Monday, January 08, 2007

Web 2.0 tools for the National Knowledge Commission


In my letter to the Chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, I just made the simplest of requests: that the Commission publish all its reports on its own website. In terms of technical wizardry, the feature I asked for is, um, so HTML (aka the Old Web or Web 1.0).

It turns out that the Commission has a serious problem. One of the members -- the Vice Chairman, no less! -- has accused the Commission of "keeping him in the dark on several reports submitted to the Prime Minister." To this accusation, the Chairman has responded by saying, "In any case, it does not bother me. In a country of a billion people, I can't make everybody happy and I do not expect all members of my Commission to agree with me".

It is clear that the Commission is badly in need of some serious collaborative tools.

I suggest that they try Zoho Wiki, Social Text, or PBWiki for collaborative report writing -- in wiki style. If they want fancier formatting, they can try Google Docs or the Zoho Writer. For sharing data and other files (if their website runs out of storage space), they can try Box.net.

And, of course, Web 2.0 can also help them feud in public more effectively. They can use YouTube for sharing videos of their angry outbursts.

Do you have any other suggestions?

4 Comments:

  1. Shivam Vij said...

    ROTFL!

  2. Mahalingam Balasubramaniam said...

    Well said...

  3. Doctor Bruno said...

    LEt them take a Xerox of the reports and circulate that to every one........ (till they know the difference between Asianet and Internet!!!!)

  4. Abi said...

    Shivam, Mahalingam: Thanks for your comments.

    Shivam: Thanks also for the link!

    Bruno: That's a good one!