RTI India celebrates its 2nd anniversary with 12000 Members and 1.5 lakhs hits per day

[kushal]

From today I would like to call all our members as Info Warriors who had joined us here at RTI India Portal on this very important day of celebration of RTI India second anniversary on 28th September 2008, on the 'International Right to Information' Day.

Let me just rewind to 1 years ago to the summers of 2007. After a modest start of just over 1000 members in the year 2006, some of the individual with forward thinking, bound in mind and spirit, inspired by a common vision, got together to make RTI a success though rtiindia.org and this is how this strong community foundation was born.

Thanks to them and today we are now more mature, more active, more exciting and most productive. Today it is but fitting to acknowledge these founding members. It is also nice to meet those who are with us today.

Now let us fast forward. From a handful of Warriors then we are now hitting a potential of over 12000+ members. We have evolved into to a full blown and a mighty visible portal embodied with the ideals in leadership, freedom of thought and social responsibility. A lot has happened; a lot has been done, and a lot still to come.

Let me preface this by quickly going over our 2007-2008 to do’s. Quickly zooming into this year alone you will get to know what beehive of activities is keeping the Team Members and the membership humming:

1. Right to Information Awareness though RTI Quiz: The first thing we did last year was to start an RTI Quiz. Our quiz had a great response, and many of us faired well. This was an important understanding for us that we have lot of scope to popularize RTI
2. Launch of Big Helpers website: Though we had very narrow focus on RTI, but the portal was poured with queries regarding matters outside the purview of RTI. We tired hard initially to create section for social help, but it just didn't stop. And thus we decided to launch another sister portal especially for social help. I am very happy to note that this marked an organized and disciplined beginning to our Warrior's. They choose their participation by their inherent desire and we were able to cleanly define our goals for both RTI India and Big Helpers.
   Is this helping solidify the membership? It truly does.
3. Proactive Disclosure campaign under Section 4 of RTI Act: After that we launched our 1st ever campaign and it met with a fair success, atleast it made us realize the potential of such campaigns. It was also important milestone for us, as we realized the importance of download segment, and then started focusing on Downloadables at our sister website http://www.rtiindia.info.
4. 10000 Posts at RTI India: Then came our 10000 psychological barrier. This milestone was an important development by then we knew we here to grow exponentially, but that also signaled more resources and energy required to run the portal. Therefore the shift to a bigger machine, dedicated hardware resource, committed RAM and voluminous bandwidth provider was inevitable.
5. RTI India joined and listed at Idealist.org: Sometime back I applied for registration at idealist.org and to my surprise I got a mail that 'RTI India' had been selected and listed at Idealist.org today. Idealist.org is one of the most comprehensive online resources for the nonprofit/NGO sector worldwide, and RTI India is proud to have joined the over 73,000 nonprofits currently already listed.
6. Join us as 'Community Builder' at RTI India: Obviously this had been our smartest move. We expected from community builders, to provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity to RTI India and it's Members. And we would like to put in record that all our community builders faired very well in the challenging task of managing community. This in short is what mentoring is all about. It connects the mentors and the mentees, and provides tools and facilities for a productive mentoring process to help mentees achieve their goals.
7. RTI India Documenter and New Guide Segment at RTI India: It was time for consolidation of resources scattered around the portal with 1000's of valuable posts. A voluntary but requiring extreme hard work, our Documenters took the job of compilation and consolidation and that did wonders to our portal by making it a really comprehensive RTI Site. Thanks to our energetic Guide coordinator C.J. Karira, it is gaining much ground and popularity. And this is where we have most of the plans in coming future.
8. RTI Directory, Store and Share RTI Documents: Taking lead from our number of hits from our download segment, RTI India Directory became the premier online document repository to Store and Share RTI documents providing the platform for users and Activists to upload and share their documents with the world. The raw first hand experience of seeing an alike RTI application is sure to give lot of confidence to those you are first going to write an application.
9. Post of the Month Contest at RTI India: Participate in the Post of the Month contest: Our community was maturing and bubbling with activity. We had many sincere Info Warriors helping others. What better way to acknowledge the contribution of members than by way of this contest. It brought out small but significant contribution which we might have lost in the plethora of 25000 posts. By a pure democratic and fair method, each post made by other user can be posted as the Topic of the week and highest three posts wins the acclaim and are aptly highlighted here

Our vibrant membership that was 1111 on this day last year has now crossed 12000, a remarkable feat indicating RTI growing popularity. With as many as 1.5 lakhs hits per day, 25000 posts on matter of RTI, around 90000 web pages indexed in search engines, you can bet for Right to Information Success in this country.

We are proud of our Members who had made our community efforts a success, either by way of a question or by posting a solution or simply being here with us. We are also thankful to those who contributed by way of assimilating news about Right to Information and shared with all of us in the RTI News section. Many appreciation would go left unnoticed if we did not mention those who contributed in the blogging, guide and directory segment. Again a Big Thanks to all those who made monetary contributions for meeting the bandwidth cost and thus reaffirmed their faith in our community work.

C J Karira, the highest contributor of RTI India has consented to join RTI India Core Team as our new 'Global Moderator'. His commitment to our site has been exceptional and we are sure his addition to the team will put RTI India on a stronger foundation in our onward march to greater heights. What better time to have him as our team member, than on this auspicious day.

The Community Builders have been doing a good work especially during the last four months, despite the ever increasing new registrations. To strengthen this area further, four of our members--ambrish.p, abhi987, prbhat gen & wehelp- have been inducted as our New 'Community Builders'. Thank you all for bestowing your precious time and dedication for our community efforts.

For others who have offered their services for being a Community Builder, we are constantly observing the active participation of all the members at the site and they will be inducted at the appropriate time based on our requirements.


Let us connect, network, reach out.

3 points to take away:

1. First of all, be a registered member. This is commitment one.
2. Secondly, stay in touch, stay in the loop. That’s commitment two
3. Third and last commitment - be engaged. The challenge for each of us is not to watch things happen but to share our talents, our resource, our knowledge, our skills - contribute in ways we can, support with means we can, and most of all share our information and blessings whenever we can.

And now for all RTI India Members here - one final thought to leave with you as we celebrate today:

'Far tho’ we wander, RTI'ans will always do wonders’

Thank you all for being with us and making our site a Success story in this country.

Discuss this announcement here!