant in Bangalore so don't confuse decentralization with centralized information of course I don't like centralized information that's a separate issue we can have a separate conversation on that but information access helps decentralization of activities simple example would be if I have vacancies for five doctors in district I can find those five doctors in my local area because of information now Google may have information on every doctor centralized that's Google's problem so don't confuse that unfortunately because of centralized information today best talent in the world is used to increase clicks what a stupid thing to do so you have the best brains in the world what are you trying to do I am going to create more clicks I am going to create fake news so you get more clicks I am going to create some other package so you get more clicks I was at Facebook office last week I am on the advisory board of Mastercard so we are all gone I thought I will also go because I had never seen their office you go there and you see this thousands of kids and one group of kids are working on this emoji trying to define and change is it going to change the world but they think this is very important task they are so intense you know all hyped up and doing great technological contribution innovation come on give me a break but that's how world sees so we have to really understand what is so very fundamental fundamental thing in life is really very simple help food shelter education love work environment almost done if we take care of all of that for millions of people then in the process some guys will click let them click they will go by best of the best you know I am on the board of institute of design in Chicago so best designers who graduate from this school which is the largest design school in the world will go work for Kaltiyar Louis Vuitton so I told this dean one day I said Patrick have you ever been to India so Patrick said no I went to go to India and go to Dharavi Patrick had no idea what Dharavi was so I kept bugging him and finally he realized that this board of director is bugging me so I better go one day and Patrick is a great human being great innovator so Patrick comes to India goes to Dharavi and Patrick calls me from Dharavi he said Sam this is a gold mine for PhD thesis he said I can get 20 PhDs from this place he said there are so many design challenges here he said I never thought that there is a design challenge in an environment like this so here 10 students from Chicago come here study Dharavi how does water get in what kind of jobs are created you know they found out that people they have very little space but they take too much space in storing water so some guy came up with a plastic bag to hang on the wall so you get free space there is a design revolution in Chicago on Dharavi because best brain decided to look at the problem of the poor and that is the challenge sorry for a long answer so Sam my name is Koen Carlos I am the CEO of an AI research lab here in Bangalore been in touch with you so one of the questions I have for you is so I see that you are talking in terms of using technology to solve problems and this is an approach that a lot of economists had advocated at one point poor economics you know and those books advocated this but there recently has been a lot of work by Kintaro Toyama for instance he wrote a book called Geek Heresy which basically said that none of the technological interventions have poor people so in a developing country like ours any amount of technology that you throw at things will only exacerbate the difference between the rich and the poor it will not bring the poor up it serves as a multiplier not as a leveler so that was a charge made by Kintaro he now teaches at Yale so you could look up his book Geek Heresy it's a very good book he worked here in Bangalore for many years and I interacted with him so one of the things I wanted to ask you is when you advocate policies based on technology why don't you measure the outcomes for instance for 30 years you have been working with the government of India look at the outcomes look at the roads outside look at what happens when it rains you know you see the outcomes are horrible why don't you instead invest and think like education right if you look at the education budget of the government of India when you were the advisor it was around 7 billion was the federal education budget the amount they spent buying fighter airplanes from the USA, Israel and Russia every year was around 20 to 30 billion why couldn't you have told them just buy a few you know few fewer planes and quadruple the education budget the 1960s the recommended federal education budget is about four times what it is currently right it should have been around 25 to 30 billion per per annum and they've been keeping it at 7 billion every year why did you not change this you know why didn't you create some grad schools worthy of the name today right the best grad school in India today is ranked 200 in the world right so why didn't you do something about this when you had a chance okay I had a friend called Rajini Kothari I don't know whether you have heard of Rajini Kothari Rajini Kothari was a great social scientist head of the center for studying developing society in Delhi Rajini was my childhood friend and Rajini always used to argue with me saying Sam you are trying to solve problem using technology I said that's the only thing I know don't accept me to solve your problem with the tool I don't know somebody else to fix potholes on the road don't tell me I can fix potholes on the road that's not my expertise I do drive on that I also feel same way you feel I don't like potholes but I can do it so don't tell me to do it I know what I can do and what I can't do if I advise government that don't have fighter planes but put more money on education I know nobody is going to listen okay because all the army guys have everything locked up so why waste my time okay I am not an idiot I may look like one okay so I know what I can do and what I can't do when I became chairman of knowledge commission I was the guy who increased education budget four times along with my colleagues okay but I never told that to anybody lot of people say you guys did some great work during NDA but you never advertise a UPA but you never advertise I said look my job was to do my work not go on to my horn I don't do that I don't have to tell people what I did I am not here for popularity contest I don't need a vote okay I have to do my work even my own family does not know what I do you'll be surprised they have no clue as to I was chairman of innovation council I was chairman of these I did report on railway reforms I have nothing to do with it but I do it each one of us will have to decide what I can do and what I can't do so don't expect me to solve all the problems I am humanly not capable I am not knowledgeable I am not equipped so find a civil engineer bug him to fix pothole find a army guy tell him to convince army guy to spend less on fighter jets specialized in identifying problems and I tell people in India you do not need talent to identify problems in India you walk on the street stand there for 10 minutes you can list all India's problems you also don't need talent to come up with solutions but I said earlier you need young people to have courage to go do it against all the odds lot of my friends from America want to come and help and they are experts and they are great immediately they'll say what will be my designation you have no designation okay you are jhadwala go get it done you know will I get a car will I get a bungalow what will be my title you are finished you can make a contribution okay you may be great guy you may have a lot of feelings for India are you really interested in solving your problem against all the odds people will hate you people will frustrate you people will abuse you you have to just love them it may not happen all the time but keep doing it there's a broader issue as well one of the things I found I used to teach occasionally give guest lectures in universities and I'd ask the students what do you want and they say I want to make $100,000 a year and you go to Silicon Valley and you say what do you want I want to be a CEO and too many people are using one would be useful to driver to cook to tribal people it's a technology television right and I think that's absolutely correct especially in India we now see with the UP elections or in the US almost a weaponization of social media weaponization of ways that we always thought access to information would be a good thing and in the intermediate stage we are at okay thank you at the intermediate stage we are at we are struggling with that we have to tackle fake news by giving access to information access to knowledge I appreciate you know about this but the way fake news is percolated in India at least is that different political parties would hire dozens of party winners and they would sit on the computer and write scripts and troll or sit on the computer and write scripts and do stuff or WhatsApp forwards and stuff like that do we create a corollary of that to challenge WhatsApp forwards by sending real WhatsApp forwards like how do we use the same media that we have today to give access to actual knowledge so I think here is the answer to fake news it's tempting to say we need to stop fake news we need Twitter to censor fake news and throw away all the Nazis but the problem is how do you know you know what's bad because sometimes you look at something and you say this is bad and it turns out it isn't I think the answer to fake news is good news and I think when you go to the store and you buy your daily newspaper you have a choice you know do you buy the Hindu do you buy the Hindustan Times you buy the newspaper that you believe in and I think the answer to fake news is two things one is better good news and then a way when you're looking at something you know how when you're on Google and you're about to go to a bad site and it says warning warning this might be a phishing site I think a plugin that you know you can choose which of the plugins but when you're looking at something maybe there's a little ding ding ding that goes off saying you know 10 people have said this is total nonsense here you can judge for yourself but you know here's an alarm if journalism students for example spent their time looking around the net and logging their opinions of what they think is right and what is not you know maybe they're wrong and I have access to that database when I'm looking at a site maybe I can get a clue as to what I'm looking at and if I'm educated maybe I'll look at that and say oh that's just total nonsense but you know it is more than fake news let me give you an example you know there is a court case in India on National Herald where I'm one of the accused by Subramaniam Swami and I have no problem going public on these kinds of things so first of all it's a fake case there is nothing in it it's all bogus but people in India believe that we all have done something wrong because the news was that there is 1200 crore work of land we have gathered come on give me a break so what he does is there is a summon on me that has to be served so someone regularly gets served through foreign office because I'm in Chicago so you go to foreign office they tell US government will inform the ambassador ambassador will come and write to me or whatever so Subramaniam Swami is of the world who did it sends a guy from India to my home in Chicago which is okay and some fake American white guy dressed up as a security come to my door fortunately that day I'm not home and my wife is also not home so they hang something on my door take a picture and all over the twitter Petrodah is excounding the funny thing so I get calls from my friend saying what is this Petrodah is excounding with a picture of my house it is not a fake news so I said look just ignore it you know you laugh at it okay how could I be excounding from my own house where I lived for 53 years but this little guy who doesn't know anything Petrodah is like that he always excounds he is basically corrupt because he has all congress party money he was friend of Rajiv Gandhi they have 17,000 crores Congress goes on everybody then starts rumor what can you do because everybody is basically ignorant nobody wants to check facts because it's worth getting facts is worth work gossip is very interesting it just flies you know but that's the world we live in but I think over a period of time this is going to change we have started a non profit organization in Paris where I am one of the founding director called AID where about 20 of us are fighting this whole idea of fake news it's a big organization now we have a major meeting coming up in Hague you know so we do a lot of these interesting things some work, some don't work do we have time? I have at least 6 more we will be brief in answering now yes I think we need better technology for microphone there you go you have to put the mic right up to your mouth eat it so yes this is a question for both of you thank you so much for your talk about digital humanities where basically the heart of what we do is talk about how technology is not neutral and how it is a top down hegemonic centralized part of our culture that we are not looking or examining the values behind and I find in India a lot of the rhetoric around say things like make in India or digital India are this kind of very techno utopian technodeterministic way of looking at the way technology can help us so how do you think it would be possible to teach the values behind technology in places like engineering colleges for example where there is as you are saying the best brains being kind of deviated towards places like google and to get them to understand the kind of history of how technology has authority baked into it so yes I would be really interested to hear any responses you have I believe that code is law and when I teach engineering students I want them to read the request for comments and understand how the internet works and if you look at the internet it's the end to end principle there is nothing in the middle and that's why we started the internet because the telecommunications companies were in the middle and they were screwing up and so the people like vince serf and david clark and all those put together this technology that went over the telephone network and turned it into a dumb network so it is not inevitable that technology is top down and you have to teach the engineers that we can have that decentralized world we can have open operating systems instead of ios on your iPhone that nobody can see the source code and begin using those technologies whenever you can and designing those and a lot of that is folks like you are working in the open source world because a lot of what we are trying to do is make that thing not a top down thing something that empowers people I used to have a poster on my wall that said freedom of the press belongs to those who own one when I started internet talk radio I had that poster up on my wall and I was able to start a radio station with one computer and at the time it cost millions of dollars to start a radio station so I think we can change that and part of it is up to the engineering schools to educate their students that it doesn't have to be go get a job and work for Facebook there are other things you can do with your life same thing with civil engineers you don't have to build skyscrapers you can build homes through the port but at the end of the day there are a few fundamental issues that you need to really discipline analysis creativity respect for other ideas ethics openness simplicity these are all Gandhian ideas just learn 10 things to do in life everything else will follow truth is a very simple idea trust is a very simple idea how many people trust each other what does trust mean but we have never taught these things and we get caught in this very complex ecosystem and we are searching for simplicity can't find it okay short questions and short answers okay I will try to give it a short so given that you have been working on copyright for so long and been doing all these let's say gorilla interventions like this digital library in India but the copyright regime in general has been turning into one direction like the term keeps increasing do you see any ways of basically or any hopes of getting it back the copyright term shortening back what kind of interventions can be made for that is there any cracks in that armor so now it's 70 years is there any TPP life less 70 years is there any hope of getting it back to 50, 40, 30 I believe copyright reform is something that must happen copyright has gone way remember copyright is not there to give you a living as a writer copyright is there to provide an incentive to create knowledge for people and as part of that bargain you get limited rights we've turned that into this infinite copyright term copyright reform is something that people all over the world have been working on we haven't been very lucky so far but I think as people understand the importance of information which is the world we live in they're going to realize that information must be available to a much broader swath of people and when you do that the world changes I learned that when I put government databases online right when the patent database was a private thing it was only patent lawyers that used it because it was expensive I put it online and millions and millions of engineers started you know reading the patent database in order to understand what's there so that was a long answer I'm taking a picture okay next question I got the next question for both of you so when we say that we need to follow Gandhi and his idea it's very hard I mean you can follow Gandhi in certain ways for good but not everywhere and when we had this discussion at the Gandhi ashram we were discussing how to bring Gandhi on to the internet there's still democracy Gandhi and democracy on to the internet I still couldn't find an answer did you find something how could we propagate it further I missed the question what is the answer you are finding how do we spread Gandhi and philosophy on the internet use Gandhi better on the internet oh I think it's pretty straightforward spread truth trust people be open love everybody that's the Gandhi and for you to follow Gandhi you don't have to follow everything let me give you one example in 89 I was to give a convocation speech at Calcutta I am I go to give a speech and I never prepared my speech I just say whatever I feel like so you have to have a written speech you know I'm giving a convocation speech day after tomorrow in Ahmedabad I don't have written speech so I go there and I'm in my mood and something clicked on Gandhi so I said look you don't have to follow Gandhi everywhere you could wear jean, drink scotch and still be Gandhi next day headline in the paper Petronas said Gandhi drank scotch and wore jeans that's okay you have to see it in that light okay we can hear you I have a very quick and short question given that the next billion users of the internet in India are going to come from mobile how do you see the open data project that you're engaged in like how do you make sure that you'll reach the next billion users on mobile who are using a smart and a feature phone in whatever you're doing will have of course huge in particular information which you have every information you have today will have to be available on this I think a lot of people have been working on that problem I know the folks in Mozilla for example have shifted much of their focus to working in a phone world Facebook guys and Google guys they all work on that I think we're beginning to understand how to go from the big screen to the smaller portable screen now the question is is there going to be a closed operating system will you be able to install your own applications on there will you be able to put your own data it's getting harder and harder to take your own data and put it on your iPhone so that you can access it if it doesn't fit within the official paradigms that they give you there is a lot of work going on today there is a chipset which will give you projection on cellphone I have one problem right where if you're a small screen and you're five friends and you want to see something you just project on wall wherever you are and there will be big screen you know and that's the answer Hi, Aotea in the back so I want to pick up on the fake news discussion that was going on few questions ago Facebook has come under scrutiny in the US because of their role in elections over there and fake news on Facebook is something that was clearly an outcome of the algorithmic bias it was something that the algorithm selected for and amplified fake news in India on the other hand happens on WhatsApp the social network is different it is not an algorithmic propagation it is a user propagation and yet it's the same company it's Facebook but I see they are holding them to account saying that they control the platform they have the ability to do something about it and they don't even care it's only in the US that after severe criticism because you got that chap over there you know as an outcome of Facebook that there is some talk of Facebook needing to do better what happens in India so the question is don't we have a responsibility to speak up more about Facebook's responsibility to fix their fake news problem in India on WhatsApp what makes you think Facebook cares in the US as opposed to simply fielding a couple of senators questions well they will be forced to to the extent that at least they are under public scrutiny out here nobody even thinks of Facebook as being the responsible party nobody you should speak I should speak we all should speak that's not going to change Facebook I can tell you that we are not speaking some of these companies pay experts $150,000 to generate fake news I am telling you I know it and not only that companies like Facebook I would say on occasion encourage that practice I am not saying they are evil but you know what their metric is revenue that's what they care about that's the only thing that's important and I think it's important that these companies maybe face up to their social responsibilities that the users demand that and if they don't get it from Facebook we should start looking at other platforms a lot of these platforms that looked great like Myspace they are gone right Facebook isn't necessarily going to last Uber may not make it they seem to have totally blown it they seem to be monoliths may not last that long and they won't last if we don't let them if we don't like the way they behave we need to find another platform to work on the same is that we have not been able to develop our own local platform nobody talks about that India does not have our own operating system India does not have any social network which is unique to India look what Chinese did they got all their stuff we could have done it we do have a hike messenger that nobody uses it's a WhatsApp of India so the thing that I want to get to is users leaving WhatsApp because of fake news sounds like an extremely unlikely proposition as far as my reading of this room goes we all know that WhatsApp is a problem because of the fake news that we keep getting on family WhatsApp groups but the solution isn't to leave WhatsApp because we will leave it but a family won't and they will continue to propagate fake news you can't delete it right now but we can educate ourselves and we can look for the alternative I used to use a variety of platforms and I started to like Twitter and I've used it for probably the last 8 years I'm getting a little tired of it and I'm looking around for alternatives you can't solve these problems overnight this is the actual question before I forget at my age you tend to forget little quickly I have been promoting this idea here I have spoken on it is we should split Internet into two one someone who is willing to identify himself and two someone who is going to hide behind all the fake news come from people who want to hide fake news don't come from people who are wide open saying I'm happy to die I'm promoting fake news so if I see when internet protocol was written we didn't have cell phones so internet protocol was written for a fixed line internet protocol evolved and cell phones evolved faster so I had a conversation with Vint Vint is a good friend saying Vint you guys didn't think of mobile caliphany at that time if you had thought of mobile caliphany then protocol would have been written differently so wherever you go it will follow then you will identify me see he wants authentication he wants reliable he wants to allow but he wants the ability to say this is a real person and I know it's a real person and therefore that person can get to the banking account and I know this person did that security and authentication have always been the holy grail of the internet we failed we've always failed but it's something we need to work on so there are solutions there but again it comes down to us demanding a new way of doing things what was that what was that I missed it should you require adar to use the internet I want to ask if you endorse this position that is authentication mandatory do you endorse the position that you should be authenticated to use the internet and publish that is the one solution that's what I'm saying so that I know that you are a real person I know that whatever you will say you will own up to it you may say something wrong and you will be sorry for it that's okay would this solve fake news given that you have Donald Trump putting out fake news regularly completely under a verified identity that people paid in political system I know of rooms 200 people who just do nothing but spread fake news okay look that's a really hard problem and it's an important problem and you raise a good question I don't know the answers but I know we got to work on it so more questions yes so provided the premises a little bit of the radar from what the discussion has been going on provided the premises of India and the thoughts of decentralization and the politics in this decentralization what are your comments on that how would that work in a decentralized atmosphere the politics how would it I have a very weird fear that it would again hamper it so what are your comments on that see it depends on what you call decentralization in politics to me decentralization in politics imply elected officer at not just panchayat but at the district elected officer in the city and given power to them today mayor has no power district collector has all the power there is no elected officer so to me that is decentralized politics whether at this higher level group of people elect this leader or that leader will take little more time in India but that leader should be also elected today none of the parties have democracy none okay and how they become leader they just become leader and they are high command and they are all over I do not understand this okay but they have captured so democracy has been hijacked everywhere what is happening in US democracy has been hijacked and when they hijacked that they stole your government you own your government it is a democracy and part of the problem is that we have not taken that back but there is a very interesting difference in US when democracy gets hijacked institutions do not get hijacked in India when democracy get hijacked institutions also get hijacked well our entire federal government just got hijacked the entire federal government got hijacked but still American institutions are pretty strong one of the questions is on ethics someone comes and does a public service like you did a public service eat the microphone eat it yeah okay you talked about public service you talked about open right today I also find a lot of people coming out into the public service I also hear how there is a conflict of interest in what they are doing do you have a guidance to them when you say youngsters they see two type of people one is someone like Sam Petra who came some time back provided 3 dot I had a cousin work there in the early time when you said 28 I am 40 so I got associate saying that yes that was true but at the same time today what people are seeing is someone is coming to the open source not free software open source doing something setting the whole thing across to someone making money right so using others thing for example I had a question to you you build the whole great internet archive awesome on one side but there is a fear coming in the mind hey if with a lot of hits and clicks will you sell it to Google because Google will find the indexing to be very good and Facebook and Google would both compete and Microsoft you know gate would also compete with the same right how are they going to have a ethics and you know when we talk about Gandhi the ethics and everything comes into picture too so you know I would like your views on it apologies for the wrong question in this audience first of all what he is doing is non-profit so he can't sell his website to Google okay so that's and even if he sells he won't get a dime not only that you know we have a corporate policy we don't own intellectual property we have done it okay that's I want to clarify that first otherwise he won't be my friend to when I came to India I had to make a choice do I want to build a business or I want to lose my shirt and make a contribution that choice was mine I decided I'm never going to make a dime in India no business no salary no bank account no ownership of Durubhai Ambani stock or any stock nothing I have no bank account I don't own anything even today not only in India even in US okay because I don't need anything my wife buys my stuff if she says your socks are fatta hua filled by new stock other I don't care I look weird anyway so it's not going to make any difference okay so you have to make that personal decision somebody might say I will get a government job and I'll make a lot of money that's a personal decision you and I can't stop that so ethics is something very personal ethics cannot be institutionalized when some news reporter ask me what's your view on corruption I said I have no views on corruption but I can tell you one thing I am not corrupt 100% guaranteed but I can't say same thing about my wife and my wife went crazy she said how dare you say this on television I said it is true I don't know you could be corrupt I have no idea I can only take responsibility of myself he may have bribed somebody for something how do I know I've never asked her ethics is very personal each one of us will have to decide that I am ethical don't advise anybody on being ethical it doesn't work just keep quiet and enjoy and love them that's all and we learn ethics right that doesn't just rain down from the sky that's education we teach ourselves ethics our parents teach it the church teaches that but again that's knowledge and education we have to instill those values in ourselves in our rulers and in our children and I think that's how you solve those problems one more question last question our general understanding so far has been that technology and data are agnostic that they have no biases and they do not have prejudices however isn't it a problem with artificial intelligence and machine learning that human biases and prejudices are eventually going to be implemented into the AI that we create because eventually the artificial intelligence is only going to be as good as the data that we provided with also isn't this problem exacerbated because the AI often functions as a black box wherein you can't see what's happening inside and all you can eventually see is what's coming out of it now when you look at the implications of this which is say governments making decisions or even courts using it in sentencing which has happened in Wisconsin we are faced with a great problem how do you propose we solve this technology is like a knife you can cut your vegetables and you can kill somebody you take a pick do you want a knife or you don't we have selected to have knife technology is exactly in the same category there is good use there is bad use some will use it properly some will use it improperly but technology is a great equalizer I used to say and I still say once in a while technology is the greatest social leveler second only to death it can equalize to human beings if you have smart phone I have smart phone you can do same thing I can do then it doesn't matter you have access to phone I have access to phone you are equal so technology has some good part and also has some bad part if somebody is watching pornography on cell phone all day what can I do more power to him I don't care so let me conclude with that black box thing because I think that's important robots are black boxes AI is a black box IOS is a black box I think one of the important things is we need to know how our infrastructure works we need to know how the things that are important in our life work I believe I was a big fan and I still am of Hinsuaraj I believe in this day and age the big challenge is code and I think if we are worried about an AI bot making decisions in a court that are bad we need to demand that the source code be open just like when you have security modules we need to see the source code to see what's going on is there a back door in my OS is my encryption flawed and so part of it is demanding that we are able to know the rules of the infrastructures and the laws because code is law that governs our life ok thank you so much we really appreciate it thank you for coming on Sunday really appreciate it thank you everyone for coming today