Back in 2011, I took Lakshmi Praturi, the founder of INK Talks, to the India Against Corruption protests. I wasn’t involved with the protests, and had no interest in being involved in the protests, but it was an interesting academic exercise to witness what was then, the most significant public protest in my lifetime.
I had known Lakshmi since the TED India conference in Mysore, at the Infosys Campus, that I had received an invite for, to report on. It wasn’t funny how many of my friends had become TED India fellows, so I had a great time there. Years later, my friend Kushan Mitra would joke that I can do a better TEDx at my home, just calling my friends, than most of the TEDx’s in India. My friend Vishal Gondal, then the founder of Indiagames, was involved as a member of INK, which was built to be similar to TED, and he ensured that I had an invite for the annual INK Conference for a few years.
At the second INK Conference, in October 2011, I met Derek Sivers, who had given my favourite TED Talk, called How to Start A Movement. You’ll see the parallel between what Derek talks about, and how I went about getting people together for SaveTheInternet.in.
As we walked through the crowd at the India Against Corruption protests, entering from Jantar Mantar and moving towards India Gate, we came across people giving talks, rousing others into action, sloganeering and even a man dressed up as Manmohan Singh, India’s Prime Minister at the time, who was accused of turning a blind eye to corruption.
There I shared with Lakshmi a question that had been on my mind since I first saw Derek Sivers’ video: it’s one thing to start a movement. How do you sustain it? My 30 minute conversation with Derek just a month ago had focused on the same question. I had hoped for an answer from Derek, but it was clear that this wasn’t a question that he had considered (yet). The solution we came to, after much deliberation, was that the only way to sustain it is via an organisation whose mandate it was to further the cause of the movement. But how would that organisation function? My suggestion was the Wikipedia approach. In my engagement with Wikipedia in India — they had an office in Delhi at the time — (and at the Wikimedia conference in Mumbai) I had learned that their focus remains primarily on getting new editors to edit the site. It’s a job that doesn’t pay, and while people are initially drawn into supporting a cause for enabling access to knowledge for the world, they tire, or get jobs and eventually lose steam. The focus for Wikipedia is to get new contributors to the cause, and there’s a core group that enables it to function.
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On a morning after a terrible road trip with my friend Shyam Somanadh (some of you might remember him as @codelust on Twitter) in November 2013, to a place called Khada Patthar in Himachal Pradesh, where we drove hours over rubble in his refurbished 4×4 gypsy with back-breaking suspension, and after a night I spent sneezing my head off because of all the dust that I had had to breathe, I had a moment of epiphany: how wonderful it would be to have an organisation of just contributors to causes. If everyone could spare just 5% of their week to do volunteer work, wouldn’t the world be a better place? As you can probably tell, those days I was filled with idealism, but this was a part of the philosophy of the SaveTheInternet.in campaign. On these trips, I would look at names of towns and morph them into domain names and check for their availability. On this day, I was reminded of something my aunt Mohini had said to me when we had visited Moga together, a town that my greatgrandfather had helped build — “This is your legacy, neyki karna (to do good)”. That morning I booked the domains Neyki.com and Neyki.org. I still have the dot com, and ‘neyki’ was at the heart of the SaveTheInternet.in campaign — people contributing towards a cause.
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In the middle of SaveTheInternet.in campaign, Harsh Gupta (hargup), asked about what the plan was for the campaign. Hargup was a thoughtful and very very smart student, and… I cant find it right now, but he wrote somewhere, or shared a link to a post that outlined the fact that all movements tend to naturally evolve to have an order about things, and a structure. We were operating as an unstructured collective. I’m not sure of whether this was towards the end of the campaign, or the in the middle, but Raman, Apar, Kiran and I had also been discussing the idea of a putting together an organisation. We didn’t have a name for it, but after the experience with 66A and the SaveTheInternet.in campaign, we felt this was a moment to put together something meaningful.
It was early in November 2015 when pollution was at its peak in Delhi, just around Diwali, and I was stuck in my room, purifiers running, feeling locked in. I called Kiran that morning, and he was leaving that night for “Hackbeach”, another makers space being created at Kovalam beach in Kerala. He was planning to drive through the night, to Kanyakumari, and turn back north towards Kovalam. I booked a flight immediately after that call and packed my bag. I landed in Bangalore, took a cab to his place, and five of us crammed into his car (Kiran was carrying a bike, food and even a stove because he intended to cook for himself since he was on the Keto diet). Kiran and I took turns driving through the night, on the gorgeous Bangalore-Chennai highway (most our highways up north at the time were badly built and badly maintained). This was my first trip to Tamil Nadu, and I remember distinctly waking up to views of windmills early in the morning, before we stopped at a roadside stall for breakfast. There we went to the southernmost tip of India — Kanyakumari, had an early lunch, and drove on north-west to Kovalam. Kiran had taken this route because the shorter one from Bangalore to Kovalam had massive traffic jams. We reached late in the evening, at around 6.30PM and crashed in our respective rooms. Thankfully, unlike Hillhacks the previous year, this was hotel with individual rooms. I think I slept 18 hours that night, and it turned out, so did Kiran.
I realised my laptop wouldn’t start. Some water had leaked into my backpack, so we went around looking for a bag of rice. Rice is a desiccant, and the idea of putting your phone or laptop in a rice bag if it gets wet and stops working isn’t mumbo-jumbo. My laptop went into a back of five kilos of rice for the next five days, and I didn’t have much to do. At Hackbeach, I met Srinivas Kodali for the first time, and he discussed with me his work on improving transportation data and access, and gave a presentation on it. Pirate Praveen, as the man called himself, gave a talk about leaving the Google ecosystem, highlighting alternate apps, and we spoke briefly about India’s Pirate Party, which, to me, appeared disfunctional. I’m a capitalist at heart (objectivist, at times), so while I engage with these ideas, I do believe in free enterprise and the epistemology of rational self interest. At times, at least that’s how I view objectivism, there is rational self interest in a collective ensuring freedom for everyone.
One afternoon, with not much to do, I wrote down on a Google Keep note for what would become my initial plan for the Internet Freedom Foundation. The idea here was to create an organisation that acts as an aggregator for research organisations and advocacy groups: to not compete with them by creating yet another organisation for research or legal advocacy but to enable them. The difference between the SaveTheInternet.in campaign and everyone else was, in my view, that we brought people to the party. If we built a membership that was large and active enough, we would essentially abide by the same thesis that I had written for the SaveTheInternet.in campaign.
Below is a slightly edited version of the initial plan I had typed out on my phone. I’m not sure if we had decided on the name for the organisation by then, but it seems I edited the doc subsequently and don’t have the original version anymore. I’ve removed what I think were later edits:
Four prongs to the framework that can be used across
- Research
- Policy/legal/govt relations
- Advocacy (public)
- Tech
- Operations and Fund
raising
Advocacy and legal/policy need research and tech for support.
Roles/work
- Tech: builds platforms for participatory governance (advocacy) and monitoring (research) and advocacy and information dissemination
1a. Participatory governance
- mail your mp/mla
- mail regulators
- sign a petition
- file a complaint
1b. Monitoring & data collection. For example: - policy update tracker (automated)
- am I being tracked
- is this site blocked? Where is it blocked from?
- what’s the latency on my network?
- data scraping tools
- data mapping tools
1c: information dissemination - FAQs page creation tool
- things you can tweet/share on Facebook
- sheets which allow you to tweet to people
- crunchbase like database (contacts + history of key players. For internal use only. Allows us to add context on each individual in policy making, think tanks)
2. Research: does analysis of information and data (from tech) to put it in context, and does qualitative data collection to support quantitative information.
2a. Policy research:
- overview and analysis of Indian digital policy on issues
- overview and analysis of global digital policy on issues
- compiles and analyses case history for legal and policy.
- compiles statements and stands on various issues from stakeholders or influencers (Indian and global)
- compile necessary documents from regulators and from submission to regulators globally.
- compile views and docs from civil society orgs globally
- filing rti for data
2b. Advocacy research - make database of influencers on various issues
- List of govt and industry reps, email addresses, and everything that has to go in the crunchbase like database
- database of global orgs working on similar issues and their areas of operation, contact details
- mapping information
- Advocacy: includes content teams across text, audio and video. Handles public and media communication and runs relationship and outreach programs
3a. Content:
- creates FAQs for simplifying issues
- simplifies govt documentation to make it accessible
- simple explanatory videos on issues and digital rights
- instructive videos on encryption, security etc.
- gifs database, ready to use.
3b. Outreach - monthly digital policy podcasts and videos with key stakeholders
- quarterly fellowship for journalists on digital rights
- annual conference on digital rights issues.
- seminars and panel discussions
- create student body affiliations with key colleges and universities
- run a quarterly publication with contribution from academia and policy wonks. Like PRS does
- prepare statements for release when things happen. Work with policy on draft statements depending on outcome.
- work to share research work done by other research organizations.
- maintain regular communication with members
What became of IFF is another story for another day, but as you can tell, by the time we started working on IFF, I had been thinking about concepts of neyki, volunteering and building a sustainable organisation for doing good.