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”.