Mahiti
On Wednesday, Chris and I had a great meeting with Mahiti, an NGO in India that is working to spread FOSS to NGOs across the country. We learned so much from the team and they have offered to help localize Firefox in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bangali, and English-IN. We’ll work out the details to see what exactly can be done because they’re awfully busy. But, the meeting was so promising and the team was sharp and scrappy.
Started in 1996 as the IT department of Samuha – a large NGO, Mahiti then spun off as a stand-alone organization. I learned of Mahiti several years ago when Ashoka (where I worked pre-Mozilla) funded Sunil Abraham, who started Mahiti. Sunil, Sree (the present Executive Director), Vijay (the CTO), and the team are very active in FOSS in India. They serve on the Plone Foundation – a CMS based on Zope and Python. Mahiti also supports more than 300 NGOs on IT infrastructure and ICT tools, migrating them to FOSS. They are a 40 member team and do for-profit consulting and IT work. With those profits, they subsidize all services provided to NGOs so they can offer free service to the organizations that need it the most.
NGO-In-A-Box
One of the great programs that Mahiti is helping to drive forward is NGO-In-A-Box.
A correction by Mahiti to my original post:
“NGO-In-A-Box is a project initiated by Tactical Technology Collective who should be given primary credit for the idea. Mahiti implements the idea as a partner to TTC for the South Asia hub.”
In this program, they organize a 5-day session where they bring together 12 organizations in a rural setting to simulate the electricity and bandwidth resources that are available for each NGO back home. They select the NGOs based on who would be most capable and interested in building communities and spreading the software back in their regions. As Mahiti describes it, “It’s about teaching and then creating a community.” They have reached out to several already and want to reach 3,000 by the end of 2008. And, yes, the NGO-In-A-Box is packaged with Firefox and Thunderbird. Thanks, Mahiti!
The Mahiti office is also an awesome space with a lot of great resources. Below are a couple of pictures of their development lab (these are iPhone pictures, so light quality is somewhat bad) Also, you’ll see the battery supply that backs up the work when power goes off…which happens very regularly in India.
Sorry…looks like the orientation of the battery supply is rotated and I can’t seem to correct it in this WordPress editor.
Could you imagine the Mozilla IT team in California, in addition to all the great work that they already do, having to also manage a stack of car-like batteries to ensure connectivity and power? Amazing…
Mahiti has offered to help localize Firefox in India. What is so impressive is that they contributed 40,000 lines of translated code for the Open Office localization project
A correction submitted by Mahiti:
“We did not do the translations ourselves. The translations were done by Kannada Ganika Parishad. We only compiled, re-combined integrated these translations into the format required by OpenOffice.org. We wrote some patch code in python to translate from one format to the other…from one encoding to the other.”
If Mahiti has the time and resources, they will be a great localization partner.
Mahiti is an obviously special place. It’s creating an environment for young developers to get experience in IT and it’s providing free software to some of the far reaches of India. The team is very saavy, experienced, polite, and deeply concerned about free and open source software and India. They are making a difference.
Thanks, Mahiti!
We do have quite a few volunteers working on a bunch on Indian languages already. I bet they’d like to get some help, you can check out their sources on cvs and lxr, as well as head over to the Teams list on wikimo
Thank you, Axel. Let’s connect Mahiti with the existing volunteers!
Very interesting. Firefox is getting on top step by step. Nice images, just a little peak in reality.