📅 Event Details
🎤 Speaker Information
Speaker Name: Bhavya Sudhir and Shruti Namboodiri
Topic: The Justice Definitions Project: A Crowdsourced Digital Legal Knowledge Commons Initiative for India
About:
- Bhavya Sudhir is a Research Associate at DAKSH. He is a law graduate from Aligarh Muslim University and holds an LLM in Access to Justice from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. His research interests lie at the intersection of Law, Public Policy, and Society.
- Shruti Namboodiri is Community Manager at DAKSH. She holds a postgraduate degree in Development Studies from Ambedkar University Delhi. She has worked extensively on community development projects across India. Her interest lies in exploring sustainable solutions to bridge the gap between people and their ecosystems.
About Future of Commons
With the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) over the last few years, multiple initiatives have been taken to develop generative AI systems in Indian languages, for a variety of uses. The process of training generative AI models requires huge quantities of data. Openly available training data - or digital commons - is critical to developing efficient and versatile AI models. Archives and museums, as rich repositories of cultural material, have been actively digitising their collections.
Collectively, the contribution of public memory and cultural heritage institutions, and mass-digitisation programmes undertaken by state and civil society organisations, has been crucial to the development of a digital commons in Indian languages. These efforts also foreground questions on ‘localised’ and ‘Indic’ AI models, the role of state, big tech, civil society and open knowledge movements, and tensions around ownership, privacy, access and ethics.
Following engaging discussions on the above thematic areas at a conference in July 2024, we now look forward to taking these ahead through a series of monthly talks, lectures, demos and conversations. Informally called the Future of the Commons Collective, this group invites academia, technologists, archivists, creative practitioners, policymakers, GLAM professionals, open knowledge activists, Wikimedians - anyone interested in the above topics, to come together to listen, brainstorm and work together on adding context and nuance to the larger topic of the future of the commons.