qualifies for me - I dont know about Sandeep - whatever, great work
On 15-Jun-08, at 10:51 PM, Prasanna David G wrote:
On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves
<lawgon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
hi,
Sandip Saini of NRC-FOSS is doing his PhD in a study of foss
methodologies.
As part of his work, he is trying to compile a set of FOSS success
stories.
Definition:
<quote>
Documenting the success stories of FOSS implementation in India--
Nature, Scope and Methodology of the study.
Is the study only limited to India ?
I have been helping maintaining the main servers of
www.nepalwireless.netlocated in Pokhara for the past 3 years. This is
a big success story and
Mahabir Pun, the founder and leader of this project got the Magsasy
award
for 2007. Nearly 20 villages which don't have any
telecommunication link
and would take atleast a day's walk to reach are able to
communicate with
neighbouring villages and to the outside world because of the network.
Asterisk is running in the server in Pokhara. The villagers are
able to get
medical help from Doctors in Pokhara - using just simple webcams at
both
ends - Telemedicine. They are able to sell/buy their products from
different villages using "HaatBazaar" - an e-commerce concept
conceived
mainly for the scenario of these villages. Poor families - whose only
source of income is some one from their family working somewhere in
some
other country - are able to communicate with them at lower cost
through
email/chat. School children are able to get latest information
from the
Internet. And this network as as an income generation for those
village
schools. And the list goes on...
All these services are fully implemented using FOSS. Even the Linksys
router is running OpenWRT (believe it or not, one friend even got
Asterisk
to run in that Linksys box - just in case the other server
crashes.). The
old computers in the villages - which were mainly donated (or
dumped) are
still running something between Windows 95 and NT though.
You can have a look at nepalwireless.com.np - which is the internal
server
webpage. Let me warn you, we didn't design the server to keep
people out -
but for anyone to get easier access to the services. This is not a
corporate house that either is worried about its competitions
breaking in or
spending money in getting state-of-the-art hardware. One of the main
headache for me has been to trying to quickly do something when one
of the
hardware components fail and keep the services running as much as
possible.
Does this qualify your definition ?
regards,
Prasanna David
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