Technology

Every day when I travel in Metro I see many people with i-pods or i –phones, Listening music are juggling with the digital content. Its a pretty common visual in most of urban cities, But when I see the use of Information and communication technology by the Non Profits in DC, Im amazed by it and also surprised that I was so ignorant about it while I was in INDIA, its not like that im downgrading my citizenship but actually being in a new culture im able to connect to the future use of technology in India, specially in the context of citizen sector. I remember there is a great debate about the use and misuse of the so called Information and communication technology and it is generally considered that propagating ICT is marketing for the technology and also for the other products as feature of capitalism.

The debate is generally about the masses but here im more interested about the classes, I mean people working in the citizen sector in India or the civil society organizations. I find that most of the organizations are far behind if we consider the use of ICT, I mean the mails and net is ok but what about the other processes which take much of the time of development professional.

I remember that once I was conducting a training session with the rural women of India and one of the lady said that" im afraid of the telephone because it has got wires” she connected wire with electric shock and probably never used one before, so after wards it was nice experience to introduce such women to telephone and help then use it for the first time, and you know how much empowered they felt while doing so because they were no more afraid.
It happened with me when I first saw that how many technology based services the citizen sector uses here in US, but now when I have tasted it I think its much better.

So I am thinking of looking this aspect of use of technology in the sector and bringing it in front of those who need it but were never given the opportunity to experiment with it.

For example, publicity and advertisements takes a lot of budget share in campaigns but have we tried using the online media to do so? Every day thousand of new people are using Internet for their personal, social, and professional need, every day all the processes are being connected to the web intermediation. Sky is the limit folks! get your tools right to draw most benefit of New media.

Let me tell you something about my friend Robert who works with me in GlobalGiving, He is nice smart and intelligent guy, and he is experimenting with the use of social networking sites to promote GlobalGiving and so far he has been very successful in doing so, he is using sites like Stumble upon, You tube, Face book, and Totallyfreestuff etc and adding more to this list every day. recently he has drived huge traffic on globalgiving.com

The best part is that the new media is interactive I mean you actually provide scope for the audience to create content on their own, and not only as a passive recipient target to receive messages.

stay tuned for more!!