The need for tech volunteering in the social development sector

Tech for social development
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Update

A lot has happened over the last few months in trying to build a structure to some of this work. This has resulted in the formation of an alliance of like-minded orgs that are working towards FOSS adoption and tech capacity building in social development orgs. OASIS - Open-source Alliance for Social Innovation and Sustainability.

The alliance is organising the OASIS Summit 2023, on 14th (Thursday) of September at BIC (Bangalore International Centre) in Bengaluru. The summit aims to get social development orgs, social entrepreneurs and innovators, techies to come together, to have hands on experience on easy-to-attain, low-cost FOSS technologies that are relevant to their work. The summit will have panels, talks, workshops, and FOSS experience pop-ups focusing, including stories from social entrepreneurs and orgs who have have big breakthroughs in their work thanks to FOSS adoption.

Sign up for the summit here:

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Were there any updates after the summit? Interested in knowing more about this.

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The summit turned out to be excellent. There were ~400-500 attendees from the social development sector and techies. There were talks, panels, and hands on FOSS experience workshops were easily deployable tools specifically useful to the social sector were demo’d (Metabase, ERPNext, ODK etc.).

Post-summit, the loose group of orgs that came together forming the alliance and volunteering to make the summit happen, are discussing to figure out a way to setup a small “secretariat” that can keep the activities going, including documenting, communicating, and sharing updates!

Hopefully, there will be full time capacity for that soon and that’s when OASIS as an alliance will become active, becoming available to wider participation. Fingers crossed.

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