Special

Open eNRICH: Sharing Knowledge Repositories

Open eNRICH project aims at simplifying and facilitating content generation, content management and content exchange within and among rural communities resulting in building and sharing of knowledge repositories. It is designed to meet the challenges of diverse languages, a poor or no connectivity environment and lack of technical support.

PROCESS->

 Open eNRICH is a Unicode enabled content management and content exchange software that not only covers the complete content management life cycle (content creation-editing-publishing-archiving) but also facilitates content exchange over various communication channels that include email, internet or other mediums, such as CDs, floppies, etc., and also uses RSS. It allows tagging of content using open metadata standards (Dublin Core) and packages content in standard XML format to enable transfer of content from one site to another.

It can be configured to receive content from satellites allowing those sites to participate in the network that have no other means of receiving content. It also addresses language diversity through Unicode support and  introduces semantically enabled search for meaningful end-user experience. Open eNRICH can be easily configured by end-users to create versions that are tailored to specific needs. It provides ready-to-use templates for configuring the software that reduce maintenance issues and also enhance its replicability. 

IMPACT->

The software has been successfully used both by rural communities as well as by government institutions. No costs are involved in its usage or for setting it up on the user’s machine as it is based on an open source software and also uses open source tools and technologies. Its unique ability to generate multiple portal/web-sites through its single installation reduces considerable effort, time and cost as compared to the scenario when each of these sites would be developed one at a time using proprietary tools or solutions other than Open eNRICH.

SCALABILITY->

Open eNRICH offers a unique facility to add as many sites as required to a single instance of its installation. This opens up immense possibilities, particularly in a collaborative environment, which includes a very high number of participating organisations that need frequent content exchange and broadcasts as part of a common set-up.

An example is the National Panchayat Portal (http://panchayat.gov.in), where a single installation of Open eNRICH co-hosts a thousands of sites for panchayati raj institutions in various states of the country.