The United Nation’s agencies in India have attempted to employ simple internet technologies to build knowledge sharing networks. Simply put, Solutions Exchange.

Cynics would argue that this is a costly way of achieving what Yahoo and Google Groups already allow you to do for free. At closer inspection however, one might conclude that while the UN-way of doing it does merit some degree of criticism, it also boasts a few advantages. The Information and Communication Technologies for development (ICT4D) ‘virtual community’ from the Solutions Exchange family met for its first face-to-face meeting in early December. Everyone who was a part of this network had a chance to join in the meeting. The scenic, former French colony along India’s east coast, popularly known as Pondicherry, provided the venue for the meeting.

Let us start at the beginning. Solutions Exchange, at present, has eleven ‘communities’. It plans to add three more soon. Communities deal with themes like AIDS, decentralisation of governance, education, water, food and nutrition, gender, maternal and child health, work and environment, microfinance, disaster management, and ICT-for-development. Just as other virtual communities in cyberspace, anyone can join these communities. However, the resemblances end here. The topics taken up for discussion by these communities are rather serious ones and this leads one to wonder how these communities function.

The website of the network offers an explanation. “Everyone in a Solution Exchange Community is a member of a moderated e-mail group. Whenever members face any challenge that they would like to discuss with their colleagues, they can draft a query in an e-mail and a moderator can then post it to the whole community. Colleagues in the community can offer advice, experience, contacts or other suggestions to help other members out. After about ten days, the moderator posts a synopsis of the responses to the mail group, including the original contributions, as well as additional helpful resources and links. This results in a quick and comprehensive response that includes a range of solutions to adapt to your local context.”

Besides a day-and-half seminar in an exotic part of India, the SE networks promise the chance for “generating knowledge, networking, recognition and (building up) national and global reach.” Solutions Exchange puts it well when it says, “When you offer assistance to fellow colleagues, your contribution is acknowledged by name. Your peers gain a wider appreciation of your knowledge, advancing your professional standing in the Community.” This is how the cyberspace operates.

Even though at present the community is India-based only, the practical model will soon be expanded to other parts of the globe, including Thailand and Ethiopia. People from all across the world are welcome to join in virtual communities anyway.

At Pondicherry, SE adviser Steve Glovinsky and SE coordinator Anand Kumar told this correspondent about future plans for expansion. They were happy with how their work was getting noticed and with the kind of responses they had received so far. Solutions Exchange, they said, was showing its ability to connect senior officials to people with the ideas from the grassroots and anyone in between, including journalists searching for a story.
UNESCO information and communication adviser Ms Jocelyne Josiah, of the West Indies, said there were mutual benefits for such a sharing even for groups like UNESCO.

Information and Comunication Technology for Development (ICT4D) community research associate Gitanjali Sah said that since its launch in November 2006, the ICTD community has had 1,244 members, prepared 27 Consolidated Replies and posted 7 community updates.

Sam Pitroda, the Indian expatriate who changed the face of telephony in the country, and now the Knowledge Commission chairman, fired up participants in a video address. He said creating small projects was easy, but stressed that the challenge was to bring about scalable change to improve the lives of millions. Internet and wireless communications are giving countries like India a huge amount of access to resources that were not as easily accessible earlier, he stressed.

Next, a ‘Knowledge Mela’ (rural meeting point) was held, where participants could share ideas about their work via questions and posters.

Themes focused on content accessibility for the print disabled (DAISY consortium), gLocalisation (local area content), refurbishing second-hand computers for the development sector and fighting e-wastes, mobile government, how FLOSS (Free Libre and Open Source Software) helps the development and alternative sector, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for tribal and nomadic children, digital library technologies, and using software to help manage rural water supplies and calculations.

One of the debates during the event expressed concerns over the directions India needed to take in order to build a national policy on the role of ICTs in school education. After a whole lot of ‘adding a face-to-a-name meetings’, the next day was spent with field-visits to the project “information kiosks” that helps villagers access information that could make a difference to their lives - crop prices, fishing conditions, weather disturbances, and inputs on the animals they could rear to enhance their income.