Welcome to Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations.

This report is the joint property of the World Bank and the grantee organization(s). The material reflects the individual, professional experiences and opinions of the authors, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of either the World Bank or the grantee organization. Information from this report may be copied and distributed freely when the source is appropriately cited. infoDev funding of the project should be noted in the citation.

1 Project Summary Sheet..................................................................... 3

2 Introduction........................................................................................ 5

3 Project Implementation and Results................................................. 5

3.1 The Project Approach............................................................................. 5

3.2 Outcomes Compared To Objectives........................................................... 8

3.3 Unexpected Outcomes.......................................................................... 10

3.4 Challenges.......................................................................................... 10

3.5 Project Inputs..................................................................................... 13

3.6 Effectiveness and Efficiency.................................................................. 13

3.7 Development Impact............................................................................. 14

3.8 Impact of the use of ICTs..................................................................... 14

3.9 Monitoring and Evaluation Activities......................................................... 15

4 Lessons Learned.............................................................................. 16

4.1 Assumptions....................................................................................... 16

4.2 Management and Organization of Project.................................................. 16

4.3 Communities of Interest and Partnerships................................................. 17

4.4 The Use of Information and Communication Technology............................... 18

4.5 Capacity-Building and Training................................................................ 18

4.6 Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning........................................................ 18

4.7 Dissemination Activities......................................................................... 18

4.8 Scalability and Replicability.................................................................... 20

5 Conclusions....................................................................................... 21

5.1 Future Plans....................................................................................... 21

5.2 infoDev funding................................................................................... 22

5.3 Concluding remarks.............................................................................. 23

6 List of Annexures............................................................................. 24

1 Project Summary Sheet

2 Introduction

Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations (KnowNet-Grin) is a global initiative to give voice to creative and innovative people at grassroots

Honey Bee Network brings together those creative and innovative farmers, artisans, mechanics, fishermen and women and labourers who have solved a problem through their own genius without any outside help whether from state, market, or even NGOs. Such self triggered and developed innovations whether technological or institutional are scouted, supported, sustained and scaled wherever possible with or without value addition, linkage with formal science and technology. Idea is to generate incentives and benefits for the innovators. The innovations could be developed by individuals or groups. These may have been developed in recent past or long past and some times these innovations or creative practices might have become part of traditional knowledge. We thus also look for outstanding examples of traditional knowledge, which help in conserving and utilizing natural resources in a sustainable manner.

Honey Bee signifies a philosophy, which is authentic, accountable and fair. Honey Bee believes that cross pollination of ideas by exchange of information across language and cultural boundaries, may increase societal capacity to spur, spawn, stimulate, and sustain grassroots innovations and provide resources for sustainable development.

The network encountered several problems in reaching out to the innovators and hence the genesis of Electronic Knowledge Network for Innovators "KnowNet-Grin".

 Creating an electronic network of innovators linked with users & peers through village based kiosks with multimedia/multilingual database, communicating in local language

 To create a clearing house, so that potential investors, venture capital, angle investors & entrepreneurs can link up to grassroots innovations, thus creating a golden triangle of innovation, investment & enterprise

 Developing a registry of inventions and innovations around the world & making it accessible

It was to overcome these challenges that the project was conceptualized. During implementation, we worked to develop a model, which could deliver multimedia/multilanguage content and enable knowledge sharing. This report shares the experience in networking village-based innovators across, language, literacy, connectivity and technical limitations with formal centers of excellence.

These challenges are specific to the focused activities taken up by IIMA in the project. Other challenges have been mentioned in the SRISTI report of the project.

3 Project Implementation and Results

3.1 The Project Approach

The conceptualization of the project was set at the time when ICT (Information Communication Technologies) were ushering in the new knowledge led economy in India. The question was: Could application of ICT help speeding up the process of maturation of ideas of grassroots innovators and traditional knowledge (TK) holders through online learning amongst peers. We believe by connecting knowledge-rich, economically poor people around their knowledge base in providing access to real time information can create opportunities of entrepreneurship and economic development. Honey Bee network over last fifteen years has been trying to link formal centres of excellence through direct and indirect linkages for helping value addition to the innovations and making their march towards market easier. The project was to operationalize an electronic knowledge network (KnowNet-Grin) of grassroots innovators scouted through various channels by the Honey Bee Network & SRISTI, Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network (GIAN), National Innovation Foundation (NIF) and a Global Registry of Innovations, with support from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The knowledge network helps in building bridges between formal and informal sciences, education, and learning communities. ICT can help access to databases and multimedia technology enabling exchange across various languages and cultural boundaries may increase societal capacity to spur, spawn, stimulate, and sustain grassroots innovations.

The project intended to provide real-time access of multimedia/multilanguage database of innovation from village kiosk centers and enable interaction in real-time through multimedia interfaces to innovators to interact with experts and peers. At the time of submission of project proposal it was hoped that IT revolution in India would reach the villages or at least the blocks and there would be a way/technology that would allow broadband (which could support multimedia) access to the proposed village kiosk centres. However at the time of implementation we encountered acute problem of connectivity and found that maturation of technology to be able to provide last mile connectivity would take much longer then it was hoped. This led to a change in strategy and development of a new model for kiosk that could provide access to database in real-time but feedback may be delayed.

A prototype network (IIMA-WAN) with multimedia / multilingual database for the e knowledge network was developed and tested at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Initially the model was IP based; the database web interface was accessible across the IIMA campus through the campus wide network. The IIMA-WAN initially supported two languages and provided services such as feedback on innovations, submission of new innovations, ideas bank, category-based search of the Honey Bee database besides other features such as discussion groups, mailing list and helpline. Later on, an offline kiosk was added to this prototype network which updated itself from the server; this completed the model, after which on field-testing was done only to find that sustained connectivity at many locations was not possible to enable data exchange.

After the field-testing of the IIMA-WAN prototype and problems identified for sustained connectivity, we made major changes in our design. This design was tested first in the IIMA-WAN; later it was implemented simultaneously at three locations to check how much sustained data exchange could be achieved in conditions of low connectivity. This new network model, which is functional now, constitutes of an offline-working kiosk based in villages, allowing access to various services and information through multimedia/multilanguage user interfaces working independent of the connectivity even if it is not available. For data exchange from kiosk (for updates and feedback) three scenarios have been visualised in the ideal scenario data exchange to the central database at server happens through FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in XML (eXtensible Mark-up Language), through a client application at the kiosk, a server application integrates the updates in the central database. These updates could be accessed through the web also and shared with kiosk in other locations, when these kiosk log in. In other two scenarios the updates could be collected at the kiosk in removable media (CDRom) and sent to the central node or district center, at the nearest point from where new updates could be exchanged (where bandwidth/connectivity is available). The newly updated multilingual data from the kiosk now could be translated by content administrators at central/regional node providing content translation from one language to another, thus enabling information sharing across kiosks in various languages.

The first node of Gujarat was put in Dharampur village, near Baroda. This node was located at an innovative farmers house. Later on, two nodes were put for six months each in the villages of Paharpur and Modassa, in Sabarkantha District, located at innovators places, viz. Mr. Niranjan Bhai and Mr. Rajnikant Patel. These nodes were removed when it was observed that being located in houses, accessibility of these kiosk to farmers and innovators was very low. Two nodes were put up in Gandhian vidyapeeths of Amirgarh & Nardipur. All kiosks provided various services enabled in the software (see Annexure  VIII) besides access to the Honey Bee database in multimedia/ local language in audio/video/text form. Users interaction generated at kiosk is recorded offline and answers to queries are provided to users later. A helpline on telephone has been set up to provide direct answers to the queries of the farmers and innovators.

One kiosk node was put up at Dormitory-13 of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, accessible to students and faculty. Another portable kiosk developed as part of the project is kept at National Innovation Foundation, Ahmedabad, this is a touch screen kiosk model developed as part of an extensive project done by IIMA and SRISTI on which an NID (National Institute of Design), Ahmedabad student worked. This portable kiosk is an outcome of an years user-centered study done to develop a portable model, which could be taken across villages. (see Annexure  VI)

1.13.2 Outcomes Compared To Objectives

Specific Objective	Any Modification of the Original Objective	Indicators	Outcome and Comments
To create an electronic network of innovators linked with users & peers through village based kiosks with multimedia/multilingual database, communicating in local language in real-time	The objective was modified to provide real-time multimedia and multilanguage information access through offline kiosks.	 Real-time information access in multimedia & multilanguage at village kiosks  Replicability across various networking models  Kiosks in four states as against two with more no. of nodes	A unique network model was developed which could both work offline as well get connected when required into the network and allow information sharing in real-time. After evaluating several technological options and models for connectivity, we found that there is no sustainable model to enable real-time exchange of information, thus necessitating this alternate approach. This model allowed replication much easier across all types of existing network model, with slight or no modification.
To create a clearing house, so that potential Investors, Venture capital, angle investors & entrepreneurs can link up to grassroots innovations, thus creating a golden triangle of Innovation, Investment & Enterprise	No Change	 Linking of investors and entrepreneurs  Volunteers for supporting business plan development, by contributing time	It is necessitated to have a single window access to the value chain of innovation for investors, innovators and entrepreneurs. This clearinghouse should allow platform for meeting mutual needs. <www.indiainnovates.com> a portal for enabling the online clearing house is an initiative to realize the golden triangle. The portal is still at business plan stage. www.scai.org.in a students interaction platform promoted by students of IIMA & NIF has been set up for value addition to grassroots knowledge.
Building bridges between formal & informal sciences	No Change	 Linkages for Value addition in innovations  Online communities providing support  Linking commonwealth innovators communities  Linking technological and design institutions for providing value addition support	Value chain process needs crucial inputs from formal centre of excellence. GRIDS (Grassroots Innovations Design Studio) at NIDs helps develop innovations in consultation with innovators. Joint workshop helps to bridge gap between grassroots innovators and designers from these formal institutions. Honey Bee Communities an online platform <www.honeybee.org/jsp/HBC/index.jsp> would help in collaborative innovation development, involving online communities working in various places networked through platform. Common Wealth Science Council, UK decided to replicate and evolve a Commonwealth Innovation Network (CIN) as part of CSIA, Commonwealth Science & Innovation Association for linking knowledge-rich grassroots communities in Commonwealth countries. Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and NID students have been linked through students projects and GRIDS, design lab for providing vale addition support to the innovations.
A registry of inventions and innovations around the world	No Change	 The online registry attracted 10% application for the first competition announced by NIF.  National Registry set up  Advocacy for global Registry	An online registry of innovations was developed and hosted by NIF (National Innovation Foundation). This registry allows users to submit innovations in multilanguage. <www.nifindia.org> A national registry of innovation has been set up in India. Advocacy for a global registry is going on.

3.3 Unexpected Outcomes

Establishment of the network model led to a thought in development of support systems for catering the need of a networked community. We realised that unless we are able to get this support network working the actual feedback and advice would not flow freely in the system, besides, of course, the obvious need to take the products to market. As an outcome of the project activities we developed several support systems to help further the need of the connected innovators community. Some of these systems have been developed and they are presently at various levels of activation.

Feedback to UI & Indic Language communities:

One of the most important outcomes of the project was the interest and awareness it generated about people centred interface design issue and need for multilingual content for village-based kiosks. The feedback generated while using the existing multilingual technology gave the developers an idea how to make the technology more users friendly. The developers CDAC later come out with a new range of solutions for the existing problems in their technology. Similarly, the user interface issue for the village-based kiosk also got highlighted as a major issue to make these kiosks more accessible to semi-literate and illiterate users. More description of the outcome in this area is given in section 1.3 Challenges.

Details of other outcome are covered in SRISTI report

1.33.4 Challenges

Some of the challenges faced by the project were in terms of technology, operationalsing and infrastructure. The problems faced were broadly identified in the areas of:

User Interface:

System interface is always required for ease of users to interact with the system. A system such as computer is even tougher for urban educated users to interact with, the peripheral inputs devices such as key board have always imagined a learned user, besides the graphic users interface which sits on the operating system also plays a very crucial role. In the context of illiterate rural users the problem is further compounded. The whole issue of human computer interface was a very serious issue under our consideration when we were working on the project. Since we were thinking of real-time systems the issue was much more critical.

Students from National Institute of Design, NID, Ahmedabad, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, Assam and Indian Institute of Technology, Industrial Design Center, Bombay led the effort for developing a universal interface for the Honey Bee kiosk. Usability tests of the current interface were conducted in different villages in Gujarat. The villagers were of varied literacy level, living standard, age group and technological awareness. Usability tests were conducted considering the purpose of the kiosk which is to develop a peer group for innovators, design a touch-screen interface with multi-lingual capabilities, linkage between little and big science and overcome three barriers to learning: language, literacy and localism. The target users are illiterate, semi-literate people of rural India. The users selected for the evaluation of the kiosk were from different age groups having different literacy levels and technological awareness. Considering the computer literacy among villagers, most of the users selected were computer-illiterate. In the first phase, the users were introduced to the kiosk, its purpose, its functionality and working. They were also provided with a broad overview of the navigation and contents. A demonstration was given to them explaining how the system works. Then they were asked to explore the kiosk. The activities were recorded with video camera. Help was provided only when they needed and were not able to understand. Their interaction with the kiosk was observed and the problems were noted down. In the second phase, users were given a particular task to achieve like finding a particular innovation. Problems were noted down. After the testing, the videos were reviewed and users were asked to explain the difficulties they had using the software. Questions were asked regarding any strange behavior. The current interface is based on the in-depth analysis of user requirement.

However applicability and suitability for such an interface in regional context not even across India but other countries of the world is to be tested. This research is an ongoing process user feedback driven. This interface would subsequently be tested for its suitability for a varied group of users i.e. rural innovators, investors & entrepreneurs across cultural zones in various states of India also.

Local Language Technology Standardization:

The Honey Bee network aims to bring together creative people engaged in the development and application of local ecological, technological and institutional knowledge for sustainable development. There is a risk of alienating ourselves from the very people we gained knowledge from unless we convey to them what we did with their knowledge in their language. The Honey Bee magazines in local languages that are brought out globally by network collaborators are aimed to connect innovators while networking in local languages. The Honey Bee Database (multimedia & multilanguage) of grassroots innovations is another tool designed to overcome the barriers of languages, literacy and localism. In this project we proposed to take this database in multilanguage through village-based kiosk providing interactivity in real-time. The major expectation were:

 Real-time communication using voice and video from village based kiosk

 Speech to text convertors in local language would allow even illiterate users to communicate with experts in formal centers of excellence for feedback on innovations

 Auto translation would allow people of various cultures and language to exchange information and provide feedback on each others work

 Internet would allow smooth flow of multilingual/multimedia information and online multilingual databases would allow access of Honey Be database to a larger audience worldwide, generating a feedback from across the globe thus connecting grassroots innovators through a worldwide knowledge network.

Development of local language computing in India has taken up very slowly. While trying to fulfill the expectations as conceptualized in our project design we faced several problems. We as a technology user both at the customization level (creating tools) and at basic level tried hard to use existing local language technology, faced many problems mainly related to standardizing. Honey Bee Kiosk application working in multilanguage is first of its kind local language & database integrated application which is also replicable and customizable in all Indian languages, even though it has some problem in working across platform. However these are technological problems and are still to be solved. While using these technologies we provided crucial feedback to the developers of the technology. At the same time, generated the feedback from users who are actually using the language enabled tools, people in villages (grassroots innovators). Major inputs in this directions are:

1) Users (rural) needs for input methods

Data input methods could be both voice/video/ textual. However we are concentrating from the computing point of view for methods of textual data input. Keyboard support i.e. Phonetic, Inscript, Remington is required depending on the type of user that would be using the system. In villages/ talukas most neo-literates are those who have learnt typing on type writer and are comfortable with that type of keyboard (Remington), on the other hand several DTP operators already using computers are fine with Inscript keyboard.

2) Data sharing

Database compatibility for searching, indexing, input, migration to and from various encoding standards. Also ease in data sharing across various system platforms.

3) Indian Language over Internet

 Editing function support such as cut, copy, paste, with bilingual compatibility for edit boxes (particularly for web based platforms and word processing softwares)

 Dynamic fonts and runtime installers (compatible with various browsers) for enabling online working in local language.

 Support in/for various programming languages such JSP, ASP, PHP, XML for encoding

4) Needs & requirement (ideal scenario, using computers in local language)

In the ideal case if the user is able to do the computing itself and use the office tools transparently such that flow of information happens transparent to the type of client, middleware, operating system and is also internet compatible backward, we can assume that some amount of success is achieved.

5) User centric standards issues

 Proper Graphical display of font face, character joints and alignment of characters

 Transliteration/translation support across languages

 Font converters are required with backward compatibility and also into new standards being developed or to be developed.

 Dictionaries and wordlist based on identified standards and exchangeable across various platforms.

 Word processing and database tools enabled to allow computing in local languages.

6) Encoding Standards

The language technology does not meet the international standards, viz. Unicode for several Indian languages. Hence compatibility with operating systems such as GNU/Linux is still a major issue in migrating all local language application to open source platform. Several research initiatives in this area both in government, academia, private had been contacted and provided feedback on the work done, we hope this users feedback shall help them further to improve the technology and development of appropriate standards for Indian languages and would also meet international standards.

Details of issues of Connectivity & Revenues model are covered in SRISTI report

1.43.5 Project Inputs

Since the start of the project, various stakeholders who could provide support in understanding the technological requirement and issues in operationalising the network were involved in the project. For some of the issues critical to the project such as real-time connectivity and user interface, feedback was taken from competent authorities.

Real-time interactivity was one of the key components of the project. Within three months of the start of project the first advisory meeting was held at IIMA, Ahmedabad in which the issue was discussed besides IBM-Lab, IIT Delhi was contacted for inputs on the issue. The general opinion suggested that possibility of low-cost effective technology for individual kiosk and distributed networks were not possible.

Similarly in another crucial area of user interface design for the kiosk was taken up by involving students from best design institutions in the country. However the user interface design research took a lot of time to get initiated and the feedback generated from those are still to go into the application developed, This was primarily because of finding students with interest in the area. However those inputs are very important for future strategies in this domain and we intend to share this experience with various organisations. We intend to use the feedback generated in the next design of the application for the open source model of the kiosk software.

3.6 Effectiveness and Efficiency

The project proposed a model assuming several technological developments for achieving its primary objective of networking illiterate/semi literate innovators in real-time using multimedia/multilanguage interfaces with center of excellence to develop a peer group for providing feedback on the work of innovators. Technology and infrastructure development in connectivity could not keep pace and still last mile connectivity remained a bottleneck for any kind of real-time connectivity. The offline model we adopted to make innovations database accessible and enable exchange between farmers worked well and met some of the objectives. Online availability/accessibility of database also helped in transfer of technology of one innovation and online platforms allowed a lot of volunteer to network with the organisations and provide value addition support to the grassroots innovators. The online registry invited online submission of ideas and innovations, which now form part of the national registry.

Summarising the intended objectives and what was achieved, the model proved to be effective. However still some more work needs to be done to enable feedback support through center of excellence. Optimum use of ICT is still to achieve considering that cross  cultural real-time interactivity, limited due to connectivity under development of language technology is still to be achieved.

Model efficiency is a difficult parameter to deduce when the major short-coming to meet the objective is high cost technology and infrastructure hurdles. As a pilot project we efficiently used the given resources to meet the project objectives, as much was possible considering the major obstacles, as already explained earlier in this report. However we could have been able to utilize our resources more efficiently if there would have been more open source technologies available to build the platform, which took considerable cost for development. Research such as user centered design and testing of technology models was a high expenditure also. However the outcome reasons well considering such research as well as model was not available for the community/organizations working in similar areas by using technology.

3.7 Development Impact

One of the immediate impacts of the project has been to bring to highlight the issues of grassroots innovators and their needs. With the interfacing using ICT we now hope that a larger peer group could be made accessible for providing value addition support and feedback to the innovators. In advocacy of grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge the project has contributed, setting up of online registry and setting of National Register of Innovations in India and growing awareness for a Global Registry of Innovations. Another area where significant contribution has been made is in the area of online technology licensing. Due to availability of online database, one technology could be licensed and queries for several innovations were received. Availability of global market for grassroots ideas would give more options to farmers facing similar problems.

Indirect beneficiary by the project were the online community of experts, students and researchers who benefit while adding value and providing feedback to grassroots problems and sharing innovations and outstanding traditional knowledge. Online communities such as the Honey Bee Communities once fully active would bring together a larger community of designers, technologist, management professionals, IPR experts besides others.

Honey Bee network believes in building upon the grassroots creativity and outstanding traditional knowledge to ensure sustainability and livelihood generation by ensuring productivity, increasing efficiency and sharing knowledge. The project helped in reaching out to the grassroots innovations and traditional knowledge holders and helped develop a peer group for providing inputs and feedback on the works of the innovators. As a result of value addition and transfer of technology the direct benefits come to the innovators and the technology gets incubated thus becomes available in market helping in improving efficiency of a larger grassroots community.

1.73.8 Impact of the use of ICTs

The mission of infoDev is to:

Promote the innovative use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)

for economic and social development

with a special emphasis on the needs of the poor in developing countries.

Informed choice options has largely remained a privilege of educated in the internet society, computer literacy as well as language (English) literacy being the biggest hurdle in over-coming the gap. ICT for development projects suffer from lack of appropriate content and replicable model. This project has tried to over come the issues of language and literacy by using multimedia/multilanguage interface using a cost effective replicable model. Using multimedia we observed that communication has been more effective in conveying the use of innovations and traditional knowledge.

The project as a pilot to demonstrate the use of multimedia/multilanguage interface to overcome cultural, language and literacy barrier by using in ICT has been able to meet necessity of the stakeholder community, however a crucial gap of real-time connectivity remains.

3.9 Monitoring and Evaluation Activities

The Project Advisory Committee (PAC) was constituted immediately after the commencement of the project. The advisory committee included some of the most eminent scientists, technologists, academics, government official and representatives of ICT industry. The first meeting of the advisory committee was held in August 2000 at IIMA. The advisory committee discussed project implementation framework and suggested bench marks for implementation. There were three levels of activities taken up for project implementation:

Technology: Software & interface Development

Database Development in multilanguages

Implementation mode

Each of these levels were activities were subdivided into three stages of Prototype development, Testing and Final implementation. At each level of activities a project deliverable was designed to be met as per the requirement of the project. The internal team evaluated the progress made at completion of each stage, internal reports were prepared on evaluation of the work done (See report Annexures - V) and shared with the advisory members for feedback. Each prototype developed was tested and evaluated at IIMA-WAN before being taken for on site testing.

4 Lessons Learned

The pilot project proposed a model taking some assumptions and with a aim to build learning by taking up networking illiterate/semi literate innovators in real-time using multimedia/multilanguage interfaces to center of excellence to develop a peer group to provide feedback on the work of innovators. One of the critical areas of intervention viz., user interface remains not satisfactorily tested, initial testing show two variant of user interface being not very successful. Some problems came up because of assumptions made at the time of conceptualization of the project. However an alternative was evolved by making changes in the implementation model, although real-time networking could not be achieved.

4.1 Assumptions

At the time of conceptualization of the project back in 1995, it was thought that technological advances in Information Communication Technology (ICT) and Internet broadband would allow real-time communication in multimedia possible. Technology and infrastructure development in connectivity could not keep pace and still last mile connectivity remains a bottleneck for any kind of real-time connectivity. As a result we made changes in the model of implementation with a primary objective to make multimedia information available in real-time. The offline model which we adopted to make innovations database accessible and enable exchange between farmers worked well technically but actual exchange between farmers did not take place and the effort could meet only some of the objectives.

Another assumption of the local language technology development and real-time cross- language exchange both in voice and text could not materialize (for detailed reason see section on Challenges). However, we changed the technology and developed a new framework, which made the software customizable in all languages. Although still the transliteration from one language to another was not possible, so we developed a web based system for monitoring the new data which could be in real-time translated by translators online.

4.2 Management and Organization of Project

The project team of IIMA & SRISTI worked on the project, the team members of IIMA were:

Project Coordinator: who coordinated and directed the execution of the project.

Project Manager: who looked after the over all day-to-day operations and development and execution work. Project Manager reported to the Project Coordinator and the funding organization.

Trainees & Researchers: Trainees contributed in development of several applications required for the software developed for the kiosk. Researchers did site testing of user interfaces and generated user feedback from the kiosk and analyzed impact of ICT

Project Advisory Committee: The advisory committee included some of the most eminent scientists, academics, government official and representatives of ICT industry. The committee provided feedback and guidance to the project. (See report Annexures - X)

Besides the immediate team, which worked, we had Honey Bee collaborators who coordinated with network nodes in other states. The central node hosted the project team as mentioned above, while regional nodes were headed by the collaborators who coordinated with the local partner organizations.

4.3 Communities of Interest and Partnerships

Initial partners in the project were SRISTI, the Gandhian Vidyapeeths and Honey Bee network collaborators SEVA, Tamil Nadu & PRITVI, Karnataka. Honey Bee collaborators were involved in documentation of innovations, customization of the software in local language as well as field implementation and forging partnerships with regional partners.

We have also been able to forge partnerships with NID, Ahmedabad & Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur & Mumbai for Kiosk interface design and with NID, IIT, Delhi, Mumbai & Kanpur for value addition in the innovations by grassroots innovators. A Grassroots Design Studio (GRIDS) was set up by in NID by GIAN for value addition as part of clearing house of innovations for value addition in grassroots technologies. Students from various business schools had been involved in developing business plans and ascertain market feasibility of various innovations. Center for Electronic Governance (CEG), IIMA linked the online innovations/TK database with their website linking Milk cooperatives in Gujarat, for accessing examples of TK on livestock management and diseases.

Volunteers from various businesses, design & technology schools across the world have started contributing in development of business plans for micro-venture promotion. Students from London School of Business, London, U.K. developed a plan for micro-venture fund, while students from Sloan School of Management, MIT, Cambridge, (Boston  MA), USA developed a business plan for the Bullet Santi (motorcycle driven plough). SCAI <www.scai.org.in> a students initiative for value addition and business development of innovations has been set up. A business plan competition announced by SCAI evoked good response amongst students of various business schools.

Honey Bee Network meeting held at IIMA, brought together all stakeholders, of the projects from across the country. The IIMA-WAN prototype network was demonstrated to the participants (See Annexure  IX Presentation). The project status was informed to the members, partners and collaborators along with the demonstration of the prototype network. We now need to strengthen these partnerships formed by providing institutional support for providing value addition and incubation support to grassroots innovations. We have conceptualized and are trying to develop the framework of a grassroots design & natural products laboratory for providing institutional support for value addition. This lab would have partnerships with various institutions across the world to get volunteer students, designers, technologists who would work with innovators for making access of these innovations to the market easier.

4.4 The Use of Information and Communication Technology

The model for kiosk network that evolved was definitely useful owing to its ease in replication and customization in other Indian languages. Similarly the partnership evolved had been useful in demonstrating and testing the strength of the model. In Madurai while working on Dhan network we found that old & lower configuration computers worked very slowly because our content was in multimedia and needed lot of virtual memory to run the application, later these computers were upgraded. We observed that adaptability of users to the user interface was very quick, at Aithore, Gujarat (where we experimented for a short time). We found small children easily learning to look for new innovations and browse through sections of multimedia stories.

From the point of view of cost of technology development we feel it was higher as most of the technology used was proprietary and some not even of proper standard. Hence the learning curve was very steep. We propose to adopt the whole model in open source and make it cross platform compatible, this would bring down the operating system cost as well as cost of the associated software.

4.5 Capacity-Building and Training

During our testing for appropriate user interface on various users, we came across two areas of capacity building of community/kiosk operators:

While working in user interface studies several studies were conducted on various user groups illiterate/semi-illiterate/newly-educated to develop user interface for kiosk. In many cases some facilitation/capacity building was required for user to understand navigation issues to explore database. After such facilitation it was observed that children learned to navigate the database quicker then other user groups.

The innovations database was also shown to executives and management professionals undergoing management training programmes at IIMA, to sensitise them about grassroots creativity and wisdom. The database was presented to experts in knowledge system in various meets on biodiversity registers, knowledge management and community enterprise.

4.6 Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning

Evaluation of the work done and learning from it has been integral part of the project implementation framework. Much of the monitoring methodology and its impact and results have already been discussed above.

4.7 Dissemination Activities

The project beta site <www.sristi.org/knownetgrin.html> provided information about project development and also reports of quarterly activities going on in the project. The information was accessible to all stakeholders through the websites. We also participated in a lot of conferences and workshops and demonstrated/presented papers about the project and its activities. The feedback and result had been good. Some of the partnerships started when these demonstrations were conducted. The online database on the website provided access to a lot of visitors who were wishing to know more about innovations and many of these actually joined in to start discussing these innovations. The website no. of site hit for the month of July 2001 was 63,000.

A kiosk has also been put at Dorm-13 IIMA for accessing by students of management programme; the database was also presented in classrooms under various courses. Future plan is to take up the installation of kiosk and development of a knowledge centre concept around it, by mobilizing the local community to build local resources database in the kiosk. We wish to popularise this concept with partner organizations. Already one partnership on this line with AISECT, Bhopal, M.P. for installation of 100 kiosk in community centers run by AISECT in Chattisgarh, would involve in second phase to turn these community centers as knowledge centers for collection, dissemination of innovations and traditional knowledge besides building local knowledge repository.

 Rural & Remote Telecommunication needs in India by Emerging Markets Forum & Stanford Universitys Asia - Pacific Centre at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA

 Sharing Capability in Localization and Human Language Technologies, SCALLA Working Conference, the European Union, Asia IT&C programme, at National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), Bangalore, India

 Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing for International Development: Asia Workshop, organized by Bellanet International Secretariat, Chennai, India

 Knowledge Networking for Grassroots Innovators in Workshop on Development by Design by MIT Media Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, July 2001

 Knowledge Network for Grassroots Innovators: The case of Honey Bee Network at International Conference on Information Technology, Communications & Development  Nov 29-30 2001 - Nepal (ITCD 2001)

 Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations at Round Table on Rural & Remote Telecommunication needs in India Organized by Emerging Markets Forum & Stanford Universitys Asia - Pacific Centre at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, USA, August 2000

 Honey Bee Network Experience in local language networking at Sharing Capability in Localization and Human Language Technologies, SCALLA Working Conference, Funded by the European Union in the Asia IT&C programme, at National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), Bangalore, India, November 2001

 Knowledge sharing in local language  The Honey Bee Experience at Knowledge Management and Knowledge Sharing for International Development: Asia Workshop, organized by CIDA, DFID, IFAD, SDC and the World Bank, with the Bellanet International Secretariat and the M. S. Swaminathan Foundation, at Chennai September 2001

 Electronic networking and knowledge management  The Honey Bee experience at InterSard South Asia meet, organized by Rice Wheat Consortium for the Indo Gangetic Plains and IAC, Netherlands at NSAC, Pusa, New Delhi, February 2002.

 Digital Nations Consortium conference at MIT Media Lab by Digital Nations Consortium and MIT Media Laboratory, USA, July 2001

 Meeting for discussion on agenda for the first year of Media Laboratory Asia, Mumbai, India at MIT Media Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, July 2001

 Media Lab Asia Participants Meet, New Delhi, organized by Media Laboratory Asia, Mumbai at New Delhi, October 2001

 Regional Conference on ICT and Environment in New Delhi on 2-3 May 2002, organized by UNEP

 Workshop on Information and Communication Technology in Agriculture Extension in India, New Delhi, India on 12-13th September, 2002

 Science and Technology (S&T) Ministers Meet of Commonwealth countries, organized by Commonwealth Science Council (CSC), UK in Northern Province, South Africa on 10th and 11th June 2002

 National Consultative Workshop on Information Communication Technology (ICT) interventions in Rural Development, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, India, February 24-25, 2003

 First ICT development forum meet of the Development Gateway Foundation, Bonn, Germany on May 20-21 2003

4.8 Scalability and Replicability

The project Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations was a pilot project focus on learning and demonstrate the use of multimedia/multilanguage interfaces to overcome cultural, language and literacy barrier by using ICT. Innovative use of multimedia and multilanguage interface is one of the most innovative elements in the model, which definitely increases the learning curve of the community. Some of the possible areas where this model could be replicated are:

One of the core activity under the project was to create a peer group for grassroots innovators by connecting them in real-time and building a value chain for value addition in grassroots knowledge and networking a global community of innovators, investors & entrepreneurs for providing value addition, investment and market access and IPRs lawyers to provide intellectual property protection. However, real-time connectivity could not be established and initiative was a failure due to various connectivity issues as already indicated. This knowledge network is the novel part of the project and should be replicated in other parts. SRISTI has been approached by Commonwealth Science Council, UK that is promoting CIN (Commonwealth Innovation Network) as part of CSIA, Commonwealth Science & Innovation Association, on the guidelines of the Honey Bee Network model, for networking grassroots community in commonwealth countries.

While replicating the project it is strongly suggested to take lessons from our experience, while developing and building on their ideas, this is essential as the learning curve of such activities is very steep as there is a lot of technology intervention and dependence that needs to be learned and reinventing wheel would not be a good idea from the point of view of resource utilization. Another important suggestion is to develop a strong revenue model around proposed activity, which is very essential for the sustainability of the intervention. In terms of the usage of technology as has been also mentioned earlier in this report it is a strong recommendation to use open standards and open source as the base for developing your technology platform, as it is cheaper, more stable, follow global standards and has free global support available at an email distance.

35 Conclusions

Sustainability of interventions such as these is a key question. When we had taken up the pilot we had a lot of constraints technological, resource as well as domain knowledge (ICT). However lessons learned from the pilot has emboldened us to take this project to the next phase. The model evolved has lot of strength as has been shown in its ease of replicability. We look forward to take up preparation for next phase of the project as suggested in future plans.

5.1 Future Plans

Sustainability of the intervention and strengths of the model has been discussed earlier in this report. Ease of replicability and user response suggests that model has its own inherent strength that makes the learning process of the community quicker. Having gained learning ourselves from the pilot project we are ready to take the next phase of the project. The second phase of implementation involves:

a) Clearing House: In this phase development of multimedia database is accessible through Web as well as otherwise to potential investors and financial institutions would be taken up. The idea is to keep the database or a terminal at places frequented by the entrepreneurs (such as financial institutions, marketing hubs, technology parks, etc.) and encourage entrepreneurs to explore the possibility of converting some of the innovations into commercial products. This would be integrated with the Online Clearing House of Innovations (Online incubator), wherein the investors and entrepreneurs would have a platform for interacting and discussing the business terms with GIAN. These nodal points would be networked with our proposed portal <www.indiainnovates.com> for networking the stakeholders. A small support has been provided by European Commission under ECCP programme for developing the framework of the clearing house.

b) Research on knowledge system and community learning by various programme for participatory learning programmes.

c) SCAI: Students clubs in various technological and business institutions would be developed and linked with the SCAI website for helping value addition to innovations.

d) The multimedia database having multi‑language interface will also be useful for innovators apart from attracting entrepreneurs and investors from different regions. The database hosted at SRISTI site and it will help explore the possibility of finding voluntary or other supporters and stakeholders in grassroots innovations, a prototype online platform (Honey Bee Communities) has already been developed for this purpose. The queries received from the potential entrepreneurs and investors will be forwarded to the innovators connected to the network portal, linked with the kiosks. It is here that the existing social and inter‑organizational network of Honey Bee will come to the rescue and help in connecting electronic and textual databases. SRISTI is already working on a 200,000 USD$ Government of India, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research (DSIR) project Grassroots Green Innovations Indian Language Database (GILD) under the NISSAT programme. Under this project we are creating a huge multimedia database of 1500 innovations & TK and 300 textual databases. This database would be made online on open source platform for open access after necessary Prior Informed Consent (PIC).

The knowledge network will be activated in different countries both in north and south among scientists, organic farmers, green consumers and marketeers, venture capitalists, etc., so that following three goals are achieved:

i) Real-time connectivity among problem and solution generators across the globe particularly among those interested in green innovations

ii) Exploration of forming golden triangle across the world so that a small scale entrepreneur in say, Canada may source an innovation in India, seek funds from US or Canada and set up an enterprise in South Africa or a Latin American country. The forces of globalization will be harnessed for grassroots innovations so as to counteract the increasing monopolization of market place by few players. Such a monopolization is neither in the interest of democracy, polycentric economic development nor will help move the factors of production to their most favoured and efficient locations and entrepreneurial targets.

iii) The incentives for conservation have to emerge essentially through value addition as already being tried at small scale by SRISTI through IDRC support and earlier through the support from PEW Conservation Scholar Award. However, without these incentives, the conservation of biodiversity and other natural resources cannot be achieved by keeping people poor. The economic opportunities available in the markets of developed countries through increasing green consumerism are enormous. This potential demand can provide a market-mediated model of poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation, and innovation augmentation if the proposed knowledge networks around the world are created and operationalised.

iv) Policy advocacy for a Global registry of innovations and international competition for scouting innovations & outstanding traditional knowledge.

The greatest hope for such a thing to happen lies in our faith in the increasing voluntary spirit and emerging civic society consciousness in north and south which believes in providing fair opportunity to efficient and environmental‑friendly solutions to be scaled up. If such a model does not exist today despite millions being spent on information technology or on poverty alleviation, it only shows poverty of imagination and timidity of thinking among the elite institutions and global institutional leaders. In any case, no major reform has often come from the top. The simmering from the grassroots captured by Honey Bee network of creativity and innovation will eventually stir the conscience of civil society and other institutions of establishment.

5.2 InfoDev funding

InfoDev funding helped in testing the impact on this networking by using ICT, but the major contribution was in adding value to innovations by various offline processes of exchanges. The pilot study has helped to develop our understanding the impact of use of multimedia interfaces in bridging cultural, literacy and linguistic barriers. However the main objective of the project for enabling real-time communication in local languages using multimedia interface is still to be realized, which could not happen owing to the constraints already mentioned earlier. Since the issues we took up in this pilot were more users centric hence investment for real-time technology was not available and hence experiments at that level using technology such as the VSAT were not tried. In terms of setting up a model the project was successful in meeting its objectives.

5.3 Concluding remarks

As a pilot initiative this project has demonstrated a model that needs to be taken up for strengthening and providing institutional support. We also need to take this network to the next stage of implementation to network communities in other continents such as the Africa and South America as part of the second phase of the activity besides of course networking in South Asia and other Asian countries.

Project title:	Knowledge Network for Augmenting Grassroots Innovations
Grantee:	IIMA, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad
Other participating organizations:	SRISTI, GIAN and Gandhian Vidyapeeths in Gujarat, India
Grant period:	From: 04/03/2000	To: 09/03/2002
Total / Grant amount:	Total project costs: 3,85,000 US$	infoDev grant: 75,000 US$
Project Overall Goal or Purpose:	To build peer network for grassroots innovators and providing them access to formal centers of excellence through multimedia and Multilanguage interfaces and a prototype model for upscaling
Main Activities	 Created an electronic network of innovators linked with users & peers through village based kiosks with multimedia/multilingual user interfaces and database of innovations, communicating in local language  Development of the conceptual framework for knowledge network, multimedia, multilanguage WAN, Wide area network (WAN) in IIMA with prototype multi-media, multi-language interface for upscaling  Created a clearing house, so that potential investors, venture capital, angle investors & entrepreneurs can link up to grassroots innovations, to generate demand for grassroots innovations throughout the world and market for ideas & innovations thus creating a golden triangle of innovation, investment & enterprise  Reduced feedback loop between users and innovators to encourage innovators to discuss specific innovations for faster maturation of ideas & innovations by building bridges between formal & informal sciences  A registry of inventions and innovations in India and around the world to secure Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for small innovators
Brief Quantitative and Qualitative Description of the Project	 Developed a unique offline model for access of multimedia/multilanguage database of innovations through kiosks installed in villages to innovators and farmers. These kiosks are networked through internet to a server-based model, which updates and receives new information from the kiosks through a unique file transfer application. Those kiosks which could not be got connected could be updated through CD as the data can be stored offline. All the kiosks are accessible/connected through the web-interface at site <www.honeybee.org>, experts can get connected and provide feedback to innovators.  A prototype of the network was tested at IIIMA. Four nodal centers were made operational in state of Gujarat with Gujarati database for short period for the pilot; community ran these centres for sometime, but have been discontinued now. In Tamil Nadu state, database was made accessible in partnership with Dhan Foundation and SEVA, through their kiosk network on 20 nodes in Madurai in Tamil language. Partnerships are being worked out with other possible partners in the states of Chattisgarh and Haryana in Hindi with a revenue model in place. Besides these, partnerships with various other organization had also been tried and discussions are at various stages.