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 anoopjohn@gmail.com Date: 2008/9/23 Subject: FOURTH ESTATE CRITIQUE Walking from Kasargod to Trivandrum for Freedom To: fourth-estate-critique@googlegroups.com
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 - freedomwalk@googlegroups.com by sending a mail to freedomwalk-subscribe@googlegroups.com 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 and without violating any of our accepted social norms. There are several areas of life where we invoke this freedom. We are primarily concerned with three different areas - Freedom from Social Evils, Freedom to live our future without having to worry about environmental catastrophes and energy insecurities and Software Freedom.
Our offer to activist Individuals and Organizations
1) Ride on this program to promote their activities locally and across the state. 2) Use this program to connect with like minded individuals and organizations across the state 3) Upgrade their operations by using technologies and services that are being offered
Organizational aspects
We are trying to partner with organizations who have reach and presence in local areas across the state to organize the programs. Currently we are partnering with Free Software communities across Kerala. These communities are going to utilize this vehicle to promote the free software movement in the state. Free Software communities are already well connected and they have reasonably good presence across the state. These organizations will be able to organize public functions and local gatherings where the general public can be included.
An agreement has almost been reached with WWF to partner with them to channel all the environmental activism and queries that are going to be generated. WWF has presence in schools across Kerala through their social forestry and nature clubs. They should be able to organize programs in schools where these clubs are active
We are trying to mobilize support of other social activist organizations and individuals to use this opportunity and organize their programs along the way.
Attracting Media Attention
The walk and the people who are walking and the collaboration platform are areas which we think are going to be attractive to the media. Media has also been very attracted to Free Software and has been promoting Free Software liberally during our activities in Trivandrum and we are hoping to bank on Free Software for this program also.
Promotion over the web
We will be using web as a primary channel to promote this project. The whole walk will be covered virtually everyday and reports, photos and videos will be updated to the website - www.freedomwalk.in - to let people across the state and the world know about this. The site is designed to let people interact with the people walking on a real time basis.
Collaboration Platform
There is no point in bringing people together just for the event and forgetting about them after that. The whole point of this exercise is to connect activist individuals and organizations together and build awareness among the general public. The event should serve the purpose of building public awareness. For connecting individuals and organizations we are developing and are planning to launch an online collaboration platform that can be used for free by this target section of the population. In addition this platform could also possibly give an opportunity for people in all sections of the society to contribute towards causes and we will have an opportunity to validate our hypothesis no 2.
General Strategy for the program
We are going to follow a more or less impromptu strategy for organizing the talks and seminars and public functions. There are three reasons for this :- 1) We don't have good centralized resources for doing this. 2) We don't have very strong local connections. 3) The organization is going to get easier once the public visibility and the momentum of the program increases.
Pending items in organization
1) Actual details of talks/seminars have not been finalized 2) Actual details of organizations who will be organizing the programs 3) Contact information of people who will be organizing the programs 4) Approximate dates during which the walk will pass through a district have to be finalized
Impromptu items that are going to be fun and exciting
1) Places of stay have not been identified 2) Path through certain districts are flexible
Strengths
1) Very strong in web based collaboration and building web based systems to rapidly mobilize online 2) Permanent team in Trivandrum to act as the Virtual Operations Centre(VOC) 3) Strong brand presence and reach in the Free Software Communities across Kerala.
-- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.zyxware.com http://www.anoopjohn.com http://www.thondomraughts.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Be the change you wish to see in the world", M. K. Gandhi ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Praveen A