Importance of open-source

Most NGOs and small businesses are starved of funds to buy proprietary software, or employ highly skilled software people for inhouse development. Open-source and publicly licensed software is definitely the answer, but making robust and generic software is more of a cultural issue than anything else. The good thing is that the FOSS community is expanding out to places like India, and if pushed in the right direction, this definitely has the potential of placing cutting edge products in the hands of social entrepreneurs.

We at Udai are trying to start a similar initiative called the Technology Hub, where we will have highly skilled volunteers with 3+ years of job experience, visit NGOs and non-profit organizations and make detailed specifications of their requirements. We will then match the requirements with skill-sets of student volunteers in universities and elsewhere, looking for summer projects and other part-time work, to implement the overall systems. So far, we have identified friends and colleagues working in India, who are willing to spend some time in making these specifications. We are now trying to establish links with universities to gather volunteers. We already have a few NGOs in mind who need some help. TARAhaat, based in New Delhi, is looking for people to help design agricultural information services software, where farmers can come to the TARAhaat kiosks and place queries related to choice of seeds or choice of seasonal crop, and experts based in agricultural institutes can answer these queries. Pradan, a fairly large NGO working on rural empowerment techniques, including micro-finance, is looking for analysis tools to understand the utilization patterns of the loans they give out.