Recently I spent a couple days in Kathmandu, Nepal, visiting the team of library IT professionals at Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya (MPP) which is conducting one of the pilots for the eIFL-FOSS ILS project. Dibyendra Hyoju is the technical lead on this Evergreen pilot with Amar Gurung, his Director as well as eIFL-FOSS country coordinator, providing careful oversight. A case study of this pilot will follow in due course, but here I just want to reflect for a moment or two on what admirable work is going on in Nepal.

You will not be surprised to learn that FOSS is alive and well in Nepal. Nepal has its own local variant of Linux, NepaLinux, and its own contribution to UNICODE. So you will also not be surprised to learn that FOSS for libraries is busy being explored, evaluated and deployed. Quite apart from the eIFL-FOSS ILS Evergreen pilot, there are substantial deployments of Koha, Greenstone, and OpenBiblio, as well as ongoing evaluations of DSpace repository software. At a workshop hosted by the Social Science Baha, I was impressed with the level of technical expertise as well as non-technical librarian enthusiasm for onward development. My co-presenters, Dibyendra Hyoju and Dr Mohan Raj Pradhan of HealthNet presented a strong case, I think, for FOSS in libraries.

What is perhaps even more impressive is that all of this great work is going on in spite of very real challenges. For example, there is no electricity in Kathmandu for 16 hours per day. That's a bit hard to get your head around at first. Only 8 hours of electricity. Of course that limited amount is extended somewhat by the vast number of private generators that kick in to action when the main power is shut off. But those generators cost money. So it is usually only businesses and the wealthy that can afford them. Even my hotel only provided electricity for a few more hours than the minimum.

How do such conditions affect the work of librarians and IT staff? Well, this is Nepal so people do cope. They develop workarounds. They make sure that computer servers are shut down cleanly prior to the loss of power. They concentrate their efforts during the window of opportunity when there is reliable power. And they are patient.

For those who do things with software, the somewhat geeky amongst us, it means the absence of late night techniness. I can attest that much of the best techie thinking often happens after midnight in the wee hours of the morning when a thorny problem just keeps gnawing at your brain demanding that you solve it. But that can't happen here. It's a little thing, I know. But it really hit home to me in the middle of night while I was sitting in my hotel room in Kathmandu in the dark with only the flickering of my battery-powered laptop screen to keep me company.

The differing challenges we face locally, however, have a way of strengthening the bonds we share. Free and open source software, and especially the FOSS communities that are built on sharing and caring, is one of the things we share. Long may it flourish in Nepal.

My visit was all too brief and yet I saw so much in this beautiful city. I only hope that some day I can return and visit the city and the country at a more leisurely pace.