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. Open Forum believes 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 are have information/knowledge available in local and simple language, so that every one in the community can understand and use it.

At Open Forum’s Technologies Solutions most successful and widely complimented initiatives has been the local language content hosting and communication platform for the non-profit sector. Termed as Social Web Services (SWS), this initiative provides for shared ownership of customized web-platform to partner organizations, and help develop their ICT capacity for quality web presence, effective e-communication and advocacy. The goal is to build ICD capacity among grassroots and intermediary civil society organizations of South Asia to enable their communication opportunities for pro-poor development planning and policy. SWS help grassroots communities and intermediate civil society organizations to have quality web presence – in English and local language of choice; and exploit this platform for developmental communication and advocacy. Central to this initiative is an easy-to-use tool, customized on open source Content Management System (CMS), which the partner organisations can use with little technical expertise.

This requisite expertise is developed through an appropriate training model that provides input on content management, graphics design, e-communication strategy, and hosting & site management. The model also involves post implementation handholding support to reinforce these newly acquired skills and to resolve any difficulty in partners’ work on the web. The initiative has enabled South Asian civil society organizations to:

•	Improve flow of locale information at the grassroots and facilitate information and knowledge exchange among development practitioners and key stakeholders.
•	Communicate development issues effectively and facilitate on-line participation in development debates, to advocate for better transparency in governance and pro-poor policy discourse.
•	Enhance the use of ICTs as a strategic communication tool especially in Indic languages – to exchange resources and experiences – thereby strengthening the civil society efforts in sustainable development, poverty reduction and social justice.
•	Support development of an online community of development practitioners in south Asia to lobby for proactive state and civil society action on issues affecting the poor and marginalized.

As a part of SWS, Open Forum has recently initiated Digital Knowledge Network (DKN). As the name suggests, is an open platform to share knowledge that adds value to people’s lives. DKN is an initiative by Open Forum to support the creation and exchange of local content in local languages among local people across the nation, supported by a range of information and communication technologies. DKN is a human network, which collects shares and disseminates local knowledge and is supported by flexible technical solutions. Poor people must be able to express and communicate locally relevant knowledge in local languages if they are to shape the decisions that affect their livelihoods. Local content development is closely tied to human development, and the ultimate aim of DKN is the empowerment of local communities.

Digital Knowledge Network works under the principles of:

•	To enhance communication opportunities for the people at the grassroots
•	To facilitate social and economic empowerment of poor communities living in India
•	To facilitate knowledge sharing by people at the grassroots and to encourage peer-to-peer networking among grassroots communities throughout nation
•	To provide needs-driven, locale-specific content to poor communities living in South Asia
•	To develop interactive tools that enable communication between communities and those who affect their lives such as researchers, agricultural scientists, health professionals, government authorities and markets.

DKN is not trying to reinvent the wheel, since many communities and projects in the Indian subcontinent were working in similar ways before DKN. DKN can support and strengthen these local and regional knowledge networks, and offers the advantage of using global standards to organize and exchange local content. DKN is joining up the dots and working to enhance existing initiatives to create a knowledge network that is sustainable. The importance of local content is now well recognized in South Asia. Local people are encouraged to act as content producers, not just content recipients

Tool for Knowledge Sharing
Open DLP a community software solution for networking rural communities is being developed by Open Forum. K4D and SDL have joined hands to share their expertise which will embrace and promote open source principles by using tools such as Open DLP.
Features of Open DLP

•	Easily customizable multilingual interface to suit specific local needs
•	Facilitates multimedia input & output
•	Enables e-Knowledge Management by Providing easy and uniform access to well organized information resources and services, both offline as well as online
•	Facilitating community members to post local content and knowledge
•	Facilitating domain experts to participate in providing information

In early 2008, the DKN concept was tested in a short pilot with the K4D community Center in India, in the first collaboration with an existing local-level knowledge sharing initiative. Using the DKN system, people in rural and urban parts of India can create digital content in their own language, which is then exchanged with others through networks of existing community Access Points staffed by what DKN calls ‘Community Reporters’.