Posted on Wednesday, November 08, 2006 4:17 PM
In a few days I will be traveling to India. I will be conducting interviews with a variety of people, software developers, representatives of organisations and volunteer 'knowledge workers'. All this to find out what understandings of knowledge people work with when they design and develop a knowledge management system, use those systems, promote knowledge sharing for development, or contribute their knowledge to a knowledge network. The organisations I am planning to visit are Oneworld South Asia, National Informatics Centre of the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in Chennai and Pillaiyarkuppam, and Village Knowledge Centres around Pondicherry.
The National Informatics Centre of the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology is the developer of the
OpenEnrich software, an free/open source knowledge management solution originally created for the
UNESCO but now also used by the Open Knowledge Network. The
Open Knowledge Network was an joint initiative of Oneworld International (London) and the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (Chennai). I think the initiative is not so 'joint' anymore but both Oneworld and the MSSRF are still very much involved in knowledge sharing. In Delhi I will visit Oneworld South Asia. They are the main hub for the Open Knowledge Network in India. I hope to visit one of the associated organisations, the
Datamation Foundation which, among other things, operates a village information centre in Babool-Ulm- Madarasa in Seelampur. I visited the centre in the madrassa briefly in February. I hope this time to interview the knowledge workers there.
Oneworld South Asia is involved in many knowledge sharing activities, besides the OKN, they also run a grassroots communication programme with, among others, a radio programme and produce publications.
I will spent half of my time in Chennai and Pondicherry. In Chennai I hope to meet some of the developers at
NatureSoft, an open source outsourcing company, who developed the first version of the OKN software. I also would like to speak with some of the people at the
MSSRF who are responsible for content development in their local knowledge for local development programmes. Then I will travel to Pondicherry to meet with Dr. Thiagarajan at the MSSRF centre in Pillaiyarkuppam. I will travel with him to some of the Village Knowledge Centres that are established with help of the MSSRF and where I hope to interview some of the women knowledge workers, volunteers who work in their own communities and who collect local knowledge for further dissemination via databases and the internet.
(to be continued)