Open Source Network Blog

Jisse Reitsma

Jisse Reitsma is co-founder of Jira ICT, wrote a book on Joomla! Templates, teaches many courses and programs in Joomla!, Magento and Drupal. Authors profile

Hidden in the north of India, Tibetans have settled down in the town of Dharamsala together with their political and spiritual leader the Dalai Lama. This has attracted noy only more Tibetans, hippies and backpackers to come over, but as well lots of young people willing to help the Tibetan community through various voluntary projects.

Interesting is also that these Tibetans in exile have also brought along their whole governmental system, including all the ministeries and even their own IT-department. For years I've been wanting to do some kind of voluntary work. But just doing stuff other people can do just as well, sounded not really challenging. I wanted to do give this community the knowledge I have: Knowledge of Joomla!, Magento, Drupal, etcetera.

These months my plans are coming to realization. I'm now in India, and already have been giving two Joomla! training-days to the IT-department of the Tibetan Government in Exile. More training-days will follow so the crew of the so-called TCRC (Tibetan Computer Resource Center) will have all the Joomla! knowledge they need: Administration, webdesign and even PHP-development.

Tomorrow another training project starts for anyone who would like to attend. Not only Tibetans will attend, but also Indians and even some westerners who have been supporting the Tibetan community for years.

The nice thing of giving these Joomla! trainings is ofcourse that it helps the people build the actual websites themselves. For years, websites have been put up by westerners, while the local crew had no clue on how to maintain or develop the site further. Using Joomla!, websites can be maintained more easily and by giving trainings people learn how to.

While Dharamsala houses many Tibetans and Indians, the IT-people can be counted in a couple of hands. Teaching computer stuff in Dharamsala means almost teaching computer stuff to all IT-people here. Luckily enough there is enough training material for anyone, because a Joomla! training is more than just using the application: There is a special Unicode-font for the Tibetan language, but how to optimize websites for both English as Tibetan. Also Linux administration comes in handy while setting up both website as webserver. But because most Tibetan websites are also dealing with the political situation, websecurity is also an issue (to make sure the website is not hacked easily by Chinese hackergroups).

To be realistic, being here is also about enjoying other things: The mountains, the people, the culture. But seeing that voluntary work could be so easily combined with open source adds to the experience.