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

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

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.