‘Collaborative technical competence and public planning is required to ensure social justice in the electronic world’

Roland Kulke, Brussels representative of ‘Transform Europe’, European network for alternative thinking and political dialogue, has called for a public approach to digital technology including infrastructure and an open access data policy to resolve the inequality and social injustice existing in the digital world.

He was speaking at a keynote session on ‘Equity and social justice in a digital world’ on the second day of the ‘Freedom Fest 2023: Knowledge, Innovation, Technology’ event organised by various organisations promoting the concept of knowledge freedom, with the support of the State government.

“A collaborative technical competence and public planning is required to ensure social justice in the electronic world. Strong co-determination within the enterprises is also needed which can be achieved with trade unions,” he pointed out.

Kiran Chandra, General Secretary Free Software Movement of India, spoke on the importance of governmental intervention to prevent monopolisation of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies.

“There is a vast data expansion happening today with about 1 billion terabyte of data being generated daily. While the total number of connected devices in the world was a million in 1991, the number is 5,000 crores at present. On an average, every person in the world today is monitored by at least 10 devices, showing the level of interconnectedness. However the technology of generative AI, which needs a high Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is monopolised by certain companies. Hence, it becomes the government’s responsibility to spend on GPU clusters and build alternative algorithms for people to innovate,” he said.

C. Pandu Rangan, Satish Dhawan Chair Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bengaluru, said that personal data privacy is facing a major challenge today. Referring to the passing of the Data Protection Bill last week in the Parliament, he said that privacy, being a basic societal need, must be ensured and data must be reasonably, logically and transparently used.

The Wiki Sangamam on the sidelines of the Freedom Fest brought together active participants in the Malayalam Wikipedia community. The discussions centred on expanding the scope of the local Wiki activities, with Malayalam dictionary, proverb collections and other novel initiatives under the Wiki umbrella. Vijayan Rajapuram spoke on the School Wiki initiative. Any school within the State can be located in the Wiki using its place or school code. The activities of the students from each school can be uploaded under various categories of the particular school’s page. The use of Wiki Commons as a platform to store images forever was also discussed. Meenakshi Nandini, who was recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation, for writing a large number of articles, was also felicitated at the meeting.

Industries Minister P. Rajeeve, who inaugurated the professional conclave organised by the Kerala Professional Network, said that the State government is set to launch the campus industrial parks initiative with the aim of creating a knowledge society.