Saturday, August 13, 2005

Bzzz! Honeybee goes from typewriter to pdf

The Honeybee Network is a 15-year old example of how knowledge sharing can be done on a large scale and respect cultural and linguistic diversity as well as the common and proprietary value of ideas. The forum provides a way for farmers and others - mostly in India and southeast Asia - to share grassroots agricultural innovations. The website is in English but the newsletters and magazines are available in Hindi, Tamil and several other languages.

It started with a typed newsletter - these can be accessed as pdf files for a fun romp through recent formatting history.

There is also a searchable database of innovations with more than 10,000 items - available for free. Makes you wonder - if this can be built at the grassroots for the grassroots - why isn't there more of it?

No comments: