National Informatics Centre (India), Open Knowledge Network and UNESCO Join Forces to Develop New Community Software Tool
11-01-2005 (Paris)
The National Informatics Centre (NIC) in Delhi, the Open Knowledge Network (OKN) and UNESCO announce a partnership to develop a new software tool – to be called Open eNRICH - for the creation and exchange of locally relevant knowledge within and between communities in developing countries.
UNESCO and NIC originally worked together to develop a software tool – eNRICH - to enable users of community multimedia centres to access and contribute to knowledge resources easily. eNRICH was implemented in nine sites within UNESCO's ICT for Poverty Reduction (ictPR) project. NIC continued to develop eNRICH, and further versions are now in use in the North Eastern States of India, the World Health Organisation's Health InterNetwork Project, UNESCO's INFOYOUTH project, in the Akshaya Project of Kerala, India and in the District Rural Development Agencies of the state governments of India. Shortly, OKN will use eNRICH to support four new partners in North India, and one in Sri Lanka.
At the same time, OKN has been successfully growing, with partners in four countries – Kenya, India, Senegal and Zimbabwe using the OKN software tool to create and exchange local content in seven languages on a daily basis. Content is exchanged over a variety of appropriate technologies including the WorldSpace satellite, dial-up landlines and mobile phones.
Following discussions between NIC, UNESCO and OKN, it became clear that there were huge benefits in combining forces to develop a new, open source, version of the software which will be called Open eNRICH. This will combine the best elements of the work so far and add many new features requested by our partner organisations. Moreover, the focus will be on an open design that will facilitate exchange of content with other information sources, networks and communication media so that OKN can participate in a global 'network of networks' for the world's poor.
The synergies between the three organisations go beyond the software development and will encourage the pooling of resources and approaches for training, support and project evaluation, and the sharing of content between all our project sites around the world. One example of this will be collaboration between OKN Africa's programme and UNESCO's Community Multimedia Centre scale-up in Africa.
At the same time, OKN has been successfully growing, with partners in four countries – Kenya, India, Senegal and Zimbabwe using the OKN software tool to create and exchange local content in seven languages on a daily basis. Content is exchanged over a variety of appropriate technologies including the WorldSpace satellite, dial-up landlines and mobile phones.
Following discussions between NIC, UNESCO and OKN, it became clear that there were huge benefits in combining forces to develop a new, open source, version of the software which will be called Open eNRICH. This will combine the best elements of the work so far and add many new features requested by our partner organisations. Moreover, the focus will be on an open design that will facilitate exchange of content with other information sources, networks and communication media so that OKN can participate in a global 'network of networks' for the world's poor.
The synergies between the three organisations go beyond the software development and will encourage the pooling of resources and approaches for training, support and project evaluation, and the sharing of content between all our project sites around the world. One example of this will be collaboration between OKN Africa's programme and UNESCO's Community Multimedia Centre scale-up in Africa.
Related themes/countries
· UNESCO and Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs)
· News archive: 2005
· News Archives 2005
· India: News Archive 2005
· Information Processing Tools: News Archives 2005
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