Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

We have a partnership with the Worth Trust in Chennai, India, to do data entry for Bookshare.org, funded by the Lavelle Fund. I blogged about it in May: Scanning in Tamil Nadu . Our international Bookshare.org manager, Viji Dilip, recently wrote about making a change in what kind of capital equipment to get Worth Trust to help carry out their work: Strange as it may sound I grew up with hearing this often, "Everyone please save all your files now as the current will be going off in the next five minutes." OK, there were no computers when I was growing up in India but the current going "off" was very common. Sometimes for an hour or two and in summer for several hours at a stretch when the Electricity Board scheduled power cuts for every city . These power cuts could last from anywhere from an hour to three hours in the afternoon depending on when the supervisor at the EB came back from lunch. "There was no current" was our equivalent of "The dog a...

My first social enterprise visit in Chennai was to one of the offices of Worth Trust, our social enterprise partner in Tamil Nadu. Thanks to funding from the Lavelle Fund, we've been able to set up a scanning facility to produce books there. Worth Trust is a social enterprise with the goal of employing people with disabilities. It has a great symmetry: people with non-print disabilities are scanning in books for people with visual disabilities. The Times of India covered the story during my visit, Disabled in city help blind in US . The scanning setup is quite similar to ours in Palo Alto, of course. I'm always amazed at how small high-speed scanners are these days. You chop the book binding off and an entire book scan be scanned in five or ten minutes. We've been shipping books to Chennai, but that turns out to be hard. We'll expect to be sending some digital images of books from the U.S. for proofreading in the future. Plus, as we get more permissions from Ind...

The main reason for my visit to South India was the National Seminar on Print Access For All, which was organized by the dynamic Mr. Krishnaswamy. He has taken on delivering print access as his personal project after his retirement from a senior police force role. He also has learned how to build electronics and program in assembly language, as well as being the sort of person who manages to convince anybody who's anybody to join his effort to bring equity to access to print. He's really helped us move forward with our India projects, thanks to our India project manager, Viji Dilip, who joined me there and who has made all of these great Chennai connections for us. There was a great article on the seminar in the major paper based in Chennai, The Hindu, entitled: Publishers urged to reach out to print-disabled population. I enjoyed giving my 20 minute talk on Bookshare.org and building a global library. The turnout for the seminar was great: I was able to meet key people ...

In April I'll be heading for Chennai , the capital of Tamil Nadu state in India. The main reason is to attend the National Seminar on Print Access for All, being held at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Madras is the old name of Chennai. The seminar has been organized by a steering committee led by N. Krishnaswamy, the Chairman of Vidya Vrikshah. I'm actually on the committee, too. It should be a great day talking about improving access to print for the community of people with disabilities in India. I've pasted in some of the invitation below. Look forward to blogging more from India next month! The Steering Committee of the National Seminar on Print Access For All (SPONSORED BY THE HINDU) has pleasure in inviting you to participate in the Seminar. The Seminar to be held on Saturday, the 19th April, 2008 at the Auditorium, ICSR Building, Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai. Shri T.S.Krishnamurthy Former Chief Election Commissioner of India has kindly ...