Representative organizations we have associated with:

The International Institute for Art, Culture and Democracy (IIACD) is an inter-disciplinary group with expertise in design anthropology, new media art, technology and art history. The group shares the common vision and agenda of programmatic advocacy for cultural democracy. iiacd.org

Mitan in the language of the Adivasis of Bastar means - A long term business relationship across the value chain upholding human dignity. Mitan was promoted by a network of professionals from diverse fields, including Scientists, Designers, Information Technologists, Textile Engineers, Social Scientists, Architects, and Communications & Media professionals committed to craft-based, sustainable livelihoods approach to development. mitan.in

Re-cognition. Every living being posses existential biological knowledge, the knowledge of nature, the ability to sustain life. Every organism is born with it. The human organism differs from other organisms insofar as it has codified it's complex language system into text. re-cognition.org and sadhanavillageschool.org

Phoenix Products has been manufacturing Non Farm Rural Equipments & Biomass Based Energy efficient devices (Water Heaters, Charcoal Cooker, Three Pan Cook Stoves, Dosa Tava, Biomass Driers, Gasifiers etc. since 1989. Phoenix is engaged in dissemination of Biomass Based Energy Efficient Devices which are commercially viable. phoenixproducts.info

Solidarity and Action Against The HIV Infection in India (SAATHII), Chennai SAATHII strengthens and expands HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment services throughout India. Janastu built an Online Resource Center (ORC) for SAATHII, which aims to serve as a clearing house of information relating to HIV/AIDS in India. The ORC consists of an E-Library, E-Forum, E-Training and E-Support. saathii.org

Tsunami Knowledge Centre, Bangalore Janastu worked on creating a Tsunami Information center. The Tsunami Rehabilitation Knowledge Center was developed to be the central repository of information for the Regional Resource Centers, and for all NGOs who are participating in tsunami reconstruction and development.

More Pantoto communities and projects can be found here.

Janastu is being granted (September 2013) 12A status based on the work done on Software Commons -

"advancement of any other object of general public utility"

Software commons is identified as the pool of free and open source software (FOSS) that is developed, and made available on the Internet, by a large number of individuals and organisations so as to be used by anyone for free (without cost) and further developed to suit the needs of the individual context or that of the local communities. Software available in the commons now (2013) can be used for most needs of an individual or an organization for their typical operation of a computer or another device such as a phone. Examples of software that is used in large numbers, that most people will recognize, are the Firefox browser, the OpenOffice suite with document processing and spreadsheet applications, the Linux operating systems that run desktops and laptops, and the Android OS that run on most smart phone models. Lately, since 2012, most of the Indian government research grants require that the software developed using public funds should be contributed to the software commons using one of the open source software licenses.

Over the last decade Janastu has been contributing by doing

1. research and development of software for the emerging needs of local Indian communities and contributing the developed software for the software commons,
2. supporting community outreach activities that advocate and innovate using the software commons, and
3. supporting NGOs and other organizations to use the free software from the software commons by helping them understand and migrate their applications.

12A certificate

Pantoto Communities is a Web-based software for Communities to Manage Community Knowledge. Pantoto Communities server has been used over the last 10 years by a number of NGOs for their managing their community knowledge. Pantoto Communities platform is about 10 years old and has gone through many iterations of development. Pantoto Mouchak is the current version of Pantoto Communities which is a Javascript framework that uses SWeeTs to extend its functionality. pantoto.janastu.org

http://pantoto.com/webs/browse/Pantoto_Communities.html

PANTOTO model is especially useful in sectors such as social development, schools, and small and medium size organizations:

• These organizations work directly with beneficiaries, capture, create and work intensively with data, information and knowledge.
• Dependency on technical professionals to build information management systems causes delays. The cost of hiring such professionals and related resources also makes the effort unsustainable.
• Equitability can arise when organizations can create, maintain and deal with information management systems by themselves.

Based on these factors, if IT is to be used, these organizations have to be empowered to:

• Take the design, implementation and maintenance of an information management system for granted and not necessarily have to acquire IT skills or hire IT professionals.
• Redesign or evolve the system based on changing information needs
• Build solutions that are easy-to-use, affordable and quick to deploy
• Use the same process across projects and in different areas
• Manage the participatory creation of locally relevant and locally created content

Wiki at http://janastu.org/technoscience/index.php/Pantoto

Janastu welcomes and supports open events at their location. Some larger events Janastu has supported in the past:

Technology Governance and Citizenship (TGC) is a series of discussions about technology and society, with an emphasis on encouraging conversations between programmers, computer scientists, social scientists and practitioners. tgc.janastu.org

Barcamp Bangalore is an volunteer run event, open to public, participatory, workshop-event focused around people, ideas and collaboration. There is no fixed format and agenda. Any interesting topic to share or want to collaborate with folks with a variety of experience Barcamp is the place. barcampbangalore.org

PyCon India is the premier conference on using and developing the Python programming language in India. Conducted annually by the Python developer community, it attracts the best Python programmers from India and abroad. in.pycon.org

The KDE community is an international technology team dedicated to creating a free and user-friendly computing experience. It is represented in legal and financial matters by KDE e.v which is a registered non-profit organization in Germany – ev.kde.org

Information Technology (IT) has demonstrated ways to gather and disseminate information. It has, however, remained closed for NGOs and community needs in general for lack of IT resource persons in their groups. Janastu intends to take a position as an organization to offer support to such groups.

Who can help manage information needs of a group of people who are not computer savvy? How can we provide solutions for people and organizations that do not have resources to develop custom solutions?

If you are a person who can proactively work with a group and can help us in bridging our resources towards this, please get in touch with us by sending a mail with a clear subject and specific interests and skill indicators to janastu at servelots.com. We can always use people with Computer Science skills, Internet skills, programming skills, user interface and usability experts, and of course various other domain expertises.

Alipi, the Re-narration Web is set of tools for developing and rendering narratives that assist in accessing Web-content across cultural boundaries. Re-narration Web is therefore also about Web-accessibility for non-literates. Alipi uses SWeeTs.

Alipi - Re-narration Web attempts to bridge the gap in web accessibility discourses in addressing the needs of non-literate web users. Provisioning of alternative narratives of the content for visitors who are differently abled/literate is delegated to stakeholder social circles. Alipi, an implementation of Re-narration Web, marks the reference elements using Xpaths in addition to attributes that identify target groups for this narrative.

In the near future, smart phones and data plans are poised to become affordable and people with low literacy will have access to the Internet. They represents the three billion emerging new users of the Web. However, most of the Web content will remain unavailable to them until as they are not educated to be able to appreciate much of the current textual Web. Re-narration Web provisions creative ways of emulating the oral tradition in these communities. Re-narration Web, thus, has a good potential to initiate learning among the low-literates.

The production and consumption of content on the Web has been mostly limited to the “literate”. Those who are not able to *read* much of Web content are in billions either due to illiteracy or due the context of the content authorship being foreign to that of the visitor of a Web page. The widespread availability of Internet enabled mobile devices have brought the Web to the palms of a much wider population in comparison to personal computers. This increase of the physical accessibility to the Web (hardware and services such as 3G) has made the issue of content accessibility, for people who cannot read, all the more important.

Wiki at http://wiki,janastu.org/Alipi

Principles of Programming (PoP) uses Javascript to develop a Web-browser based course for the Web 2.0 era. (With Venkatesh Choppella, http://www.iiit.ac.in/~choppell)

Computer Science courses, especially the introductory ones, need to jump into the Web 2.0 era. We notice, for over a decade now, most programmers jump into learning programming languages, using what may be called as "Bible books" (e.g., Java Bible). What is also of interest is that these learners are independent of university curriculum. There are a number of online resources that cater to these learners. However, most university curriculum and teaching is based on decades old teaching that using "computers in labs". We feel that it is time to turn teaching CS upside down by first introducing abstract concepts and use browsers to introduce them, letting students use these to put together programs that resemble their everyday applications such as gmail, facebook or a Google docs spreadsheet, and as the student gains confidence in CS fundamentals, to introduce in the later courses low level computing machines, algorithms, etc. pop.janastu.org

Wiki at http://janastu.org/technoscience/index.php/Pop

Technology Governance and Citizenship (TGC) is a series of discussions about technology and society, with an emphasis on encouraging conversations between programmers, computer scientists, social scientists and practitioners.

Links: http://tgc.janastu.org and Wiki

Knowledge Bank for Indian Digital Heritage project at Hampi is to interconnect cultural resources from a number of contributing teams, in order to facilitate a custom Web-presentation of their work. 

 

One of the goals of Indian Digital Heritage project (IDH) is to see that people can set up heritage web sites and contribute to heritage knowledge. Essential component for such heritage setup is a knowledge bank that assists, in a virtual heritage walk. For this we propose to collect SWeeTs (“semantic tweets”) about artifacts, let people curate them, and then style the walk presentations.

We, with IIACD, experimented on how large murals can be annotated by experts and others so that these annotations eventually also contribute to the knowledge bank of Indian Digital Heritage. We develop a set of reusable tools to help the process of annotation and curation for cultural heritage and museum platforms. These annotations can be pulled into a context of curation by a set of experts, who thereby can develop a desired narrative.

Information about partners and collaborators of knowledge bank, see IDH website: vijayanagara.in; IIACD project about murals: vijayanagara.in/#murals; :

We have been working on concepts and community platforms, over the last few years, that fundamentally depend on the provisioning collaboration. Lately, we have been able to re-architect these platforms by identifying the messaging aspects into a separate layer called the SWeeT Web. SWeeTs are Social Semantic conversations that help bring an individual to annotate the Web with a set of simple, customizable, tools. SWeeT Web serves as a social complement to the distributed and decentralized Web. SWeeT Web decouples the messenger and the aggregator.

SWeeT is someone’s context sensitive statement about some Web resource, which exists on the Web itself. SWeeT Web facilitates conversational enhancement of the Web through SWeeTs which are stored in repositories. The syntax of a SWeeT is
@user Context Resource Attributes
@user is the person making the statement,
Context is the resource that defines the context (i.e. ontology),
Resource is the subject (URI) of the statement, and
Attributes describe the properties of the Resource according to the given Context.

Wiki at http://wiki.janastu.org/wiki/Sweet_Web

Follow the Sheep project involves following shepherds and their (mostly black) sheep, in the Deccan areas of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh of India. Shepherds are non-literate in general. And the nomadic shepherds travel about 400 kms over a range of 6 to 8 months with their herds. They are in small groups of 3-8 family members. Every few days they migrate to another location that can help feed their sheep. When in a location, they are often in a farmer’s land after having negotiated a trade for feed in return to the sheep manure (night droppings). During the day they can graze part of the farm (as per negotiation) and take the sheep to other grazing areas which are often common property reserves, and to areas where there is a water body.

Follow the Sheep is about researching into possible mobile (smart phone) applications for the needs of shepherds. Thinking in terms of the booming technology, the mobile phones reaching every corner right from the urban area to the rural and how can the mobile phone features/mobile apps help the shepherds too, consider their needs and requirements. mitan.in/followsheep

Wiki at http://wiki.janastu.org/Follow_the_Sheep