Press Release: NGO-in-a-Box Lonavala (Pune)

Indian voluntary organisations are taking advantage of an initiative to supply them with free software, training and support to help them use Information Technology more effectively in their work. A series of workshops are being held across India over the next two years. Each of the participant organisations will enjoy free software support until 2009.

The first workshop was held in Lonavala, Maharastra with participants working on a diverse range of issues from HIV/AIDS to water resource management. The workshop is based on a series of free software tools dubbed “NGO-in-a-Box”. The tools are specifically selected to address a range of voluntary organisation's action areas from open publishing to Internet security and privacy.

The NGO-in-a-Box project is an initiative involving technology practitioners in the voluntary sector in Europe, Africa, South American and Asia. Several sets of the software tools are being refined for organisations in India and South East Asia. Simos Xenitellis, a free software expert and consultant to the voluntary sector, was a facilitator at the event. He compared the need for affordable software tools to the need for affordable basic foods saying “As it's important to an economy to make staple foods as cheap as possible and accessible to everyone, in the same way affordable software and information handling tools are essential for the growth of a knowledge based economy such as India,”

John Pineirho is a training officer at Positive People, Goa. He puts together training and health awareness programmes for students, teachers, sex workers and HIV positive people. John is acutely aware of the importance of effective Internet usage in organisations like his. “The Internet is a great opportunity for all NGOs and civil society to bring awareness, conduct fund-raising programmes and to give visibility to an organisation and the kind of work that it does.” John commented. He explained that his organisation had rented some space on the internet for about one year but did not put up a website due to a lack of skills and knowledge. They later took help from a volunteer who put up a very effective site. However, the tool used for updating the site soon expired and they were no longer able to change it. In response to such problems experienced by John and others, facilitators from Mahiti Infotech in Bangalore gave a hands on class on alternative free software for producing effective web pages and collaborative tools. “A website empowers you to reach an huge audience and helps ensure you are not silenced.” Edward Crompton of Mahiti explained.

The event placed a great emphasis on the importance of sharing skills, case studies, experiences and of course software amongst the participants. Amee Mankad of Pravah, Gujurat was one participant very keen to share her experience and successes of water resource mapping using a computer based graphical information system (GIS). Gujurat has extremely diverse geology and geo-hydrology, Amee said. It is impossible to have a uniform policy and implementation of water resource management across the state.

Pravah began to address the problem by using existing geological maps of a village and surrounding area. These maps were enriched by adding the indigenous water source data to them. Hydrologists then cross checked the maps drawn from traditional knowledge using modern global positioning systems or GPS. A GPS is a hand held instrument that gives exact position information using signals received via satellites. Amee's team than used a suite of software for creating graphical information system to combine data from the indigenous maps and the GPS data.

Pravah has managed to produce specific water management plans for 169 villages so far. The system now has the support of the state government which has adopted the area specific policy approach to water resource management. “The scheme is now being expanded to a further ten coastal areas.” said Amee who is motivated by a strong desire to promote sustainable drinking water for all and to make people aware of their rights.

The free software philosophy promotes social and economic growth by allowing inclusive rather than exclusive access to software tools. “Why should we need to use free and open source software when pirated copies of Windows and Microsoft Office are free or inexpensive, anyway?” asked one participant. It is undeniably hard to tackle the culture of piracy so deeply ingrained in the culture of many developing countries, but free and open source software can provide a legal, effective community based alternative to using pirated versions of proprietary software. The main difference between open source and proprietary software is the model under which it is developed. Rather than a single company producing a software tool and closely guarding the secrets of its inner programming code, the open source model builds whole communities with hundreds or even thousands of programmers contributing to the development of a tool. The programming code is available to anyone who wants to develop or modify it, often under the condition that they share their changes with the wider community. This makes open source software far more likely to be tailored to niche requirements and available in local languages because it is not so driven by the business interests of software companies. The NGO-in-a-Box workshop promoted awareness of alternatives amongst participants, without the expectation that voluntary organisations should dump proprietary software altogether. The workshop also demonstrated many open source tools which can run on MS Windows systems and enhance security and resistance to viruses.

Gauri Puranik of Bhartiya Samaj Seva Kendra (BSSK), Pune made a presentation about her struggles with using outdated software. “We were using the Windows 3.1 edition on all our machines until 3 months ago” Gauri said. The software Gauri used had very outdated support for things like email and web browsing. “We had dial-up internet and it took one member of staff 3 hours to download emails and 2 hours to send them every day.” BSSK is an adoption and educational sponsorship organisation. They depend a lot on email to communicate with adopters and donor agencies. Gauri has since migrated the whole office to a much newer version of Windows and set up broadband internet. However, her plight highlights the strong need for software alternatives that are cost effective to update and which can run on less than cutting edge hardware. The Ubuntu distribution of Linux was demonstrated at the workshop as just such an alternative. It is free to distribute and update, will run on low specification computers and it has already been translated into many of the worlds local languages. All the software demonstrated during the workshop was given to the participants to use, study, share or modify as they wish.