Delhi, India – August 21 – 22, 2006: There was Muthu from WorldCorps bouncing a balloon on his elbow. The grassroots knowledge workers in the room looked around tentatively, slowly smiled … and pulled out their own balloons. This was a chance to play not only with balloons and each other, it was also a chance to play with idea of social entrepreneurship as a key element of running a telecentre.

The balloon bouncing was part and parcel of the first Mission 2007 Training Commons pilot workshop. Fifteen second year fellows from the Tata National Virtual Academy had come to the workshops to help test out the social entrepreneurship curriculum developed by Muthu with help NASSCOM Foundation’s Sagarika Bose and IDRC’s Ambika Sharma. The fellows came from projects of all types: MSSRF knowledge centres; ITC e-choupal kiosks; government CICs; farmer education groups. They participated in many languages, with Tamil and Hindi as common communication channels and with written materials in English. The session took place side by side with a larger scale participatory knowledge management workshop that MSSRF was running with first year NVA fellows.

There were two primary pieces of feedback from the participants: 1) we want more of this kind of training and 2) we need this adapted to our own language and context. With this input, the Training Commons team (MSSRF, WorldCorps, NASSCOM, IDRC and others) will move on to the improvement of the entrepreneurship module as well as the development of modules on community development, grassroots marketing and infomediary skills. These will be piloted in a number of languages with more NVA fellows over the next six months.