New chapter in the Netherlands

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

After 11 1/2 years at CIS - I am moving on to a new chapter in the Netherlands at ArtEZ University of the Arts. This means that I have to transition from my role as ED as CIS to a part time role. Please see my note below that gives more details. There are so many people here that I need to thank and I don't know where to begin. I will remain always grateful.

With my very best,

Sunil

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Dear Colleagues,

In March this year I had my first meeting in Bengaluru with Carin Rustema, the director of growth and development of the Graduate School at ArtEZ University of the Arts, in the Netherlands, to discuss a possible professorship. The idea developed in collaboration with Nishant Shah the current Vice President of the Executive Board of ArtEZ. Nishant along with Pranesh Prakash, Nirmita Narasimha and I were the co-founders of CIS in June 2008. As these plans developed they have been shared with shared with the board and also the senior management and also briefly with everyone at the all staff meeting last September.

So far, I have spent my completely professional life have working in India and mostly at organisations that I co-founded. So this is a completely unprecedented move for my partner – Esmeralda Davis, our daughter Maia and also me personally. I have signed a contract here with Artez giving a 66.66% commitment for my new tasks and responsibilities around research activities with a focus on digital policy and design practices. Since the lectorship or professorship is a significant substantive responsibility the time has come for my contract with the CIS board to be modified to reflect that only 1/3rd of my time can be devoted to the Centre. The board is currently working on this new contract. My designation will be changed to reflect this new contract and my transition from the role as executive director. Together with the board and the senior management team – I will produce a transition plan and also facilitate the building of a new governance structure. I will remain a member of the society and also a member of the board till the end of my term. After the transition period I will continue support CIS as a part time consultant on projects where the donors or the teams request for my contributions.

When Anurag Dikshit [our seed donor] contacted the founders eleven years ago, he had a vision that CIS would one day become a key reference point for policy and academic research at the cross roads of internet and society for India. He didn’t want the founding team to constrain their research scope to the areas that they were familiar with at that time – free speech, free software, accessibility and cultural studies. As always advocating that we should bite off more than we can chew – today we have expanded our mandate to areas like privacy, digital identity, artificial intelligence, future of work and cyber security. From four co-founders we have grown to more than forty. From purely desk based methods we have expanded into more technical, quantitative, empirical and field based methods. Thanks to the collective efforts for those currently with us and also those who have moved on to other organisations, we have produced an internationally recognized body of research in a very wide area of research as is obvious from the many different keywords on our website. The research has been set apart from its peers because of a. innovative methodologies b. fresh theoretical contributions c. south-south collaborations and d. multidisciplinary entry points. CIS has over the years achieved some victories in a variety of state, national and international fora through its research based theory of change. There have been several citations in important

Supreme Court verdicts and also policy documents, papers have been published in peer reviewed journals with high impact factor. We have contributed through our participation in global fora like WIPO, IGF, ICANN, IETF, ISO and the GNI. The site for the most action research at CIS over the last six years has been the Wikimedia movement through the members of the Access to Knowledge team. And the Researchers At Work team have over the years have created a field at the national level apart from their own seminal contributions to the fields of digital humanities.

Apart from producing my share of the research, my primary contribution has been towards the culture of CIS. The principles of subsidiarity, plurality, post facto accountability, reduction of meta-work and amorphous institutional boundary. I believe that most of CIS successes and perhaps a few of its failures can be attributed to these values. On LinkedIn there are 190 people that list CIS as a previous affiliation – I am proud that our institutional values have touched each of these people in some way over the last 11 and 1/2 years. CIS has been a very special place for me because everday of working with you, is a day of learning – today people actually mistake me for a lawyer, computer engineer or a researcher. For a BE in Industrial and Production engineering graduate that is such a gift from you.

I hope to have a dedicated meeting with everyone within the next ten days to begin the co-creation of a transition plan that is current being discussed by the board and the senior management team.

I would like to end on a personal note and remind each one of you that I am always available as a friend, colleague, mentor, collaborator and disciple as I begin this new chapter in life. I will remain forever in each one of your debt for having the privilege of working alongside you.

With deepest gratitude,

Sunil