Transition at CIS: Setting the stage for the next era
Last month, I ended my tenure as Executive Director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), India, after nearly seven years at the organisation, and over two years as Executive Director.
When I joined CIS back in 2015 as a Policy Officer, it was an interesting, though completely different, time in digital policy research and advocacy in India. We were in the early years of Modi’s first term as Prime Minister, and the government’s flagship project, Digital India was still emerging. On one hand, the Shreya Singhal judgement protected free speech, on the other Indian jurisprudence had been set back by questions raised over the status of privacy as fundamental right (only for the Supreme Court to rule emphatically for privacy two years later). Internationally, the Manila Principles had only just been released by digital rights and civil society organisations (including CIS). Seven years down the line, we have a well recognised fundamental right to privacy thanks to years of activism, litigation as well as research (by organisations like CIS), yet our digital rights are under more threat than ever. The safe harbour regulations on intermediary liability and content regulation are even more hotly contested and debated due to the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech online. In the last few years, we have also seen digital governance emerge as a site for the geopolitical battle for data and its promised insights. I am proud to say that CIS has been an active participant in and has informed the debate and discourse of a variety of these issues nationally, regionally and, through our partners and collaborators, globally.
My association with CIS actually goes back further than 2015. I interned with CIS in my final year of law school in 2010-11 in the first-ever privacy research project that CIS undertook. Then I worked in the corporate law for four years in technology and privacy equity, and chose to come back to CIS in 2015, and found the space in the organisation to grow from a policy officer to manager, to director and finally ED.
When I became a Director at CIS in 2019, and took over as Executive Director in early 2020, it was at a critical juncture in our short history. The founding team — Sunil, Pranesh, Nirmita and Nishant — had envisioned an ambitious organisation focussed not on singular issues of technology policy, but one which viewed the role of the digital as critical to policy making, society and life, in general. It was from that perspective that programmes cutting across Telecom, Accessibility, Internet Governance, Access to Knowledge were created. Over the last few years, CIS also reimagined verticals with Privacy, Digital Identity and Governance; Digital Cultures; and Social Justice and Labour emerging as new areas of focus.
The life of a civil society organisation is fluid and dynamic, constantly evolving to examine its mandate and how best to serve the community it exists in. Over the last few years, we have needed to overcome institutional crises, stabilise the organisation and renew staff commitments and community’s confidence in the organisation alike. More than anything else, the last few years have been a test of institutional solidarity and well-being. In civil society environments, where organisations are largely founder-driven, CIS has shown resilience, growth and flexibility to evolve and have another generation of leaders lead it into the future.
India is a low rights jurisdiction fast emerging as a testbed for several digital policymaking experiments — digital identity, net-neutrality, content regulation and data governance. During my years at CIS, I got the enviable opportunity to manage research and advocacy projects that further the cause of digital rights and openness. It often involved a dual role, of a researcher engaged in digital policy issues, and a strategist to marshal research and community-building as tools for change. Consequently, the advocacy strategy we devised focusses on utilising five key levers of change — producing actionable and strategically disseminated research anticipating policy windows; close collaborations and movement building; supporting litigation efforts on digital policies and laws; participating in and informing legislative efforts; and finally, working with policymakers as part of committees and working groups.
As a researcher, I grew up at CIS, and it allowed me to work on a range of issues. In 2017, a report I co-wrote demonstrated the unethical public disclosure of Aadhaar Identity numbers by Indian government websites. This report mobilised public opinion, and led to the immediate introduction of new regulations on encryption and other safeguards for Aadhaar numbers. The report was also referred to in arguments before the Supreme Court of India and the Delhi High Court, and in deliberations in the Parliament in India. Similarly, my research on the right to privacy in India has been cited with appreciation by the Supreme Court of India in its landmark judgment on the Aadhaar project in 2018, where it was described as ‘astute and sagacious.’ In 2019, my first book, The Networked Public, was published. The book examines the range of problems faced by the Indian public on the web, from data protection to online harassment, misinformation and manipulation to predatory market policies, and how they shape the nature of democracy in India. I was priviledged to design and lead CIS’s Digital Identity programme, on the global uptake of digital identity, its problems and solutions. I co-authored an Evaluation Framework for national digital identity programmes, which has since been adapted by civil society actors in five Latin American countries while the same is underway in ten African countries. This project was also been nominated at the #GoodID awards under the privacy track.
Most importantly, the last few years have been a period of organisational transformation. In 2018–2019, we started a series of internal discussions with the staff and began introducing changes in the organisational culture with a focus on developing an inclusive, equitable and feminist workplace. Since 2019, staff members have been encouraged to deliberate upon organisational culture, focusing on existing policies and the concerns around them. We created staff led ‘Change Teams’ to enable a consultative decision-making process.
The discussions and insights from these processes informed our organisational processes, policies and culture. This was an exercise in practising the politics we espoused in our advocacy work and led to an overhaul of most of CIS’s internal policies to set up clear protocols for accountability. We prioritised expectations of institutional care towards forming an inclusive and feminist space, formalising practices that consider the intersection of personal and professional lives, visualising mental health issues, and identifying and institutionalising different aspects of care (respect, help, self-care, mentorship, flexibility). We tried to constantly adopt and improve the processes of consultative decision making, distributed forms of programme management and leadership practices, strengthening mechanisms for accountability and transparency, and measures to operationalise the principle of care, among others. These values will remain integral to CIS’s continued growth and relevance.
CIS is in a great position to navigate the next chapter of its journey, with its funding and reserves in a strong position, as are its programs and systems in a robust state. It has an incredibly committed team and a senior staff with both imagination and drive. I have had the distinct pleasure of first, growing within the organisation and then watching a new generation of leaders take on more responsibilities and take ownership of organisational mission and vision. I have learnt a huge amount leading CIS, and look forward to watching it evolve to meet the many big challenges ahead.