OneWorld.net (U.S.)

In their quest to create virtual communities at the grassroot level, Change Initiatives has succeeded in producing glocalised content (a blend of information from the Internet and local knowledge) for the local population of Baduria, a remote region in West Bengal, India. The experiment is an instance of the various off-the-shelf innovations being carried out under Nabanna, a project of Change Initiatives in collaboration with UNESCO. A problem arose while the Nabanna team was trying to create a digital module on diarrhea, a wide-spread malady in Baduria. However, documented information on both child and adult diarrhea was found to be acutely lacking, not just in Baduria but also in surrounding areas, including Kolkata. It was then that the Nabanna team decided to search the Internet. Two main result-entries were drawn upon. One was that of the WHO and the other was of that of the US-based National Digestive Diseases Information Clearing House (NDDICH). Additionally, oral information was collected from local health bodies. The two were then put together and a final database on diarrhea was successfully created, locally. At the heart of Nabanna's 'virtual community project' is the Participatory Information Networking (PIN) model, developed by Change Initiatives. PIN is an off-line information dissemination model that gives even the less literate an access to web-based content. Currently, the efficacy of PIN is being tested through a series of community-based experiments on digital databases.