HasGeek and NUMA Bangalore are excited and proud to welcome two eminent internet pioneers to speak on open data and knowledge in India.
Dr. Sam Pitroda was a senior advisor to Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh and is widely credited for having led India’s telecommunications and technology revolutions in the 1980s. Dr. Pitroda holds 20 honorary PhDs, close to 100 worldwide patents, and helped create the first digital PBXs in the 1960s.
Carl Malamud started the first radio station on the Internet and is considered one of the pioneers of the U.S. open government movement. Carl runs Public.Resource.Org, an NGO which has placed hundreds of millions of pages of government information online, including all 19,000 Indian Standards.
The Right to Information, The Right to Knowledge
Sam Pitroda and Carl Malamud will talk about their efforts in India, the U.S., and many other countries to help promote universal access to knowledge. They'll discuss the constitutional underpinnings of this right in India and some of the information they've been making available, including 3 lakh books from the Digital Library of India, 19,000 official standards from the Bureau of Indian Standards, and a raft of other resources such as the entire Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
They will discuss how key laws such as the Right to Information make this possible but will focus more on how the world of open source and the Internet can turn that promise into a reality. Universal access to knowledge is the great unmet promise of our times, and they will talk about what we can all do to make this dream possible.
