The Hindu : Open source: joint ventures

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, May 27, 2002

Business

Business

Open source: joint ventures

THIS EDITION of NetSpeak examines a novel service that tries to use the `Open Source' method to build a community of development experts, activists and technologists willing to participate in solving design challenges related to subjects including clean water access, cholera treatment devices and agricultural technologies.

The tremendous potential of the Net in facilitating and performing collaborative ventures has been proved beyond doubt. The Net paved the way for collaborative open source software movement that provided a range of free software packages including operating systems, full-fledged application packages and numerous specialised utilities. The Net infrastructure lets us deploy computing power that lies idle with millions of PCs worldwide to solve complicated computing tasks. After these successful collaborative projects, an attempt is being made to harness the knowledge and expertise of skilled people to solve developmental and governance problems.

ThinkCycle

In spite of the technological advancements, tens of millions of people still lead a wretched/horrible life. One reason for the failure of the many developmental projects could be due to lack of experience and expertise. If one is handling a pollution control project, the inputs from people/experts who had already exposed to similar projects would certainly be useful. The ThinkCycle project is a non-profit initiative that aims to mobilise people with ideas and expertise in solving "design challenges among undeserved communities and environment". The service, through the Web, aims to bring together "domain experts and stakeholders" and provide the necessary tools that help them collaborate "towards evolving solutions to critical problem domains".

ThinkCycle process

ThinkCycle's content is organised within `Topics' created by its users. A `Topic' is created under subjects such as health, education and community. A user can browse the `Topics' and go through the content. Each Topic can be considered as a shared information space that contains notes, shared files and publications. Any registered member is allowed to contribute ideas, design concepts, challenges, and any materials relevant to the topic. Through the active participation of members, a community centred on the topic will be formed and this way it sustains the `Open collaborative' spirit of the service.

Apart from professionals and others directly involved, it is likely that `Thinkcycle' database may provide students of engineering, business and the like with enough real-life problems in development, health and environment. As the complete content of `ThinkCycle' is open to the public, the service allows you to download the content for free. For more details, check out the link at: http://thinkcycle.org/home

E-mail tracking

One of the shortcomings of the current e-mail process is its inability to produce automatic acknowledgements. There is no proper mechanism to know whether the mail sent was read or not. Though some mail clients support the `Return Receipt' option, often this feature does not work as it depends on the co-operation of the recipient. What we need is a mechanism that lets us receive an acknowledgement response straight away without anybody's intervention. A couple of utilities/services that let us solve this problem is discussed here.

SentThere

SentThere — brought to the author's attention by a NetSpeak reader — is a free program that helps us receive reports on the status of a mail sent. To use the software, after installation, invoke it, provide the e-mail address and create an account with the service. After a few seconds, scan your mailbox, collect the password sent by the service and log-on to it. At this point the system will show its interface, from which the user can send mails and monitor them. Clicking at the `Status' button one can check the status of a mail, sent through this software. An, `(o)' next to the message indicates that the message has been received by the addressee.

This free software is available at http://www.sentthere.com.

ReadNotify

Another similar product that can be experimented with in this regard is the e-mail tracking service provided by ReadNotify. Here, you don't need to download any software to track the status of the messages. To track your messages, first you need to register your e-mail address with the service. Now, to start the tracking process, compose the mail in the usual manner, but before sending it, add `readnotify.com' at the end of your client's e-mail address. This means, if the recipient's address is your_name@provider.com, change the address to your_name@provider.com.readnotify.com and send the message. ReadNotify will send the mail to the proper address and once the mail is read by the recipient, you will get an acknowledgement automatically. To try out the trial version of the service access the link at: http://www.readnotify.com/

Windows Washer

We carry out many tasks daily in our digital life like browsing the web, downloading various information products, creating text documents through a word processing package and so on. While we perform these tasks, Windows keeps some digital foot prints that let anybody accessing the PC understand our activities. Windows stores many records that include the links traversed, history of documents composed, and list of the commands executed using the `Run' option and so on. Even if not bothered about privacy, removing these history records would certainly enhance your system's performance. Though one can certainly remove these files manually, the task is a little cumbersome one. In this context, the cleanup program `Window Washer' might be helpful. The program automatically cleans up your browser's cache, site history list, windows `find' history, document history and so on. For a trail version, check out the link at: http://www.webroot.com/washer.htm

J. Murali

(The author can be contacted at: murali27@satyam.net.in)

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