India Delhi Chapter organised a webinar on Diversity and Inclusion. The session was moderated by Subhashish Panigrahi and Amrita Choudhury. Japleen Pascricha from Feminism in India present her views on diversity and gender inclusion while highlighting issues leading to gender digital divide and online violence against women. This was followed by a discussion among chapter representatives from the region on the current practices in their countries and chapters for improving diversity and gender inclusion. The chapter representatives who shared their views include, Shveta Kokash, ISOC Mumbai; Cherie Lagakali, PICISOC; Musyrifah Mahmod, ISOC Malaysia; Sagarika Wickramasekera and Poornima Meegammana, ISOC Sri Lanka; Bikram Shrestha, ISOC Nepal; and Shabana Mansoory, ISOC Afghanistan. It was also felt that the discussion on the subject needs to be continued further.
CCAOI organised an online discussion on the TRAI consultation paper on Regulatory Framework for OTT communication services on 7 December. The event was supported by the Internet Society, Delhi Chapter.The aim of this discussion was to provide more clarity to the community on the subject and questions asked in the paper and encourage different community members to make their submission to TRAI.
The 90 mins discussion began with a brief overview of the consultation paper by Shashank Mishra from Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas, followed by expert opinion from our guest speakers T. V. Ramachandran from Broadband India Forum; Rajesh Chharia from Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) and Ramanjit Cheema from India Freedom Foundation (IFF). The discussion was very balanced having different perspectives being shared by the participating speakers. This was followed by an open discussion and question answer session.
In terms of participation, the webinar was attended by nearly 40 participants from different stakeholder communities. The general feedback was it was a very useful and people would like to attend ‘such informative’ sessions in future. The recording of the session can be viewed from this link: https://isoc.box.com/v/ott20181207