Shemeer Babu at the ERPNext Conference 2022 on how we leveraged ERPNext to create a digital infrastructure for NGOs, concerned citizens located across India to collaborate and worked together to help vulnerable communities.
T4G Labs was born when a google sheet was accidentally deleted. 
This particular sheet was helping 25+ volunteers across India to coordinate help for 1,200+ migrant workers in distress during covid lockdown. It gave us sleepless nights that sitting in the silicon valley of India, we did not have a robust platform for changemakers, concerned citizens to come together and effortlessly collaborate to help those in need. We were inspired by the missions of FOSS United, Societal Platforms, Fields of View to help us through this journey.
Vulnerable communities face complex challenges at an unprecedented scale with multiple intersectionalities.
We learnt and believe that no single organisation, no matter how big, can solve such complex problems at scale. E.g a poor migrant worker displaced because of climate change, and a single woman with a child. She not only has to deal with challenges of unpaid wages but also face sexual harassment at her worksite and needs access to healthcare, and quality education for her child.
As we look around us, we see that change makers are not able to easily collaborate with their partners, other CSOs, Government agencies while trying to serve the same vulnerable groups. They are good with their own internal collaborations but when it comes to collaborating with others, it was not easy. Think of these changemakers as messaging apps like Whatsapp and Telegram. These apps are great for communicating with other people or groups who are using the same app but you can’t send a message from whatsapp to telegram. There is no interoperability! To solve complex problems at scale, the changemakers ecosystem needs to work with each other seamlessly. (Like email - one can send an email from gmail to hotmail and copy yahoo mail). There is an urgent and important need to move from an ecosystem and work together as an ecosystem.
The future of large scale societal change is collaboration.