[Fsf-india] Re: Value (from FSF-India)

[Tapan S. Parikh]

Raj,

This is one hope of the workshop that we have been talking about and
that you alluded to.  To bring the developer community, particularly
progressive, aware technicians such as ourselves, closer to the NGO,
development and govt communities, so we can better understand
their needs, and provide better thought-out tools that meet their
requirements, while still remaining technically sound, true to our ideals
of interoperability and freedom, whatever they may be for us.

There are tons of NGOs to work with, Sristi (who I used to work with) and
SEWA in Ahmedabad come immediately to mind because I have first-hand
knowledge.  Also many various govt agencies could use help, and as someone
enlightened me about earlier today, starting to interface with them on the
advantages of free software is a definite possibility.  Get together with
other developers, and people you know in the larger community, and start to
make inroads if you can.

But I know this is hard until there is a platform of dicussion to which we
can both come to to discuss, which is not technically intimidating to the
NGO / govt side, nor tedious and undirected to the technical side.
Otherwise discussion will be unfocused and vague and will lead nowhere,
which I also tell you from first hand experience.

One thing I am imagining as I write this is very interesting - how about a
sourceforge type platform for rural and development groups to post software
problems on?  These could then be refined in to full-fledged software
specifications, and then taken up by people like us who find such projects
interesting to develop.  That would be a great work model, and maybe we can
start talking about building such a web platform.  Where to start?  Can we
start discussing the requirements for such a platform?  Can we make it a
sourceforge project, and start working on it?  (Hypothetical questions,
because of course we can!)  I look forward to it, I think it would be a
great contribution if we could do that.

--Tapan

>
> Can we collect the details of NGOs and other groups so that we can get
> in touch with them. Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad is one such
> organization in Kerala.
>
> Any one involved with NGOs here?
>
> > - setting up training and education forums and trying to get
> > people, particularly from these communities, involved
>
> Rather, can we work on creating some training material so that the
> NGOs can use it to learn themselves, This will be more productive i
> the long run as they need not be dependent in us.
>
> One such example is the tutorial collection of TugIndia.
> <http://www.tug.org.in/tutorials.html> If we can get about 10 - 15
> people and if each can write a chapter we can create some nice
> tutorial and use this mail list to answer the queries for the tutorial
> users.
>
> > - analyzing the needs of local language and rural software in
> > India and start developing tools and applications
>
> This is a very important step. I am looking fwd to attend the
> conference you are organizing. I myself is working on and off on
> various stuff for Malayalam.
>
> raj





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