The Interledger Community 🌱: OpenSpeaks

Bringing Down a Mountain — Future Money Final Grant Report #2

OpenSpeaks — Thu, 21 Mar 2024 03:21:53 +0000

“The landfill is full, and so are the dreams”.

The Bringing Down a Mountain's director Subhashish Panigrahi and Interledger Community Ambassador Hollis Wong-Wear discuss the film at the premiere during Interledger Summit, Costa Rica.

Project Update

The short docufiction Bringing Down a Mountain (dir. Subhashish Panigrahi), made possible through the Future|Money Grant, dissects the intersecting themes of access, abolition and caste through the experiences of residents of a rural village and that of a hyper-urban city. Set in a rural village in India, this 13-minute film underscores community sovereignty in access to mobile data and the know-how and decision-making power of digital payments. Premiered at the Interledger Summit 2023 in Costa Rica, a DVD copy of Bringing Down a Mountain is archived physically at the U.S. Library of Congress, and the film is gearing up to be screened at major international film festivals. The screenplay by noted activist and poet Bharat Majhi includes long-form Odia poetry narrated by educator Monalisa Moharana and theatre maestro Debadatta Pati. Blackmagic Design published an official press release announcing the film with an exclusive interview with the director, and the Interledger Foundation published a podcast with behind-the-scenes updates.

Progress on Objectives (KPI’s) (progress on project)

Conversations between technologist and film's collaborator Arky A.R. and computer scientist and media activist T.B. Dinesh at the beautiful redwoods of Camp Navarro, CA, during dWeb Camp 2023 inspired the narrative on community-based technology.

Bringing Down a Mountain was intended to push the audience to examine current digital payment systems critically and reimagine a parallel system for the future. The film underscores how complex socio-economic and structural barriers prevent most people from controlling their lives and making digital systems work for them. A part of the film critically examines several systemic obstacles, particularly the Indian caste system's role in financial exclusion. The film's other significant part dives deeper into the collective leadership of the Bahujan—the majority of people who are also marginalised—to abolish the caste system and reclaim access. Majhi's powerful narratives starkly contrast reality and consciously lit a web of pragmatism while elaborating a radical approach to end the caste system. There is a strong critique of the platform economy and an apparent demand for it to work seamlessly for all rather than just the privileged few. Rather than loftily wishing for minor fixes to the existing digital economic models, the story asks boldly—“can we reverse the present oppressive ways?”

The film used solely Creative Commons (CC) and Public Domain media and was released under a Creative Commons ShareAlike Attribution (CC BY-SA 4.0) International License. A long list of open source software programs and libraries were also used to make the film, and an open source Citation Style Language (CSL) style was explicitly created to provide credit for such media. It was later released publicly under a CC License.

A DVD version of Bringing Down a Mountain is archived at the US Library of Congress.

Short video (3-5 minutes) Describing the conceptual thought around the process.

Official Website
IMDb Page
Exclusive Interview by Blackmagic Design (in 13 languages)
Podcast by Interledger Foundation by Lawil Karama and Hollis Wong-Wear

What’s Next?

After a short and much-needed break after the premiere, we have started submitting Bringing Down a Mountain to film festivals. Considering its intersectional and structural approach, we will continue screening the film in India, its premise, and worldwide. The screenings would continue with conversations with the audience, helping spur ideas for inclusive digital payment practices. We also plan to write about the learning for the academic and the larger research community. This film builds on Subhashish's 2021 feature-length documentary MarginalizedAadhaar which captured tech-based exclusions and a quest for inclusive design, and our long-term goal is to build a more prominent media narrative by merging the themes of these two films. While this was a speculative fiction piece, we want to make a larger documentary around these issues and themes. In a way, we're only getting started!

Community Support

We wanted to share our gratitude to the ILF team, particularly Lawil, Ayesha, Chris, and Ambassadors Hollis and Kokayi for their kind support during the entire journey. The diverse ILF community has been remarkably supportive too, and we will continue sharing updates here as things progress while asking for input. We also would stay connected with many, keeping doors for future collaboration open.

Bringing Down a Mountain — Future Money Progress Grant Report #1

OpenSpeaks — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:33:45 +0000

From production: Dialogs recorded to cassette tapes as analog audio to be converted into digital audio again—a treatment to invoke the wide spectrum of tech access in the real world.

Project Update

Bringing Down a Mountain is a short docu-fiction film that was possible through the Future|Money Grant. The 13-minute film, made in India's Odia language, reimagines digital inclusion in a post-oppression Indian village, and it premiered at the Interledger Summit 2023 in Costa Rica. The film's production involves the use of solely Creative Commons-licensed media and a wide range of open-source software. A long-form poetry by noted Odia-language poet Bharat Majhi based on the original narrative story by Subhashish Panigrahi, who also directed the film, is voiced by Debadatta Pati and Monalisa Moharana.

Progress on Objectives (KPI’s) (progress on project)

July-August: Research on existing empirical studies about digital payments; Collection of success stories and learning from failure; Analysis of stories; Conversation with community/ies
August–September: Building docu-fiction film plot; Discussion with community storytellers (actors); Strengthening film plot
September–October: Film production (main shots and b-rolls; Translation; Subtitle creation)
October: Post-production (Video editing; Audio editing; Final subtitle creation); Creation of first-cut version of film; Recording of podcast (first part)
November: Premiere and exhibition at the ILP Summit — Feedback from Interledger grant team and ILP Summit participants; Recording of podcast (second part)

Short video (3-5 minutes) Describing the conceptual thought around the process.

What’s Next?

Submission to film festivals for competition and screening
Promoting on mainstream and social media
Submission to film critics
Search and submission for distribution

Community Support

Additional Comments

Relevant Links/Resources (optional)

OpenSpeaks — Grant Report #2

OpenSpeaks — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 15:33:18 +0000

Project Update

The broader scholarship in anthropology has provided some context to how the socioeconomic and linguistic hierarchies in the Indian subcontinent have created access and participation barriers for many marginalized communities. Furthermore, studies also help understand more the direct impact of systemic socioeconomic privileges (or the lack of them) on the agency of such communities affected by technology. Many new and emerging technologies, such as the Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), are often touted as open and distributed by design. In theory and at the outset, DLT does have the potential to promote openness and accountability from a technical standpoint. However, user sovereignty, wider access to information and fair and equitable content monetization in relation to socioeconomic dominance need further investigation. In our research, we have attempted to understand the web content ecosystem in two indigenous Adivasi languages – Ho and Santali – and how the current challenges and opportunities correspond to the future of web content monetization using DLT. It is important to note that Ho and Santali speakers have historically been oppressed in India, most notably through the Hindu caste system as it percolates through access to wealth, education and livelihoods. The affordability of smartphones and computers for creating content, the access to the internet, knowhow about monetizing content, the affordability of the content users to pay for content are some of the factors we studies in our work.

Progress on objectives

Building a small research team: Prasanta Hembram (Santali-language content creator active in editing Wikipedia, localization and user documentation of many open-source software, and speech data creator using Mozilla Common Voice) and Ganesh Birua (Ho-language content creator active in promoting Ho on social media, blogs and other web platforms) joined with Subhashish (founder, OpenSpeaks, an open project aimed to building resources and strategies for multimedia content creators in low-medium-resource languages) to further this study.
Public and open research hosted on Meta-Wiki, a Wikimedia project licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
Creation of hypothesis: Development of a broad range of hypotheses based on prior knowledge.
Desk research on the web content ecosystem keeping in mind socioeconomic, technological, educational and livelihoods factors.
Interim research findings presented at the Mozilla Festival 2021.
Surveys and in-depth interviews conducted with two groups of citizen content creators who have created their own web channels (YouTube, blogs, Facebook Pages/groups and Twitter handles). Analysis of this study helped elucidate the status quo of the web content ecosystems of these two languages and how they contrast with other dominant langage counterparts, and indicated the gaps and opportunities while shedding lights on the strategy behind content monetization.
RightsCon 2022 proposal selected to unveil the research findings.
Team preparing to submit a book proposal with the final outcomes.

Key activities

Design sprint: literature review, development of "how might we..." questions and preparation for Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 presentation
Presented a session at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2021
Participation by Prasanta Hembram at a Santali cultural event and documentation of anecdotal insights from content creators
Organized a panel discussion at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) titled "Building the wiki-way for low-resource languages
Co-organizing a workshop on media creation in the Ho language by Subhashish P.
Participation in the MozFest Trustworthy AI Working Groups program and development of openly-licensed (CC0 1.0 licensed) Natural Language Processing data in Ho and Santali.
Presented at MozFest 2022: "Low-resource languages, and their open source AI/ML solutions through a radical empathy lens"
Submission titled “Should web content monetization be allowed for Indigenous languages?” accepted for RightsCon 2022.

Communications and marketing

Throughout the entire span of this study we have presented at four international conferences that focus respectively on open licenses, Openness and digital rights advocacy: Creative Commons Global Summit 2021, Mozilla Festival 2021 and 2022, and RightsCon 2022. We also have participated and presented at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, an international conference that brings together governments, civil society actors, citizens and private organizations for high-level inter-country-level discourse about an open, distributed, decentralized and multi-stakeholder-led internet. We have organized an in-person workshop, in collaboration with an organization working towards the development of the Ho language, to study further the strong coherence between societies and the internet, especially the reducing social spaces during the pandemic. Additionally, beyond the scope of this project, we have contributed towards building wordlists both in the Ho and Santali languages in collaboration with the communities to help future work in Natural Processing Language (NLP), particularly for creation of spell-check and speech data, which is essential for further content development. This was beyond the original planned objectives and received support from Mozilla under a separate project.

What’s next?

We plan to publish the main report with the research outcomes and recommendations on the existing open research page on Meta-Wiki. The report would also have the executive summary in both Ho and Santali for the respective speakers to access the content of the report with ease. We had created an interim research report, apart from the interim grant report, that we had submitted the ACM FaccT Conference but were unsuccessful to present. We are working on furthering the report as a book proposal and would explore publishing it through a publisher.

What community support would benefit your project?

Additional comments

Relevant links/resources (optional)

interim grant report
Wordlist in Ho and Santali

OpenSpeaks — Interim Grant Report #1

OpenSpeaks — Fri, 14 Jan 2022 12:25:00 +0000

Screengrab of our Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 session: "Does Creative Commons Licensed Content Pay, Especially Indigenous Language Content?"

Project Update

As Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is gaining popularity in the larger web content sector, we have been studying what its expected impact would be for many indigenous communities in India. As we started working on the project to understand whether it would help promote open and distributed user freedom, and lead to a expansive access to information and fair content monetization. We focused on two Adivasi (indigenous) languages from India -- Ho and Santali for our work. We brought onboard two community members -- Ganesh Birua and Prasanta Hembram -- to lead the research on the web content ecosystems. Ganesh and Prasanta also happen to be content creators in Ho and Santali respectively. They both
created a long list of hypothesis by touch-basing the socioeconomic, educational, business and geopolitical issues related to their own languages. We conducted an online sprint to help ourselves with anticipation of content creators and created a list of "how might we..." questions. We also studied existing literature to check the hypothesis.

While most of our work happened online, Prasanta was able to meet leverage a cultural event that he attended to meet some of the Santali content creators. This was helpful to get some anecdotal insights. Similarly, Subhashish co-organized a small workshop along with the Birbasa student union where youth members of the union learned about building an audio pronunciation library using open-source tool Lingua Libre. This workshop also helped strengthen the collaboration with some content creators in Ho.

Currently we are conducting three sets of surveys (respondents can choose from English, Ho and Santali based on their fluence) to collect a range of anthropological, technical and other relevant details from Ho and Santali web content creators. While these surveys would help us understand nuances that are neither captured in existing literature or are being captured in a comprehensive manner, it would also help paint a picture of the web content ecosystem in both these language. We plan to interview some of the respondents to further investigate the hindrances in relation to the growth of web content in Ho and Santali, and the opportunities that they see in the horizon. As a final outcome of this work, we plan to summarize these inputs into a set of recommendations for the future of DLT-based content in both Ho and Santali language, and also in many other low-resource languages. We are also developing an open framework that decision makers of DLT-enabled content platforms can use to make informed decisions before launching DLT-driven web monetization systems.

Progress on objectives

Screengrab of the questionnaire used for a survey in the Ho language

Studied existing web content platforms that are in two indigenous languages (Ho and Santali) and/or are run by indigenous individuals/groups, their content dissemination process models, and their sustenance/business model.
Investigated on speakers (end users/audience) of two low-resource languages that are predominantly spoken with a limited amount of content being documented in written format.
We are in the process of investigating and documenting: a) demography and spectrum of the two target indigenous language speakers of India, b) web and multimedia content ecosystem, c) emerging trends, challenges and potential scopes, and a d) conceptual framework and model for enabling web monetization for citizen media.
Built a conceptual framework that can help content creators better design content delivery models while keeping the freedom of content producers and content users in the core (as opposed to using personal data as a currency).
While incorporating Web Monetization and Interledger Protocol in content models was in our original plan, we realized after further studying that it would be premature and the frameworks need to be used by decision makers of DLT-enabled platforms. So, we channeled our focus on building a robust framework and investigate further the web content ecosystem in both Ho and Santali.
Also, we maximized the use of open licensing (Creative Commons), open source software and other open standards in our entire work. Our research is periodically documented publicly whereas some of the codes and data that we thought would be helpful for Ho and Santali web content creators are hosted on a repository on GitHub.

Key activities

Design sprint: literature review, development of "how might we..." questions and preparation for Creative Commons Global Summit 2021 presentation
Presented a session at the Creative Commons Global Summit 2021
Participation by Prasanta Hembram at a Santali cultural event and documentation of anecdotal insights from content creators
Organized a panel discussion at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) titled "Building the wiki-way for low-resource languages
Co-organizing a workshop on media creation in the Ho language by Subhashish P.
Participation in the MozFest Trustworthy AI Working Groups program and development of openly-licensed (CC0 1.0 licensed) Natural Language Processing data in Ho and Santali.
Submission to MozFest 2022: "Low-resource languages, and their open source AI/ML solutions through a radical empathy lens" (submission accepted)

Communications and marketing

Periodic documentation in an open and public research page.
We have mostly used telephonic and VOIP conversations for all remote communications.
Session at online conference Creative Commons Global Summit 2021
We have spent some funding in one physical workshop.

What’s next?

Analysis of the ongoing surveys (respondents are web content creators in Ho and Santali), identification of a set of interviewees among the survey respondents and studying in detail the web content ecosystems.
We plan to speak at MozFest 2022: "Low-resource languages, and their open source AI/ML solutions through a radical empathy lens" on March 9, 2022 and share the outcomes of our project
We plan to publish the outcomes of our entire project by the end of March 2022 on the open research page.
We are also applying to multiple conferences where we can present the final outcomes of our research and disseminate the same in the wider community.

What community support would benefit your project?

We welcome any and all feedback or questions in the discussion page of our public research page. (one time sign up or log in with existing credentials required; comments without logging in will log IP addresses)

References

Panigrahi S and Patnaik S (2021). Building the wiki-way for low-resource languages: Session Report. O Foundation. Bhubaneswar. United Nations Internet Governance Forum. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/df9y-nz19 (accessed 19 December 2021). PDF

Attribution

Cover image: Participants of the workshop on media creation in the Ho language. Image used with permission from Birbasa, Bhubaneswar, India.