I had a long and infor­ma­tive talk with Sujatha last week­end. Sujatha’s a blog­ger and radio jockey who’s involved with vol­un­teer activ­ity for Akshara, a foun­da­tion that works with chil­dren. I am post­ing the infor­ma­tion about what needs to be done, but do also go over and check out her post and leave com­ments there if you want to be involved.

This is from Sujatha:

The work that needs to be com­pleted over the next 3 and 1/2 months can be divided into two dis­crete steps:

1. Data Col­lec­tion: There are three kinds of data that need to be col­lected — School data, Teacher data and Stu­dent data. To begin with, the Kar­nataka State Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion will pro­vide Teacher and Stu­dent data to Akshara which Akshara is accept­ing for the time-being.

School data, on the other hand, will be pri­mar­ily col­lected by Akshara. This is where we, the volu­teers, come in. Start­ing Decem­ber 15, 2005, Akshara will need volu­teers to go to each of the schools (addresses and direc­tions will be pro­vided by Akshara), stand there at the loca­tion with a GPS receiver (which will also be pro­vided by Akshara) and fig­ure out the exact GPS loca­tion (lat­i­tudes and lon­gi­tudes) of that school so the loca­tion of every sin­gle school under the project can be pin-pointed on a map.

The city is divided into 9 edu­ca­tion blocks (with 77 clus­ters), so it would be pos­si­ble for volu­teers to pick an area and go to all the schools in a cou­ple of clus­ters, for exam­ple, rather than criss-crossing the city and going all over the place.

All this work can be done on week­ends and hol­i­days (the schools need not be open for this pur­pose). The dead­line for this step of the project is Jan­u­ary 31, 2006.

2. Data Entry: All the data that comes in (School, Teacher and Stu­dent) will need to be keyed into com­put­ers. A cou­ple of you had asked me if data entry can be done at home on per­sonal com­put­ers and I con­firmed today that that is pos­si­ble. Data entry can be done at home and the spread­sheets can be e-mailed to Akshara. Alter­na­tively, data entry can also be done at any of the 9 block offices of Akshara where they have ded­i­cated com­put­ers for this purpose.

Akshara antic­i­pates that this phase of the project will begin Feb­ru­ary 1, 2006 and the dead­line is 31, March 2006.

What we need to do now is to let Akshara know which of these two phases each of the volu­teers is inter­ested in. Please leave a com­ment on this post with your prefer­ance and I’ll tab­u­late it so Akshara has a clear idea of where they have help and where they need more.

Read Sujatha’s com­plete post here.