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1. What is O Foundation?

The O Foundation is a nonprofit that uses digital technology in its core to make social innovations. With a focus on openness, diversity and inclusion, we are striving to transform the way millions of people have been accessing knowledge, and contributing to the knowledge commons. We ourselves being long time advocates and contributors to the Free/Libre and Open Source Software, and the Open Science movement, have been creating and bettering open source tools and educational resources that empower many marginalized grassroots communities—people with visual disability and illiteracy, speakers of indigenous/endangered languages, and people that have access to only low-end technology—to access the wealth of knowledge in their own language, preserve their native languages, and influence the narrative about themselves positively in a global scale. The Odia-language will be a focus language to begin with, but our work is going to be completely open and reproducible for others to build technology on the top of our work, and we will venture into more languages as the organization grows.

There are eight core objectives that the Foundation is going to work on:

  1. Anthropological, social and linguistic research focused on, but not limited to India

  2. Innovation, development and aggregation of educational resources for the growth of languages, cultures, and societies — with a focus on but not limited to the Odia language and Odisha

  3. Development of conventional and digital multimedia including digital preservation, restoration and documentation of literary and cultural heritage

  4. Activism for the open web, digital security, privacy, and other socio-technological causes tied to the Internet

  5. Outreach, promotional, and educational activities, and publications related to the core values of the organizations

  6. Collaboration with the government, educational institutes, Non Government Organisations, private organisations, individuals and other stakeholders for accomplishing the aforementioned goal

  7. The Organization will adhere to the philosophy of Openness and Transparency, and will strive towards publishing its work and methodologies under open standards

  8. To promote diversity and inclusion in Science, Technology, Education and Management (STEM)

2. Who can become a member?

The Foundation has four Founding Members — Nasim Ali, Sailesh Pattanaik, Sailesh Patnaik, Shitikantha Dash, and Shreekant Kedia — that were involved in the foundation of the organization. We have an internal policy to accept new member individuals/organizations (as collaborators). If you are interested to join us, please go the JOIN US page and apply. We will get back soon on our decision.