organisations , individuals , event

• 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.

• AGNII - Art For All began as an entertainment group performing fire-dance and drum shows and today has metamorphosed into an ART for a CAUSE group, aspiring to create a culture of peace, friendship and harmony in the society. Agnii is driven by passion to see the world smile and dance with joy.

• Namma Nimma is the bicycle sharing system at the Campus of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. The pilot initiative consists of four manned bicycle rental stations within the institute campus. These bicycles are available to students, staff and visitors, to commute within the campus. The project works on a simple Sign-Up, Select, Ride and Return system where students sign-up via the website, and get a registration ID, select a cycle from any of the station racks, ride the cycle to their destination and return it to the nearest station.

• Namma School Radio We believe in branching out our team as much as possible, in order to reach out to as many as possible. We also use open source resources, which gives contributors complete independence over their career growth. For further information on how to be a part of Namma Halli Radio, do write to us at namdu1radio@gmail.com

• Neelkanth Mama a shepherd and social activist, distinguished intelligence of the educated that relies on technology from wisdom among the shepherds who rely on nature for their knowledge

• Prabir Chitrakar - Patachitra artists in bengal, Community of artist working on contemporary as well as traditional patachitra.

• Alemaree - Creating a Makerspace and helping community in crafts.

• Futuretronlab The future is always around the corner. Our mission is to build an affordable and aesthetically pleasing Eco-friendly bike that revolutionizes intra-city travel

• 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

• LLN - Living Labs Network is a place based organisation that works with different contexts and communities for a participatory reimagination of development for the place

• Milli is a consortium of individuals and communities interested in the nurturing of archives. Archives enable diverse stories. This aim guides the work of the consortium, the purpose, form and content of an archive, and what environments it could nourish in the future.

Summary

Demo: https://stories.janastu.org/

We have been telling stories, re-telling stories and weaving incredibly complex network of stories. How can Internet standards, protocols and tools support this basic human need? How can a hyper-media Web of inter-linked stories become discoverable and navigable content for all - inclusive of low-literate people. How can Internet technologies help archive, reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent to assist the natural ways of storytelling and help capture oral histories and local knowledge directly by the people for the first time in human evolution?

We are working on Papad, a hypermedia annotation tool that can be used across devices and in regions with low internet connectivity and low-literate populations. Tools like papad have significant potential in creating and disseminating knowledge that is audio/video-based, and therefore accessible to populations with lower literacy levels. It can assist anyone in voicing their views on their community related topics. It would be a way to preserve and revive the knowledge for next generation. As a tool to share, learn and explore from other communities’ perspectives on art, culture, education, technology, tradition for health and farming.

Our research focus has been on web accessibility for Indian needs in the local context of culture, literacy, and socio-economic conditions. One can upload an audio recording to a local server, browse, listen to audio and tag the entire audio or relevant parts (fragments), annotate a image tag, which can later be used in making audio visual stories that is relevant for the communities. Papad aims to be the audio visual publishing platform for the low literates, without barriers of knowing to read and write.

Janastu is a people oriented open-source collective working to enable community storytelling by the people, for the people.

Our mission is to build decentralized community owned networks to provision local connectivity in remote areas and to facilitate Internet, technology and crafts literacy.

We are developing audio annotation tools for community archiving and to help construct storytelling narratives to help in the inclusion of low-semi literates as first class internet citizens.

If you are looking for our old website, its here.

If you want to join us for a meeting to see what we are working on today, start at the Agenda

Quick Links

Listening and making sense of conversations need annotation, discovery and navigation tools. To give a glimpse, over 500 million online meetings happen per day in 2022. Many of these are recorded by facilitators for sharing of the meeting proceeds and for sense-making activities. Typically, the recordings stay on a cloud provided by the meeting host and hardly many revisit them for review for lack of time and lack of decentralized collaboration tools. Followups post the meeting are particularly aggravated when the meetings are with rural participants. Participants will not have a locally available recording nor can bookmark audio fragments during recording for revisiting needs. Therefore coordinating review discussions require obtaining the recording, making notes on what was said when, scheduling review discussion with local groups and then sharing with the meeting facilitators for a walk through. This process is especially aggravating for the remote rural participants who typically, unlike the facilitators, are low-literate and not able to minute the meetings with reference timestamps.

We propose CnBox, a plug and play Community Networking cloud server with decentralized recording and marking tool as one of its services. These tools also provide a Web interface for media archiving, annotations and discovery of related media fragments. The recordings are addressed by content and can be referenced across the shared networks. Annotations can be collaboratively shared or made in private that are only available on local networks. The resulting hypermedia archives interconnect as a Web of linked data that is inclusive of the low-literate or the remote participant communities. These tools are browser based and open source, and can be hosted even on personal computers.

use cases: https://hackmd.io/L6MynXknQVaprOJfMAxCbA?view

Audio conversations has been the main stay of human communications. As Internet reach for the rural and low-literate populations of the world is halting, interaction and interconnection support for audio based communications are a necessity to encourage utilitarian engagement. Collaborative media annotations can effectively contribute to decentralised hypermedia content networks. We have developed and deployed collaborative audio annotation tools in a number of community networks. These are in the contexts of listening sessions in rural contexts and mesh networks, community radio - curation and discovery, micro media and storytelling archives, ethnography and community health, and online learning in offline spaces during the COVID lockdown times. With this work, we ensure availability of packaged open source tools for self hosting in addition to devices that plugin to a participant network context for "sense-making as a service".

Related Projects

This is a software design document that captures the system requirements and discusses the overall architecture of the system. The system in question is one designed for creating, publishing and consuming locative media. Locative media is media, text, audio, video, that has been geo-located. There are multiple types of locative media currently available, such as the KML files coming from the ‘Follow the sheep’ project.

The idea is to allow this media to be consumed in a player application which allows the viewing of media at particular geo-locations. This can be used to create interactive narratives and other forms of non-linear narratives that involves the user of the media moving through physical space to consume media.

Examples of narratives could be treasure hunts where users have to unlock clues at different locations that take them to other locations to find treasure. Interactive fiction where users move from point A to B to navigate the fiction, to take the story forward. Guided city tours are another possibility, where users are shown different media at different locations and they get to know or understand media taken or about a particular location.

We intend to work with the Ragi Gudda Slum in Bangalore, which became a vertical housing settlement project for state rehabilitation of slum dwellers in 2011-2012. People lack access to formal credit, job mobility, education and healthcare. Our vision is to create an open-source eco-system of connectivity for them that makes their needs accessible. We will begin by setting up a wifi mesh network in the area. Several households have been enthusiastic about working towards such connectivity infrastructure. The problems of connectivity, although present long before the pandemic, were amplified because of it. Education and work that was available before cannot be accessed anymore because of the lack of networks and devices. Through this project, we hope to build a resilient connectivity infrastructure for the communities in the Ragi Gudda slums using mesh routers and community radio facilities.

Through this project, we would also like to work on a holistic approach to learning, capacity building and community cultural interventions. We have been working with youth and women in the area and introducing WiFi mesh operations, local repository of their content, open box devices and open source technology by starting tech-circles. Our objective is to see such a culturally compex community succeed in innovating and customising infrasture based on their evolving needs.

Mission

We work with the Raagi Gudda Slum in Bengaluru - a high-rise housing settlement project for state rehabilitation of slum dwellers built in 2011-2012. The people lack access to formal credit, job mobility, education and healthcare. Our vision is to create an open-source eco-system of connectivity for them that makes their needs accessible.

Vision

We will begin by setting up a wifi mesh network in the region. Several households have been enthusiastic about working towards such connectivity infrastructure. The problems of connectivity, although present long before the pandemic, were amplified because of it. Education and work that was available before cannot be accessed anymore because of the lack of networks and devices. Through this project, we hope to build a resilient connectivity infrastructure for the communities in the Raagi Gudda slums using mesh routers and community radio facilities.

Solution

Through this project, we would also like to work on training the women and youth in the region in open source technology by starting tech-circles and GLUGs (GNU/Linux User Groups) so that the communities are not only able to maintain open-source infrastructure themselves, but also succeed in innovating and customising this open-source infrastructure based on their evolving needs.

Implementation

Stages

Process

Outcomes

Key Activities Conducted

Reflections and Results

Reading Material

13 Ways is a "Storytelling from Archives" of NCBS conceived by Venkat Srinivasan for its 25th anniversary.

"Built around multiple ways to reflect upon and assemble the history of the institution, the exhibit brings to light a tangled history and unlikely journey, weaved by over 70 story tellers, over 600 photographs, official records, letters, and the occasional lab note. Where does meaning reside in an archival document? And how can we better engage with archival repositories to form stories? The exhibit is an attempt to answer these questions through the history of an institution. It is the first phase of a digital experiment in archiving, journalism and storytelling."

The transformative potential of indigenous knowledge production, archiving and storytelling in a decentralized wifi-mesh context is likely going to lead to alternate possibilities of development for low-literate and remote communities.

Our interest is to look at both archival architectures and how they connect to the offline as well as the process of data creation, interpretation and analysis as an essentially offline activity. It reflects on data creation for an archive and the interpretative and organisational logics that determines inclusion. It also comments on institutional structures and procedures as essential drivers of the life of a digital archive with resources and institutional politics playing an important role in the nature, use and access of the archive.

Once the archive comes into being various elements in the architecture of the archive itself enable a selective engagement with the offline propelled by the archive’s politics. This can manifest in metadata derivation, access, dissemination, assigned user roles and hierarchies and the archive’s approach to validation and annotation.

Access to the archive then invites questions of use and performance. Who chooses to see what in what context? How does the access that the archive enable direct this performance? Communally annotated archives reflect social processes that may be independent of the original archival impulse and generate new data and open new archival pathways.

Maaya is a class of utilities to co-create AV presentations from a Web browser. It as been used to generate video renditions of Girija Kalyana of Hampi using Prof. Chelavaraju's narrative, Street Vending is Pakka Legal using ALF's cartoon book, Give back our Drums using a tribal story, Anthillhacks in short daily updates, etc.,

Janastu, Medha, Development Alternatives, la Caixa, Work for Progress,

We are currently (2020-2021) working in several villages in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Janastu and Medha (Lucknow) were selected to deploy social innovation methodologies to reach young girls and open up new opportunities for them. "Work 4 Progress" (W4P) India Programme called to experiment with technology to overcome lack of connectivity, mobility and safety in workspaces faced by young rural women in Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Value-driven technology represents a window to the future of work for young girls and their dreams and aspirations. Our project was to create a hyper-local mesh that would be inclusive of women and other low-literate people around the girls in their story narratives, and help develop a process for developing a hyper-media decentralised archive that helps navigate and discover skills in the area so they are collectively gig enabled.

The year 2020 made travel to the area impossible and we worked with out local partner Medha in developing and deploying ASPi: an aspiration device which is enabling young girls to connect with high-end technologies to record narratives and learn new skills in entrepreneurship and communication. The prototype technology is called ASPi (based on unleashing aspirations of young girls), that records audio and visual messages and transmits them over a wider network. The technology began with the idea to enable Medha and Janastu to listen to young girls, while facilitating conversations among them, as they went about their day.

As the girls became more comfortable with the technology, they began synchronising, annotating and sharing their recordings with each other. The initial stories of their daily routines, their families, childhood experiences and incidences evolved to significant topics with the girls speaking of their talent, aspirations and role models.

Mission

Problem Statement

How might we use information and communication technology (ICT) to create virtual co-working spaces for young women (18-25) in eastern Uttar Pradesh, thereby enhancing access to entrepreneurial work opportunities in a rapidly transforming economy?

As part of “la Caixa” Banking Foundation call Challenge Work4progress 2019, Janastu / Servelots in collaboration with Development Alternatives (DA) and Medha is working in the Mirzapur district, Uttar Pradesh state in India. With a larger objective to encourage rural women, students, young women in traditional labor and skill contexts, typically low literate and unconnected or unable to discover or publish useful content on the Internet, to find purposeful online communities to actively engage with for their collective needs of skill development and entrepreneurial aspirations.

Vision

• Gig empowering young women in the villages of Mirzapur

• Creating synergies between skills among the young women and their digitally connected cohorts.

• Nurturing backward linkages from the aspirations of outgoing students to a cohesive gig empowerment of their communities.

Solution

Aimed at creating synergies between gig empowered young women and digitally connected communities. Nurture an outlook for women to think beyond the convention towards new age income generation opportunities. A tech platform will help enable “self preneurs” engaging with local communities through freelancing opportunities to create a sustainable ecosystem.

Our exercise is to ensure Comfortive, Cohesive, Upskilling, Communicative, Freelancing spaces.

Implementation

Stages

• Dialogue

• Co-creation

• Prototype

• Acceleration

Process

A Visit to Mirzapur

8 members from Janastu team had planned to visit Mirzapur in march 2020, tickets were booked for both flights and trains. With the covid situation we had to cut short on people and finally Dinesh and Shalini went ahead with the visit.

This visit marked new beginnings for us in UP and since then, we have gone from strength to strength.

Outcomes

We are currently working in several villages in Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh where we are building a webinar device (based on raspberry pis) for collectives and groups of college-going girls who have not been able to continue their vocational education and schooling because of the ongoing pandemic. This is a substantial contribution to edu-tech as it seeks to address the problems of connectivity and schooling that are faced by about 75% of the households in the country. Through a low-cost and accessible setup, we are creating technology that is community-driven and for the use of groups, thereby working towards goal of self-directed learning as well. "While these webinar-pis can be used for educational seminars, online/recorded classes".

Key Activities Conducted

Reflections and Results

Reading Material

Relevant Blog Articles