Despite an increased appetite for risk, India is not an entrepreneur-friendly nation. While ample support is available for “proven” social development concepts, the majority avoids getting involved in attempts that are truly innovative and therefore, untested. The majority has chosen to label Open Forum as an “innovative social experiment”, which also bears the burden of being a “big commercial risk”. The majority of Indian IT firms have thrived in Bangalore, a place that comes closest to the famous Silicon Valley in terms of human capital and infrastructure. These firms have gained prominence by achieving “global standards” and “international certifications” in service delivery.

Open Forum, on the other hand, was conceived in Steel City, Jamshedpur, a city known more for being first planned city of India and environmental-friendly production practices, than for an innovative group of firms working in the Information Technology domain.

Open Forum, however, chases standards of a different kind. These standards lie undefined in the villages of India and the rest of the developing world. It is expected that they would soon be discovered and documented, for the rest of the world to chase. With the success, of Antatah, Open Forum should emerge a truly Indian brand? An Indian organization specializing in the task of combining ICT and local resources for creating empowered networks, in low-income markets. The success and emergence of brands like Open Forum would be directly linked to India’s development in the global neighborhood.

Its journey as a “concept” had a major implications on its evolution as a “Social Organization”. It is because of having started on a “clean sheet” of paper that Open Forum has arrived at a cost and organizational structure suited for commercial replication of a bottom-up business concept. The guts to face “great problems” often leads to the joy of discovering “great ideas”.

Information needs of the community are immense. Presently they continue to remain unmet, whether its agriculture and related information for the farmers, educational opportunities for the students, health education, livelihood opportunities, employment opportunities for the unemployed, and access to market for the small entrepreneurs or government information for the citizens.

Every citizen has the right to information. The challenge is how to have access to the information and how to disseminate the information. Similarly, every community has the reservoirs of local knowledge. How to harness this local knowledge and what should be the sharing mechanism from one community to another; from one village to another; from one block to another; from one district to another and how to share the global knowledge, needed at the local level. It seems to be a marathon task. But, small efforts can show the way. On the one hand the process of collecting, collating, conceptualizing and disseminating of information and knowledge has to be built, on the other hand, the environment for accessibility and acceptability of the knowledge sharing mechanism has to be created with the ultimate goal of connecting communities and empowering people.

In recent times, the digital medium has demonstrated distinct advantages over traditional approaches of reaching out to communities and has a great potential to empower communities in voicing their voices. Present services through Internet are designed in English, that continue to remain outside the ambit of semi-literate communities and language become the main barrier in accessing and assimilating the e-knowledge. The community requirements have information/knowledge available in local and simple language, so that every one in the community can understand and use it. How do we address this need? One way to achieve this is to develop a pool of information/knowledge in digital format so that it is readily available for sharing via online and offline routes.

Strategic orientations – a human rights-based approach to development
To live up to this commitment, Open Forum will adopt a human rights-based approach, which means starting from the standards set out in the human rights framework, integrating human rights principles in its policies and programs, and empowering rights-holders and strengthening duty-bearers.

Integrating human rights principles
Together with its Grassroots Communities and non-governmental partners, Open Forum will integrate human rights principles into the design, implementation and monitoring of development policies, programs and projects at multilateral and bilateral level by dissemination of proper information via contents. The following human rights principles represent fundamental values inherent to human dignity and underpin the international human rights framework:

• Equality and non-discrimination: Policies, programs and practices will not, intentionally or unintentionally, reinforce social, political or economic inequalities. On the contrary, they will consciously aim at promoting equality and non-discrimination.

• Participation and empowerment: Activities will aim at empowering people to participate fully in decision-making processes that affect their lives – and at making state institutions capable of responding to the opinions expressed and of balancing conflicting interests in ways which conform to human rights.

• Accountability and the rule of law: Human rights link participation and empowerment of rights-holders with the responsibilities of state authorities to respect protect and fulfill their human rights duties. Open Forum will particularly strengthen accountability mechanisms at the national and local level by use of contents. Civil society is an important actor in developing countries. It has a crucial role to play in building ownership and participation in national development strategies as well as holding public bodies to account. This is increasingly accepted as a cornerstone of international development policy. Open Forum also have its Community Information Centers (CICs), which were set up with a objective “To create and implement a sustainable, scalable platform of Rural Indian Entrepreneurship for enabling the development of rural economy and society through the use of Information and Communications Technologies”.