Part of our 21st July campaign is formation of GLUGs all through the state of Andhra Pradesh and inspire these groups to spread the use of GNU/Linux. The GLUGs that we are thinking of are not just "users groups", they are expected to go much beyond...

Though I would not completely agree with the fact that the rural India is ready for a rapid penetration of computers... I think it can slowly start. People need to know what computers can do for them, they have to feel the need for computers and that feeling and the dissatisfaction would bring the next revolution. Again, its my opinion and I would not mind trying other ways of spreading computing to rural India... after all, as bunny puts it, trying it out can only have a zero impact if not a positive impact.

Now, when people start using a computer they would come across all those difficulties that we the so-called computer literates came across when we first used the comps. Fortunately, we had our instructors and friends who helped us out. A GLUG should be the same instructor/friend to the people around their college. Only then a unit would be self-supporting and that would infact improve usability and peneration of computers in rural India. GLUG as defined by its role, will be a very important unit of the Free Software Revolution in India.

FSF AP now had a strong network of people trying to build GLUGs in the engineering colleges all through the AP and hope the GLUGs thus formed sustain the self-supporting units in their areas!

Long since I blogged and in the process left out many activities that are worth more than a simple mention in my blog! In the last couple of weeks, we have been coordinating with the Free Software Foundation of India (FSF), Andhra Pradesh chapter to bring computers and Swecha in particular to the rural parts of Andhra Pradesh.

On the 24th and 25th of June we had a workshop at IIIT Hyderabad. The response was great and the participation clearly meant a great future for free software and for the rural India!!!

• Session 1 (Philosophy)
  
• Welcome note by Dr.Rajeev Sangal (Director, IIIT)
  
• FSF Philosophy by Kiran Chandra (FSF-AP)
• Session 2 (Paradigm Shift)
  
• Proprietary to Free Software by Bunny and me :)
• Session 3 (Techie)
  
• Networking in GNU/Linux by Prof. Reddy (JNTU Kakinada)
• Session 4 (Future work)
  
• Discussions about formation of GLUGs
• Closing note and conclusions
  

Finally the outcome of the workshop was to bring Swecha to 21 villages, create 21 GLUGs to support the spread of free-software and have a common collaboration platform... all by the 21st of July!!!