CIS-A2K/Events/Future of Commons 2024

Future of Commons is a conference focused on exploring digital commons and generative AI, aiming to broaden the horizons of the Wikimedia community. The event aimed provide a platform for Wikimedians and open knowledge advocates to engage with cutting-edge innovations, with a focus on AI integration, cultural heritage preservation, and improving knowledge access on Wikimedia projects. Centre for Internet and Society, along with it's CIS-A2K team, initiated and organised the first event in the initiative called Future of Commons 2024 (A Conversation on Artificial Intelligence, Indian Languages and Archives) in Pune, Maharashtra in collaboration with Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited from 5 to 7 July 2024.

FoC 2024 have participants from diverse backgrounds: Apart from Wikimedians, attendees are from technologists, policy makers, academicians, civil society organisations, archivists, and content creators. Total 35 persons from 24 organisations participated in this event.

Objectives

To provide opportunity for Wikimedians and larger open knowledge advocates & practitioners to connect and collaborate on cutting edge technological developments.
To see how the discourse of AI speaks to Indian languages, and to bring people from different domains together so they can develop and apply the insights gathered from the conference to their own projects.
To foreground the idea that discourse around technology need not be a solution-based one but an inclusive one that examines the idea of technology critically.

Takeaways

The main takeaways from the conference revolved around continued investment in Identifying areas of work and collaborations such as:

Developing a platform that puts together resources and tools to help those who work in archiving and Indian languages
Working towards facilitating the availability of open source tools
Enabling further exchanges of ideas and information
Approaches and strategies that inform archiving and artificial intelligence projects in India and the way forward

Speakers and Participants

Prominent speakers at the event included renowned Mumbai-based journalist P Sainath and Sunil Abraham, Director-Policy at Meta, India. Panelists included those involved with Pratham, White Swan Foundation, Keystone Foundation, PARI, Curating for Culture, Rekhta Foundation, India Water Portal, The Dialogue, and Translation Panacea. Projects in Indian languages computing unfolding at CDAC- Pune, IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, IIT Mandi, and IIIT Hyderabad.