FREEDOM WALK – A Walk to Claim, to Ensure and to Preserve Freedom

This is a freedom walk.. the walk with a purpose…  This event is supported and promoted by Technopark Open Source Community, organized by Technopark Today and supported by the Linux User Group, Trivandrum.

Background

Our society is ridden with problems – social, economical, environmental. People have
always been trying to solve these problems. Sometimes they have been successful while
sometimes they have not been. The level of activism and the sensitivity of the people
towards these problems have been going down progressively. Good can survive on their
own while evil has to collude to survive. This lack of a need has resulted in a definite lack
of communication and collaboration among activists in diverse areas.
Free Software as a community driven initiative has been growing in leaps and bounds
over the last decade or so. This has been made possible because of the use of
technology for efficient collaboration and communication in the community. The parallels
between Free Software activism and Social and Environmental activism are very close,
but their individual progresses have been very different.

Objective
1) Run a mobilization campaign across the state to build awareness about the issues that
we are addressing.
2) Use this campaign to connect with and connect together individuals and activists
across the state
3) Offer Technology as an efficient means and a supplement to the existing systems
used by the activist organizations

Hypothesis
1) There is lot of inherent goodwill in the society. If we can tap into this goodwill to
promote social causes we should be able to scale up any kind of social operations
massively
2) There is inherent goodness in everybody. If we offer the right kind of opportunity for
people to offer their capability, services and resources in a way and scale convenient and
comfortable to them, they will.

Idea
Identify a campaign that will be bizarre that people would find it novel. I am making
myself available for this project as the crazy IT guy who gave up a life in the US, a job in
the US and who came back to India to try to do the impossible. Additionally do
something that people don’t hear very often. So we have figured out this idea of walking
from Kasargod to Trivandrum covering all district capitals and conducting awareness
seminars in Educational Institutions and other organizations along the way. Politicians
have done this, Adventurers have done this, Activists have done this – but an IT
entrepreneur with the above profile – not before. This idea have been thrown out to
peers and the only response that we have been getting is – Crazy – and we think that is
good.

Our offer to activist Individuals and Organizations

1) Ride on this program to promote their activities locally and across the state.
2) Use this program to connect with like minded individuals and organizations across the
state
3) Upgrade their operations by using technologies and services that are being offered

Organizational aspects

We are trying to partner with organizations who have reach and presence in local areas
across the state to organize the programs. Currently we are partnering with Free
Software communities across Kerala. These communities are going to utilize this vehicle
to promote the free software movement in the state. Free Software communities are
already well connected and they have reasonably good presence across the state. These
organizations will be able to organize public functions and local gatherings where the
general public can be included.
An agreement has almost been reached with WWF to partner with them to channel all
the environmental activism and queries that are going to be generated. WWF has
presence in schools across Kerala through their social forestry and nature clubs. They
should be able to organize programs in schools where these clubs are active
We are trying to mobilize support of other social activist organizations and individuals to
use this opportunity and organize their programs along the way.
Promotion over the web
We will be using web as a primary channel to promote this project. The whole walk will
be covered virtually everyday and reports, photos and videos will be updated to the

website – www.freedomwalk.in – to let people across the state and the world know about
this. The site is designed to let people interact with the people walking on a real time
basis.

Collaboration Platform

There is no point in bringing people together just for the event and forgetting about
them after that. The whole point of this exercise is to connect activist individuals and
organizations together and build awareness among the general public. The event should
serve the purpose of building public awareness. For connecting individuals and
organizations we are developing and are planning to launch an online collaboration
platform that can be used for free by this target section of the population. In addition
this platform could also possibly give an opportunity for people in all sections of the
society to contribute towards causes and we will have an opportunity to validate our

hypothesis no 2.
General Strategy for the program

We are going to follow a more or less impromptu strategy for organizing the talks and
seminars and public functions.
There are three reasons for this :-
1) We don’t have good centralized resources for doing this.
2) We don’t have very strong local connections.
3) The organization is going to get easier once the public visibility and the momentum of
the program increases.

Pending items in organization
1) Actual details of talks/seminars have not been finalized
2) Actual details of organizations who will be organizing the programs
3) Contact information of people who will be organizing the programs
4) Approximate dates during which the walk will pass through a district have to be
finalized

Impromptu items that are going to be fun and exciting

1) Places of stay have not been identified
2) Path through certain districts are flexible

Strengths

1) Very strong in web based collaboration and building web based systems to rapidly
mobilize online
2) Permanent team in Trivandrum to act as the Virtual Operations Centre(VOC)
3) Strong brand presence and reach in the Free Software Communities across Kerala.