Communities of Practice - eINDIA 2008 an event to remember

Working to engage with the stakeholders of a thematic community, and developing a collective agenda that works as one of the thematic tracks of the eINDIA 2008 conference, the fourth in the series of annual events organised by Centre for Science, Development, and Media Studies was the most enriching experience in the last four-five months of intense preparations.

Now that the conference is over, its time to reflect and look back at the learnings. The opportunity to bring together face to face, at single location, experts and practitioners from all over the country, and also a few guests from outside India (almost 35 countries) provides a space for multiplying the energy and ethos of knowledge sharing, where ideas flow like water in the river, and where no barriers are hard to overcome.

This was the state of affairs at India's largest ICT4D event held in Pragati Maidan from July 29-31, 2008. The way and processes involved in bringing together partners from different verticals, from different academic backgrounds and experiences make it all appear like an easy task. But it was not. The unique strength of the event was that it proved to be a delicate balancing job of bringing the voices of different ecosystem players in a way that make ownership of the event large, and varied but one that was unifying.

The exhibition was also very unique in that it showcased products, institutions, initiatives, services all under one roof.

The best part: over 10,000 foot falls in three days! This was 2.5 times higher than what we had projected. The logistics team led by Vicky Kalra, and supported by Ajit Kumar and Bharti Malhotra, and various other staff of CSDMS and eLets technomedia private limited were worth noting. They made it look like a cakewalk! Kudos to them.

More with pictures when I get around to sorting over 18 DVDs recording the events.

Jaya

Telecentre Magazine's third issue is out!

Juanita, Vignesh and Jaya (self) have been delighted to work on this current issue of telecentre Magazine, our third issue since the conceptualisation of this magazine.

As a key ICT4D knowledge sharing tool, the idea was really born out of informal conversations between Mark Surman and Ravi, Jaya and Frank Tulus, Richard Fuchs and Ravi, about the need to really do an indepth analysis and research publication for the telecentre community.

The challenges that most grassroots telecentre leaders face is their difficulty in telling a story. Its often difficult to write and even more difficult to publish. Narration is the first part of the active documentation, but the vision of telecentre magazine is to make it a "Economist" of the telecentre domain.

Let's all celebrate this collective vision between telecentre.org and CSDMS.

eINDIA 2008 is just 11 days away!

At CSDMS where I have been working since April 2004, we have so far organised five major international level muti-track conferences. The upcoming event eINDIA 2008 will be held in Delhi's exhibition grounds called Pragati Maidan.

From July 29-31, the venue will be the hub of India's largest Information and Communications Technology Event, bringing in over 4000 delegates, 350 speakers, 125 exhibitors and specialists in seven themes.

Several partners, exhibitors, supporters from government, private sector, NGOs, international agencies, development organisations and networks have joined hands to make this a mega event. Conferencing, networking, knowledge sharing, making friends, and learning from demonstrations and workshops will be the key purpose of this mega event. There will be fun evenings too with Awards, Music, and magical transformation of the knowedge sharing space to a relaxing and rejuvenating space with live music and band.

The themes are: egov, ehealth, digital learning, eagriculture, mserve, municipal IT,and telecentres.

There is a grand eINDIA awards ceremony too. There are over 150 applicants for the awards in each thematic area, and six to seven awards under each theme. In all over 42/45 people will be felicitated.

For more information, log on to www.eINDIA.net.in/2008

How to improve intra-office knowledge sharing - Need to build trust

The other day, we came across persons (more than three) from a well known organisation and globally well linked, being at the edge of a communication failure, mistrust and concern. The fact that it is a reputed organisation, and small in size, it does not have the problem of big hierarchy, it came as a big surprise to us.

What really was the problem? As a key partner to the above said organisation, we often have to deal with more than one member from that organisation. And, this itself becomes a cause for concern. The members began to feel that we should or should not talk to one or the other members.

This is a clear cut case of failure/ break-down of intra-office knowledge sharing, and even though there are brilliant knowledge sharing ICT tools, they don't necessarily solve the intra-office communication issues.

Due to the multi-cultural nature of the said organisation, and being global in nature, different cultural ethos affects the way people communicate.

The most important of it all is Trust. If people have doubts... they are beginning to widen the distance and is a warning signal for management to take note of the problems. These are but first signals of serious problems.

I have been trained by Sam Kaner on facilitation techniques, especially for conflict resolution, and a trained facilitator have learnt that the mediator may become not only necessary but also critical to address the current scenario in the said organisation.

I am deliberately not mentioning the name of the organisation, as we continue to deal with folks from that organisation, and we don't really want to hurt or offend anyone. But how will they know? When should they be told about the problem that we can sense?? Comments are welcome.

Dignity and respect for people, in whatever position they are in, is a critical pillar to the development and nurturing of knowledge sharing.

Hope these inputs will help people.

December 2007 Annual CSDMS Party and Saraswati is having fun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAhLPGV7Sxk

As you all know You Tube is the latest social sharing tool both for documentation and giving a new expression to all those who really hate editors, directors, etc.

Here we have an unedited version of the annual party that CSDMS and elets team enjoyed after the annual review process in December 2007. It was a fun party. And, most beautiful for me is the dance and joy in Saraswati's face (check out the lady with the long hair, and dancing away happily).

There is another longer version of the video clip of about 8 minutes, and is fun watching too. What is important to note is the ICT4D and Knowledge sharing has to be as much fun as lot of serious thinking and hard work.

Let your hair down, and chill... ENJOY!

High Cost of Indecisiveness

We are often confronted with bosses who are indecisive or even fickle minded.

How do we really tackle indecisiveness? This is one of the biggest issues that often face people. In a dynamic and rapidly growing organisation, there are always challenges and stresses that the staff have to cope with. But the quirky nature of decision-making is the most stressful among them all. Most of the times, the work that we put in, the time and effort that goes into some task does not seem to find the due respect that it deserves. People expect not just salaries but also respect from all... including the bosses.

While its absolutely true that the employer has the right to the final word, professionalism only comes in if an organisation leadership and management respects the time, and human/mind effort that has been put in.

If not, it becomes hugely demotivating force and the workspace becomes an ordeal to come to.

Another fall out of the situation is the urge to become insipid workers who must not "waste" their time and mind to think or take initiative, lest it be killed at the final hour. It almost borders on the edge of sycophancy. The dilemma of succumbing to the indecisiveness leads to the same job being done, redone, and redone again... at huge time wastage (if costed, works out to over 120 mandays lost in a month, at times)and cost to the organisation.

The net result may satisfy one head of the organisation, but leaves behind the rest of the team unhappy, unmotivated and more than anything else loss of self-esteem and respect.

This is also how most of the times power centres work. Truly collaborative environments requires that the management respects its staff, their time and effort. And, if interventions/advise must be given, it should be done so, well before the start of the job.

This is the difference between mentoring, handholding, and getting your whims and fancies rule the roost.

School Health Annual Report Programme the largest School Health Network

SHARP, the acronym for school health annual report programme, an NGO registered in 1999 has been working on using ICTs to manage the records of school children across schools in 40 centres in India. Headquartered in New Delhi, the group relies on the school volunteers (students and teachers) who get trained to monitor nutritional and health status of school children in urban and rural schools, across government run schools and private schools. Keeping in mind the privacy of the needs, the programme allows access of health records to the students and their parents through a username and password, to the teachers who are data input persons of the records, and to the local Public Health practitioner in the area.

The project is one of the partners of the Intel's World Ahead Programme, and the software has been written by Tata Consultancy Services.

The SHARP project has worked with the VIIT's Baramati based schools to run the project.

According to Dr. Puran Prakash, the General Secretary of SHARP, "Creating a network of health promoting schools, children, their families, hospitals, health professionals, UN and Development Agencies, NGOs, and corporate houses, has ensured that promoting health through schools is the most cost effective health approach and the investments made in school health yeild ever lasting returns."

A project that is worth documenting! For more details write to sharp@schoolindia.org

John Davies of Intel talks of the four pillars of development intervention at Baramati Conference

John Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Group and General Manager of the World Ahead Program, Intel Corporation, spoke passionately at the 8th Baramati Conference. Showing two video films, one of the Baramati school children learning computers, and another of the World Ahead programme across developing countries.

He mentioned about the Telecentre Project at Vietnam's Lao Cai where wimax connectivity has enabled the communities to access education, health care, livelihoods opportunities.

Emphasising the four development focus areas of the Intel's World Ahead Programme, being Accessibility, Connectivity, Education, and Content. The initiatives had inspired and improved the opportunities of the people who benefited from the programme, and thinking of an entrepreneural model to combine free services with paid for services, it was possible to make impactful interventions.

Calling for a need to do a lot more, John congratulated the work done by Baramati's VIIT, and other partners around the world.

Jainder Singh reiterates the role of ICT on egovernance for better accountability

Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India, in his keynote address at the 8th Baramati Conference on ICT for Communities - scale and economic benefits - quality, accessibility and assessment of government services. The NeGP aims to provide the IT backbone for citizen centric services. Learning from the diverse pilots for scaling up has to be undertaken, when roll outs. 100,000 CSCs. Connectivity and content 18,000 colleges (Rs 10,000 crores over five years), e-Courts (13,000 courts), Broadband across the country etc are some of the scaled up projects undertaken by the Department.

The scale is unprecedented, 70,000 CSC are to be made operational by December 2008, with minimum revenue support and bid to be implemented by NGOs, Private Agencies, etc. Other USOF centres, Post Offices, PCOs, etc. will be housing the CSCs delivering agriculture, health and livelihoods services.

Wishing the conference a success, Jainder Singh ended the keynote address with a call to the delegates to share and learn from the successful initiative of Baramati.

8th Baramati Conference Gets Off to a start - 1

The eighthBaramati Conference has just been inaugurated with the lighting of the traditional oil lamp with an introductory welcome note from Sharad Kulkarni, the Chairman of the Governing Council of VIIT. The Baramati conference is being co-organised by VIIT and Intel and is being held at Baramati from 23-26th March 2008.

The inaugural session is being moderated by Sharad Kulkarni, and has key note presentations from Subas Pani, Secretary, Planning Commission, Government of India, Jainder Singh, Secretary, Department of Information Technology, Government of India, John Davies, Vice President, Sales and Marketing Intel World Ahead Programme, R Siva Kumar, Managing Director, Sales and Marketing, South Asia Intel.

Dr. Amol Goje, the Director of VIIT and the inspiring leader of the Baramati Initiative is looking forward to two days of exciting deliberations on "ICT for Communities - Scale and Economic Benefits" the running theme of the conference. "We expect to learn from the experts in the next two days, but also it is important for us to showcase practical examples of how things work on the ground".

Mr. Pani shared his experience of working in the Election Commission of India, the importance of project management, detailing and multi-lingual needs were reiterated.

Opportunity Cost of Unwise Management Decisions

An interesting set of tasks and overlapping deadlines leads one often to face the situation of making a decision. In teams, this is often done through collective discussions and decision-making, and prioritisation. Sometimes, work overloads and deadlines take precedence over other important tasks.

A recent example was felt by the our editorial team which had a media partnership with another organisation that was conducting a national conference and exhibition. This partnership would have helped the team to get more knowledge, and more importantly, more content for an upcoming issue planned on the topic of Different Abilities and use of ICTs and other technologies.

However, an unwise management decision percolated down, that would neither have been challenged, not discussed, since there was no scope for doing so. Communication from management was one-sided, almost a conditional order for participation. The decision was also unwise since the loss would not only be of the team, but of the entire institution. This was, however, neither understood by the management, not discussed in detail. It did cause a lot of disgruntlement, and bad feeling among the team members, but one was actually helpless, since the magazine deadline was put as the priority.

If a collective meeting had been held, probably, work-flow could have been replanned, and the teams could have proceeded to divide the work among the team members to achieve both the tasks. Silly and unwise decisions, often have a high opportunity cost. And, we paid it this time. Hopefully, the management will see value in knowledge-sharing and not stick to knowledge-management.

Ministry of Information and Broadcasting holds its third meeting for screening applications from NGOs for setting up of Community Radio Stations

Ms. Jayalakshmi Chittoor, Programme Coordinator of CSDMS, has joined as an invited Member of the seven members Screening Committee for consideration of applications from NGOs/ CSOs and private educational institutions, etc. for the grant of permission for establishment of community radio stations by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. The Committee was constituted by a Ministry’s Order dated 22 August 2007.

The Joint Secretary (Broadcasting) of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, chairs the Screening Committee. Other members of the Committee include Dr. Lalit Kumar, Deputy Advisor, Planning Commission, New Delhi; Dr. R. Sreedher, Director, CEMCA, Commonwealth of Learning, New Delhi; Mr. Deep Joshi, PRADAN, New Delhi; Mr. Sajan Venniyoor representing the Community Radio Forum, New Delhi; Mr. S.H. Indrukar, Deputy Director, CAPART, New Delhi.

There are three to five special invitees to the Screening Committee. They may change and be invited from time to time to bring expertise from other sectors.

The Screening Committee has met twice in 2007. The first meeting was held from 10-12 September 2007. The second meeting was held 22-23 November 2007. Since the establishment of the committee, Seven NGOs have been awarded the CR licence.

The third round of screening committee meetings have been scheduled from 15-18 January 2008. Mr. J.P.S. Verma, Deputy Secretary, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, New Delhi; Mr. C.T. Mahajan, Additional Apprentership Advisor, Ministry of Human Resources Development, New Delhi; and Ms. Jocelyne Josiah, Adviser in Communication and Information, UNESCO, New Delhi will be participating as Special Invitees to the upcoming meetings.

For those who are interested to learn more about the policy, the guidelines, the processes of application, for NGOs and CBOs to set up a community radio station in India, please link up to: http://mib.nic.in/CRS/CRSmainpg.htm.

Hope you all benefit from this post! Enjoy the new year with more CR stations in India.

How does knowledge flow in an organisation which is pretty ICT savvy?

Today was an interesting day at work. The Internet connectivity was intermittent, or none, depending on whether someone had access to a data card or not. This being the case, one saw a lot of face to face knowledge exchange happening. People were also trying to get some off-line work done.

But in general, the mood appeared to be one of relaxation, and destressed situation with most colleagues, except the team on Digital Learning which is fighting some deadlines, and desperately looking for online connectivity. Looks and truly feels like a Friday afternoon.

Today was also a day to spend some time with a colleague to understand the nuances of knowledge flow in our own organisation, where a lot happens through the mails, notes and shared file system among team members. The phone was the next best thing put to use when the Internet connectivity denied email as the option to send out notes, updates and information to each other.

People also generally walked around the office and chit-chatted a bit, not necessarily always about work. But this to me, appeared as a crucial necessity to share ideas, thoughts and friendship.

To promote more knowledge sharing, it would be a great idea to have a No Internet Day (once a month) and promote free-flowing sharing of ideas.

Radio Duniya 2008 planning meet sets the tone of the conference in February

Yesterday, the advisory committee of the Radio Duniya team met in Intercontinental -The Grand in Barakhamba Road, New Delhi. The meeting was chaired by Ms. Zohra Chatterjee, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.

It was a fantastic experience to meet a mix of the radio professionals passionately discussing the issues at the policy level, at the implementation level, and most importantly wanting more clarity on measuring what people really want? The measurement of the viewer feedback indicators and what other experiences were there in other countries figured as an important topic to be discussed at the upcoming conference and awards function to be held from February 11-12, 2008.

The overview of the meeting was provided by Ravi Gupta, the editor of the Radio Duniya magazine, and my dear friends Sajan Venniyoor of the Community Radio Forum and Ashish Bhatnagar along with Dr. R Sreedher of CEMCA, Commonwealth of Learning were also present at the meeting.

Kudos to the team members who have done a good job of preparing for this meeting, and also for putting together three issues of the monthly magazine, since it was launched in November 2007.