A wonderful initiative happening in Kerala, and I believe we did not
see an effort this huge to spread Free Software to such a wide
audience have happened before. I hope all of you would try to join in
at least one of the locations of the Walk. (You could even plan a tour
around this, there are many beautiful places in Kerala to visit).
At the minimum join the mailing list at freedomwalk.in and share your
ideas and pass of this message to your friends.
Cheers
Praveen
-- Forwarded message --
From: Anoop John [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 2008/9/23
Subject: FOURTH ESTATE CRITIQUE Walking from Kasargod to Trivandrum for Freedom
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dear All,
This is my first mail to the group and I think this warrants a short
introduction about myself. Anoop John, running a small IT business in
Trivandrum by the name Zyxware Technologies. I had started this
company with a definite vision to actually drive the change I wished
to see in this world. I don't know if you remember this but we were
the company who released the Chikungunya Tracking Software as Free
Software to the Govt of Kerala last year. You can read more about the
company at www.zyxware.com and more about me at www.anoopjohn.com and
www.thondomraughts.com
This time we are planning on a mobilization campaign across Kerala to
promote social and environmental activism in the state. A team of us
are walking from Kasargod to Trivandrum and are planning to organize
programs in Schools, Educational Institutions and other Non Profit
Organizations to build awareness about the issues. Additionally we
hope to connect with activist individuals and organizations across the
state and give them an opportunity and a common platform to
collaborate with each other.
I am writing to this group because I know that there are quite a lot
of activists in here and we need help from you to organize the
programs in your respective areas. If you are interested you can read
more about the project below or you can check out the site at
www.freedomwalk.in
If you are interested you can please subscribe to the mailing list -
[EMAIL PROTECTED] by sending a mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] If you know somebody who will
be able to help us with this please forward this information to your
friends.
Hoping to hear a positive response from this group.
Warm Regards
Anoop John
FREEDOM WALK - A Walk to Claim, to Ensure and to Preserve Freedom
Background
Our society is ridden with problems - social, economical,
environmental. People have always been trying to solve these problems.
Sometimes they have been successful while sometimes they have not
been. The level of activism and the sensitivity of the people towards
these problems have been going down progressively. Good can survive on
their own while evil has to collude to survive. This lack of a need
has resulted in a definite lack of communication and collaboration
among activists in diverse areas.
Free Software as a community driven initiative has been growing in
leaps and bounds over the last decade or so. This has been made
possible because of the use of technology for efficient collaboration
and communication in the community. The parallels between Free
Software activism and Social and Environmental activism are very
close, but their individual progresses have been very different.
Objective
1) Run a mobilization campaign across the state to build awareness
about the issues that we are addressing.
2) Use this campaign to connect with and connect together individuals
and activists across the state
3) Offer Technology as an efficient means and a supplement to the
existing systems used by the activist organizations
Hypothesis
1) There is lot of inherent goodwill in the society. If we can tap
into this goodwill to promote social causes we should be able to scale
up any kind of social operations massively
2) There is inherent goodness in everybody. If we offer the right kind
of opportunity for people to offer their capability, services and
resources in a way and scale convenient and comfortable to them, they
will.
Idea
Identify a campaign that will be bizarre that people would find it
novel. I am making myself available for this project as the crazy IT
guy who gave up a life in the US, a job in the US and who came back to
India to try to do the impossible. Additionally do something that
people don't hear very often. So we have figured out this idea of
walking from Kasargod to Trivandrum covering all district capitals and
conducting awareness seminars in Educational Institutions and other
organizations along the way. Politicians have done this, Adventurers
have done this, Activists have done this - but an IT entrepreneur with
the above profile - not before. This idea have been thrown out to
peers and the only response that we have been getting is - Crazy - and
we think that is good.
What is this freedom that we are talking about?
It is the freedom to live our lives to its fullest without harming
anybody else
