Bangalore IT wizards take communities online

Monday, 03 March 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: Pantoto, launched by the Bangalore-based T.B. Dinesh and expatriate Suzan Uskudarli, sees itself as a simple but effective community building tool that just about anybody can use. This online community builder aims to support existing real world communities, by giving them the cyber tools that could make their networking and knowledge sharing more effective and meaningful. "It uses information architecture tools to allow communities to manage and nurture a repository of community knowledge," explains Dinesh. Its goals include providing an online platform, where people who are part of any community (or extended network sharing similar interests) can interact and come together for their common cause. Pantoto seeks to promote information-centric communication, as its developers call it, between members of a community. To keep the software simple, it is small and light in size, and works in any browser - the software widely used to search the Internet. To make the knowledge sharing among any community more effective, this tool offers a well-organised information repository. It says the communication of the group can be "customised to suit the needs of any community" and this also helps the group to build a cost-effective presence on the Internet. This makes people, rather than technology, the key towards leveraging the power of the Internet. Pantoto says it can help groups build an online community, and also put up their treasure-chest of useful and relevant knowledge out there for everyone to share. "With its three basic outputs - a community, knowledge-repository and web-presence - a community can create any output," claims Dinesh. "The output would depend on the information needs of the community and how they choose to structure and manage information." But managing information and sharing it effectively out there on the Internet might not be as simple as it sounds. To be able to run Pantoto, anyone would need just the technical skills of "knowing how to use a web browser", claim its promoters. Web-browsers are very simple tools, used sometimes without even being aware of it, by anyone browsing the Internet. Dinesh, who completed his Ph.D in computer science from the University of Iowa and post-doctoral research at Amsterdam, says: "Pantoto might soon be used for project listing by indic-computing community and CharityFocus India chapters. "But our main work lately has been to work with local NGOs to help them build information management solutions, themselves, for their varied needs." "Pantoto is an attempt to first bring information architecturing to the end-user, where by we hope that organisations (like a typical NGO) can be empowered to be independent of IT consultants for much of their everyday needs and next to provide flexibility with look and feel," says Dinesh. Uskudarli stresses "the importance of structuring information" to make information "accessible and usable" in the long term. "Structuring provides meaning to the information. Thus, intelligent searching, filtering, and other processing such as analysis becomes possible," she adds. Over the past three months, some NGOs have begun using Pantoto with a "little bit of hand-holding and initial training". These include Sakti, a Bangalore-based NGO that works for women empowerment and with communities like landless labour. It is using this tool to capture and analyse information related to a baseline survey of 148 villages in Karnataka. New Horizons, another Bangalore-based group, that helps people with disabilities to get access to jobs and health care, is using it to create a management information system for all products manufactured by their network.
Source: IANS