Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Pilot India Infrastructure Gateway: A comprehensive portal using OpenACS

1. The site was developed to address the problem of information asymmetry in the Indian infrastructure sector that has severely affected economic development activity in the country. A large number players including the government, private sector, research organisations and NGOs were often working at cross purposes, due to the lack of information, much of which was in the public domain. This led to a range of market and regulatory failures (e.g. the Enron debacle in commissioning a multibillion dollar power plant along the Indian western coast. The US is not the only place that has been hit by that meltdown!) that a poor country could hardly afford.

2. We won a small amount of money ($ 60 K) from a World Bank Group (PPIAF) challenge fund to establish a proof of concept for a portal that would address the concerns of various communities of practice in the infrastructure sector in India. This was initially limited to the country as a whole and two States (provinces) for the water and power sectors.

3. The project was meant to be executed by a joint Content and Technical development team from two different firms, starting August 2000. The project team, in its search for an appropriate and cost effective implementation platform identified ACS amongst others by September 2000. A chance meeting with the management team of the World Banks Global Development Gateway (www.developmentgateway.org) (which had chosen ACS at roughly the same time – and promised technical support to a related part World Bank funded initiative) confirmed this choice.

3. Unfortunately, the Technical development team found it difficult to support the use of Open Source technology for commercial reasons and the challenge of learning to work in an environment that was not mainstream.

The Content team (www.taru.org) on the other hand, found the erstwhile ACS philosophy as the most effective means to build the online communities that would test the project concept and also build a sustainable revenue model that was underpinned by very minimal fixed costs because of the OpenSource advantage. This was confirmed when Oracle licensing costs in India were quoted higher than the overall project budget !

4.The project suffered a large number of delays since then. The most important were because the content development team had to learn how to use ACS and programme in a TcL environment; ACS became semi open, if not closed and went a Java intensive route; the promised OpenACS 4.0 port was delayed many times over and the range of functionality for the planned site was rather substantial.

5. Development was started in earnest in July, 2001 on OpenACS 3.2.5 even though it was clear by then that there were some inherent challenges in its structure and datamodel. The team had effectively painted itself into a fortuitous corner on technology by then, with a number of embarrassments on missed deadlines

Three developers and one content manager worked on the implementation more or continuously till Jan 2002, to produce what you see.

6. The implementation has lots of flaws and warts, partially because the team had to work by the seat of its pants; sitewide templating and other crucial Open ACS features were unavailable. The result is there for the community to see and critique.

7. The main power of this implementation will be the quality and breadth of the content that we hope to bring to the site. For example, a number of rare and inaccessible documents on the Indian economy are available on the site and are very useful to researchers.

8. The content team is slowly enabling brain dumps at the moment while a market research exercise in underway to help get potential user feedback and develop a business plan for a full scale implementation that may involve a migration to OpenACS 4.0, plus a whole range of backend features to track online content development and establish a dynamic revenue optimisation model.

9. The IIG shell has the current potential to scale around three dimensions: content area, geographic location and stakeholder. Each of which could be the locus of communities of practice. Even if we take the development costs as sunk the issue is of how to maintain a stream of content with cutting edge quality, that comes both from the community and experts who may need to be compensated.

10. We still need to assess from potential Indian and international users whether this will fit a market based revenue model or a more digital commons + public good framework, a crucial process question for sites of this kind.

We are more than happy to share details of how and why certain functions and modules were developed, where we see them going and technical challenges and solutions that we found.