Taking communities online... Bangalore offers cyber tools to manage knowledge
By Frederick Noronha Everybody on the Net seems to be focussing on technology and tools to get their job done, but an Indian-incubated initiative is focussing on how people can make the real difference in tapping the potential of cyberspace. Pantoto, launched by the US-educated but Bangalore-based Dr. T. B. Dinesh and expat Dr. Suzan Uskudarli, who worked out of Bangalore till recently, sees itself as a simple but effective 'community building' tool that just about anybody can use. This 'online community builder' aims to support existing 'real world' communities, by giving them the cyber tools that could make their networking and knowledge-sharing more effective and meaningful. "It uses information architecture tools to allow communities to manage and nurture a repository of community knowledge," explains Dinesh. It's goals are clear: providing an 'online' (Internet-based) platform where people who are part of any 'community' (or extended network sharing similar interests) can interact and come together for their common cause. Pantoto seeks to promote 'information-centric communication', as its developers call it, between members of a 'community'. To keep the software simple, it is small and 'light' in size, and works in any browser -- the software widely used to trawl the Internet. To make the knowledge-sharing among any 'community' more effective, this tool offers a well-organized information repository. It says the communication of the group can be "customised to suit the needs of any community" and this also helps the group to build a cost-effective presence on the Net. This makes people -- rather than technology -- the key towards leveraging the pwoer of the Net. Pantoto says it can help groups build an 'online community', and also put up their treasure-chest of useful and relevant knowledge out there for everyone to share. "With these three basic outputs (a community, knowledge-repository and web-presence) a community can create any out-put. The out-put would depend on the information needs of the community and how they choose to structure and manage information," says Dinesh. But managing information and sharing it effectively out there on the Internet might not be as simple as it sounds. To make it easier, the Pantoto solution depends on providing apt online tools, creating multiple 'personas' for oneself which help a person 'manage relationships' within a community, and encourage people to contribute to an info repository through Pagelets. Pagelets are structured web-pages that can be published as easily as filling out a form. Pantoto also tries to help collaboration to enhance creation and dissemination of community knowledge. To be able to run this, anyone would need just the technical skills of "knowing how to use a web-browser", claim its promoters. Web-browsers are very simple tools, used sometimes without even being aware of it, by anyone browsing the Internet. Dinesh, who did his PhD in computer science from the University of Iowa and post-doctoral research at Amsterdam, says: "Shri Shakti Alternative Energies has been our beta users for a while. They use it for intranet and dealer network needs." "Pantoto might soon be used for project listing by indic-computing community and CharityFocus India chapters. But our main work lateley has been to work with local NGOs to help them build information management solutions, themselves, for their varied needs," says he. There are many tools out there for web-communities to grab and use. But many are either expensive or need IT/Computer-programming help to tune it for an specific information-community need. "Pantoto is an attempt to first bring information architecturing to the end-user, where by we hope that organizations (like a typical NGO) can be empowered to be independent of IT consultants for much of their everyday needs and next to provide flexibility with look and feel," says Dinesh. Dr Susan stresses "the importance of structuring information" to make information "accessible and usable" in the long term. "Structuring provides meaning to the information. Thus, intelligent searching, filtering, and other processing such as analysis becomes possible," she adds. She says 'pagelets' are the information pieces that are meaningful to the community. "The big deal about this is to distinguish the concept of pagelets from common web pages. A typical web page has no structure. It is free in form and free in content." "On the contrary, with a pile of 'pagelets', from a series of surveys of slums, these structured pages can answer questions like -- show me the incidence of AIDS and the number of 'arak' (traditional liquor) shops in April 1999 in Mysore district," she says. Over the past three months, some NGOs (non-government organisations) have begun using Pantoto with a "little bit of hand-holding and initial training". These include Sakti, a Bangalore-based NGO that has some 70 employees, that works for women's empowerment, and with communities like landles labour. It is using this tool to capture and analyse information related to a baseline survey of 148 villages in Karnataka, to capture the knowledge assets and training investment made in Sakti employees, and to also create a client-management system for visitors to the Sakti counseling center. New Horizons, another Bangalore-based group, that helps people with disabilities to get access to jobs and health care, is using it to create a MIS (management-information system) for all products manufactured by their network. They also will be deploying Pantoto to create a patient-management system, that records all interventions they're making for patients, and to be able to report to funding agencies. Swabhava, yet another Bangalore NGO that works on minority sexualty issues and HIV/AIDS has also been working on it. Pantoto.com has more details about the work it is suitable for under its 'experimental communities' section. Dinesh says these tools are often speedily deployed. "We have been, almost as a policy, working with people/NGOs who are able to send 2-3 persons from their organizations to develop their solutions in house at Servelots -- there by understand information management issues, more than "computer training" issues -- and this has been effective. We have noticed that they very soon (sometimes with in a week) start "develping web applications" for their other needs! Some of them feel convinced enough to work with us further to provide solutions for other organizations themselves," he says. -- Frederick Noronha : http://www.fredericknoronha.net : When we speak of Freelance Journalist : http://www.bytesforall.org : free software we Ph 0091.832.2409490 : Cell 0 9822 122436 : refer to freedom, : not price. ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, a Non-Profit Organization*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
