Great initiative and I’m appy to help.
I would love to help
Would like to involve in community in whatever way possible.
I was looking for something like this recently, and I came across Datakind which does some great work! I joined their slack but I’m not sure if it’s very active right now. They helped the Internet Freedom Foundation with one of their projects and that’s how I found them. A whatsapp/telegram group that connects the NGOs that need help with developers who want to offer their time would be fantastic. I’d be very interested in something like that!
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OTTER
Had a long conversation with OTTER. They help run training and onboarding programs for social development orgs to get tech enablement. They’re around 5 years old, and they educate social dev orgs about free tech services available in the market that they can use (mostly proprietary SaaS tools). They have program management capacity, but not internal tech or development capacity. They’ve worked with 1000+ NGOs so far.
Spoke about the obvious risks of onboarding social dev orgs to free-of-cost, but proprietary SaaS tools that lock them in. They’re aware, but don’t have any avenues or resources to work with FOSS alternatives that are as easy to onboard as their proprietary SaaS counterparts. They mentioned that the social dev orgs are put-off by the cost and complexity of trying to find consultants who can install and maintain FOSS tools for them. This may be something as simple as getting a DigitalOcean instance and installing WordPress.
I also had a conversation with the Ashoka foundation recently where we discussed the idea of creating a program where their fellows (social entrepreneurs and change makers) get hands-on experience tinkering with FOSS tools that solve their day-to-day problems. Tools like Metabase, Glific, ERPNext etc. OTTER suggested a similar idea. They have data on the biggest tech related pain points experienced by most social development orgs, the low-hanging-fruit problems (eg: finance management, forms, communication etc.). With this:
- Identify a few easy to use FOSS tools that solve common, but big problems.
- Identify and train a few small IT shops / consultants who can easily install and services these tools for a reasonable fee.
- Identify volunteers from the tech industry who may be interested in participating.
- Run a program with several dozen social dev orgs and let them tinker and familiarise with these tools.
- Connect the orgs to volunteers and IT consultants.
^ See how it all goes!
Kalvium
Kalvium is a hands-on, mentorship based experiential tech learning alternative to the conventional BTech degree. They partner with colleges and universities and replace the BTech program with their program (DISCLAIMER: Rainmatter Capital, with which I’m associated, has invested in them).
Their students are looking for hands-on projects to work on as a part of the course and for internships, which also generates actual credits for their BTech course. I suggested that it may be interesting to create a program where projects come from the social development world. A potential win-win scenario. Students get to work on real world projects that have actual social impact, and social dev orgs get their problems solved.
Connected both OTTER and Kalvium to TinkerSpace and T4GLabs (who now work out of TinkerSpace) to explore the possibility of kick starting these programs. TinkerSpace in Kochi (backed by FOSS United) seems to be slowly turning into a space where the FOSS tinkerer world and the social development world physically intersect. Excited by the possibilities!
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Would love to be connect with Kalvium. We can offer some interesting projects to their students on our platforms (avni, glific, data platform), some experimental and futurisitic, some we need it asap.
My 2 cents with regard to NGO needs:
- We need to train a lot of IT shops/consultants on tools available out there that they can deploy on the cloud (or use an existing service)
- IMO, the main issue with most NGOs is not the tech per se, its understanding the problem, and getting to the root of the problem,. Many a times, that a long winding path. For most of the problems (once identified), the tech is the easy part of the whole process.
- I think there is a large ecosystem of commercial tools (specifically things like G-Suite etc), which make sense for most NGOs to use (even though not open source). For most of the things we encounter, there are quite a few good OSS options.
- NGOs should not have to learn about hosting or managing projects. Thats what the above ecosystem of consultants/partners should do
lobo
Interested to contribute as a volunteer, feel free to reach out and let me know how I can help.
Have experience and background in creating content, training (L&D), decent grasp and interest in product and technology.
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Will connect you over e-mail.
Agree. Maybe we should actively look at making this happen. If we can assemble and train a group of a few dozen IT shops and consultants, it might just slowly kick off into an ecosystem. Sensitize them on the dynamics and nuances of the social development world, and create a program that solves like 90% of the low hanging fruits (a suite of tools that solve stuff like e-mail, accounting, finance, dashboards, websites, project management, HR etc. etc.).
Not easy of course, but worth trying.
Yep. It’s really the lack of tech capacity, not tech. In 2023, there’s out-of-the-box tech available for pretty much everything! T4GLabs does good work in this regard. Shemeer was telling me that ~50% of the time, they’re able to convince an org that they don’t actually need tech for a specific problem they’re trying to solve. It can just be framed in a different way. And that’s a win.
Agree. Self-hosting an e-mail suite is not going to be practical. Just have to sensitize orgs on choosing the right kinds of tools. There are proprietary commercial offerings that go from $1 to $1000 in no time, specifically designed to entrap. Was speaking to a large org that we all know of recently who are locked into a popular SaaS CRM. It’s become a huge and expensive bottleneck to their operations and getting out of it is their top priority. So much time, money, and effort is going to go into this.
100%.
Hi All,
Anil from Kalvium here. I should probably blog in the longer form on this topic - but running an educational institution, I see a massive opportunity in skill arbitraging that’s available to us. Students typically do not use their growing technical knowledge and skills when they are completing their degree course, and companies only come in after.
So there’s a win-win opportunity of getting real world problems and projects to students:
For the student: getting to work on real world problems, making an impact.
For organizations: getting problems solved with technology - via skills their team currently lacks.
For educational institutions: Better learning outcomes for students due to real world projects.
With kalvium, we’re aiming to provide a structure to easily enable this from the 2nd semester onward on an ongoing basis. If you think you can benefit as an organization, or provide mentorship to students as they tackle these projects, please reach out to me: anil@kalvium.com.
Regards
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this guide is worth a read: Don't Build It. A Guide for Practitioners in Civic Tech - MIT GOV/LAB | MIT GOV/LAB
@Anil_Gulecha as we spoke, I think we can start using and deploying Kalvium students to:
- Help us design and build platforms
- Work with NGOs on the field (see above guide) to understand and learn more about the issues and problems above and beyond the tech lens
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Really interested to contribute!
I’d love to volunteer
A few of us (volunteers from FOSS United Foundation and representatives from Ashoka Foundation, Tech4GoodLabs, Tech4GoodCommunity, Tech4Dev, ONI, Kalvium, TinkerHub Foundation), ReapBenefit who have been having these conversation in silos, met up in Bangalore to brainstorm and figure out actionables.
Key issues that were discussed:
- The social development sector severely lacks technical capacity (knowledge, awareness, skills, access).
- The tech world at large has little visibility into the social development sector.
- There is no easy or natural technology discovery mechanism for non-tech-savvy social development orgs. There is an inability to frame problems in a way where a readily available FOSS tech solutions can be discovered even via simple searches.
- A significant number of tech/organisational problems are low hanging fruits that repeat across organisations. Things like CRMs, data collection, management and reporting tools, inventory mechanisms, volunteer and project management systems, finance management tools etc.
- Many orgs also have an app-first, “not built here” view which prevents them from exploring FOSS solutions.
- Massive amounts of money, time, and energy are wasted on trying to build software from scratch, or are blown on proprietary systems that also result in vendor lockins. Most social dev orgs are not tech companies capable of building or commanding tech.
Actionable experiments:
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Identify the most common, long-hanging-fruit usecases and problem statements across social dev organisations. Identify out-of-the-box FOSS solutions for those and map them. Prepare an open framework + playbook + docs specifically from a social dev organisation perspective.
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Identify and onboard a pilot group of IT/tech vendors and consultants and equip them with this framework to offer installation/usage/support services to social dev orgs. Once an organisation is able to frame their requirements and map it against the framework, it should be possible for them to quickly turn to someone who can equip them with it. This should ideally cost only a fraction of what would otherwise be wasted trying to reinvent systems from scratch or getting vendor locked.
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Work closely with a pilot group of “role model” organisations to equp them with appropriate FOSS for their needs and training + tinkering experience. Present evidence for a number of usecases, high quality FOSS exists out there and no software has to be built. The criteria for an org to be a “role model” can vary and does not depend on its size or age. Such an organisation should be in a position to influence other organisations in the same space to adopt similar playbooks.
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Setup an internship+mentorship program to connect skilled tech students to social dev projects and orgs. Kalvium, for instance, has students who can dedicate time to projects for a whole year. The bet is that students get to work on meaningful real world projects with social impact and social dev orgs get to connect with the tech world. Even if a small percentage of interns start paying attention to social development projects as a result, that’s a win. This is a long term attempt in hopes for seeding a culture of volunteering.
Based on the outcome of these experiments (perhaps in a year or a year and half):
- Organise meet-ups, workshops, and a FOSS/tech/social development conference. Present case studies and evidence: “For most usecases, FOSS works out of the box. Don’t waste time and energy trying to build software from scratch.”
- Organise workshops for funders of social dev orgs and present the case studies and evidence. It is important for funders to know that their money will not get wasted on software development dead ends if FOSS playbooks are adopted.
This is the gist of the discussions. T4GLabs and T4GCommunity have very graciously agreed to be the program office for this project. Once things get going, a new thread can be started with specifics and progress, and once there is some semblance of a structure, a number of avenues for volunteering for everyone who has expressed interest here should open up.
I am personally very excited and deeply convinced about this. A project like this can ideally only “fail” upwards. Best case scenario, it increases awareness significantly and kick starts sparks of a FOSS+tech+social development ecosystem that may slowly grow and sustain on its own. Worst case scenario, we would have helped a handful of impactful social development organisations with technology and the general lessons can be documented and released as a research paper for posterity. Win-win.
It is important to note that the goal of the project is not to provide technology services for free (as in cost) to social development organisations. This is not “charity”. The goal is to bridge the massive gap in FOSS technology awareness, knowledge, and access between the tech world and the social development world, to enable discovery of high quality FOSS that solves common and widespread problems, and to enable social dev organisations to focus on their work without having to waste huge amounts of time and money on futile technology pursuits.
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Interested.
Interested to volunteer!
Interested
Hello All,
My name is Saurav and I represent Centedge Technologies, a niche company focusing on building video technologies from India for the World. We have an in-house built from scratch video conferencing platform Meetnow which is a combination of Gmeet and Airmeet along with additional advantages for specific use cases. We have other products like media server load balancing, scalable server side recording infrastructure etc.You can visit our website to know more about our products / services.
We recently open sourced a video calling server, Cignal which comes with a good documentation. It is ready for production usage. It can be self hosted on a server of your choice(preferably Linux based) and can scale effortlessly to thousands of concurrent audio / video calls if the hosted server has adequate CPU / RAM capacity.
A 4vCPU / 16GB RAM machine should be enough to handle 10k+ concurrent audio/video calls.
Some use cases where our offerings can benefit:
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One to one video calling like one to one online coaching/counseling without any time limitation with detailed call logs of the past with service fine tuned for low bandwidth networks with auto re-connection of the call in case of a network failure. This is possible with modifications to our open source offering and we will try to support wholeheartedly from our side for use case specific modifications.
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Video KYC for a non profit financial institution with detailed call logs of the past with service fine tuned for low bandwidth networks with auto re-connection of the call in case of a network failure. This also is possible with modifications to our open source offering and we will try to support wholeheartedly from our side for use case specific modifications.
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Large group virtual events( Up to 500 users) without any time limits with detailed analytics of the meeting with advanced features like break out rooms, virtual backgrounds, server side recording, stage mode etc. This is possible with our commercial offering only but we can offer it for social impact in a non profit manner where we recover our infrastructure cost only.
If any NGO / NPO thinks that they can immensely benefit with a real social impact from our open source library or from any of our commercial offerings, please feel free to connect with me. I’ll be happy to go on a discussion.
I am reachable on sp@centedge.io.
Great initiative kailash! I am interested
i am intrested