Any person from any part of India dials a designated number using a land line/mobile telephone. They don’t have to pay for this service since this service is based on a Toll Free Number. The call first reaches the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) System where the person selects the language option and then registers the query with the help of the voice menu. Now this call is connected to the Call Centre of Open Forum and the agent is ready to take the query of the caller. The query from the person is also stored as a voice clip in the database server.

The person who receives this call at our call centre will first make sure that he/she understands the requirement of caller. Accordingly they will provide them the best suited information about the theme areas they inquired about. The Knowledge worker (KW) logs in to the application through the web interface, and views all the answers that have concern with the query. The KW searches the FAQ database for answer. If the answer is in the database, KW prompts the answer to the person or stores the answer for the query in the IVR.

Every caller are intimated about their query ID, so if the Call attendant dose not find any suitable answer of the callers query on the FAQ Database they will sends it to subject matter experts. The KW will contact the respective organizations/experts for the answer of such query which has not been answered. When the answer is received from the expert, the application alerts the Knowledge worker. The Knowledge worker retrieves the text answer, and stores it in the audio database. Apart from this he/she will also call back the person on the number they provided as their contact number and disseminate the information required. If the caller doesn't have any contact number, they simply have to dial the same toll free number and after they quote the query ID to the call attendant (KW) they will receive the answer/s of their query. We are in process to make a large active and responsible partnership for the same by panel of experts and the organizations, till date we have received about 127 confirmations about the partnerships from experts and different organizations.

Keeping in mind that call can be generated from any part of country since the coverage of this service is national so we have finalized to expand our call centre solution from 5 seats to 20 seats. Apart from this voice service the person who registered his/her query can also retrieve the answer in text format from the Information Centre near to his village by just visiting the K4D Website. he state of the art technological solution has been devised at the backend to ensure that the user end is simple and provides an easy access to information and knowledge sharing for the grassroots communities.

K4D is a versatile, dynamic application which has been customized and adopted for information sharing in different other crucial sectors of education, health, registration and employment, mission2007 etc.

K4D has adopted a multi stakeholder approach spearheaded by Open Forum with private sector providing the technical support, Civil Societies supporting in implementation, government supporting with its thematic expertise and above all communities supporting in building the knowledge base.

Initiatives like K4D demonstrate that if all stakeholders in the society join hands to form multi-stakeholder partnerships, a successful, just and equitable knowledge based information society can become a reality today.