Further to my previous blog entry about micro-finance and the IT community finding opportunities to assist the third world, I recently read about an initiative called NGO in a box

Its aim is to increase the accessibility of F/OSS to non-profits in developing and transition countries.

Open Source should be an ideal help to NGOs and small businesses in the third world, but a major stumbling block is that we depend so much on Internet access—much more than say Microsoft developers. It's hard to leverage the power of the CPAN if you don't have reliable internet access, and imagine downloading the latest Java JDK over a flakey 14.4 dial-up connection...

NGO in a box aims to address these sort of issues by packaging an agreed set of F/OSS tools in a kit that can be distributed and copied at will—the contents will remain fairly static (although version upgraded) so that the relevant technicans can work confidently in the environment across organisation of similar aims.

It contains Linux, firewalls, applications and documentation. It sounds simple, but I would imagine that simple practial projects are what is needed.

Time to put on our brainstorming hats to see what else