Building Communities: Some Experiences with IT

Broad access to information plays a crucial role for empowerment, skill building, and more active participation of different groups of society, thus making an important contribution to social development. While information technology offers almost unlimited ways to enhance information access and management and to improve organizational structures, communication and workflows, it is the interaction between people, organization, and technology that makes economic and social development possible.

In this paper the author describes some of the efforts with which she has been associated directly or vicariously. In these initiatives to enhance economic and social development, ITs enabling capacity has been harnessed imaginatively.