On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:51 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe <password> <address>" in the subject or body of the message. http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
