Taking IT to the voluntary world

Frederick Noronha

If you hear someone talk about Mahiti and Bangalore, you’ll probably think of the state government program that goes under that name. But even before the state began making IT relevant to the common man, another venture with a similar name was taking it to the not-for-profit world.

Mahiti.org is a venture that aims to provide simple and affordable Information and Communication Technology services to the civil sector. Or, as they put it: "We specialise in multi-platform, multi-lingual Web, Intranet, multimedia and kiosk applications."

Okay, so what’s the big deal?

In the task of making IT relevant to the diversity of India, reaching out to the non-business, non-government world is another critical task. What happens to the efficiency of a sector that needs the solutions badly, has a lot of potential use for it, but simply doesn’t work on corporate lines sufficiently enough to go out and get (or afford) what it needs?

Over the past three or so years, Mahiti.org says it has worked with 50 voluntary organisations on publishing, messaging, e-commerce, knowledge management, collaboration, and advocacy projects. The organisation has also held many technical and non-technical training sessions.

Today, they specialise in the Zope application server, as a solution for the voluntary sector. (Zope is a leading Free Software application server, specialising in content management, portals, and custom applications. This product enables teams to collaborate in the creation and management of dynamic Web-based applications such as Intranets and portals. See www.zope.org).

Mahiti.org has worked with Murray Culshaw Advisory Services, Rotary Club and Madhuvan to build an offline and online directory of voluntary organisations in Karnataka called ‘Bangalore Cares’ (www.bangalorecares.org).

In collaboration with Give Foundation (www.givefoundation.org) and Murray Culshaw Advisory Services (www.fundraising-india.org), this network of techies, harnessing IT for the voluntary sector, has worked on building a national donation channel on a portal called ICICIcommunities (www.icicicommunities.org).

In recent months, Mahiti.org has been working to get Free Software into the vocabulary
of the development world. Recently, it has been working to deploy 30 student volunteers of PESIT, a Bangalore-based engineering college, to build e-governance applications on Zope or Python and Indic applications on GNU/Linux.

One of their dreams is to help build a Copyleftregistry.org, and help facilitate meetings of the Bangalore Zope/Python User Group. They also have been working to release a ‘donor management software’ based on Zope/Python into the copylefted world.

Says Mahiti.org’s Sunil Abraham, "We are a small organisation with limited personnel and financial resources. We have no grant or donation-based income and have to survive by selling our products and services."

Over the last three-and-half years the organisation claims to have serviced more than 75 VSOs (voluntary service organisations) directly, and around 1,000 VSOs indirectly. "Our clients include Ashoka.org, Indian Foundation for the Arts and National Law School of India. Mahiti was also the finalist for Erica 2000—an award instituted by Ericsson for technical innovation in the non-profit sector," states Sunil.