हैकरgram started 5 years ago as an experiment among friends in Bhopal faced with the unique problem of finding sustainability strategies for a bunch of projects that were not “commercially viable” in the traditional sense. From this conundrum grew the notion that communities need to be able to exchange value with a larger degree of autonomy than allowed by traditional economic models.

This led to the notion of peer to peer social equity exchange, which is what this community is all about.

Some early attempts at definitions –

“We are HackerGram. We are a community of media, art, technology and sustainability enthusiasts. We believe in the art of doing. We are hackers in the most primitive sense of the word. We reframe conventional ideas, technology and practices in order to offer alternative solutions to chronic problems. Our name, HackerGram, comes from this powerful narrative of doing. The word gram, which means village in Hindi, is used to describe the functional and self-sufficient nature of the communities. We are excited by technology and innovation, but recognize that people come first. We believe that innovation is valuable only when it serves people. The solutions we are looking at are in no way final, and will continue to evolve over time. HackerGram is a work in progress.”

-Indu Nepal

“An initiative to bring people together to pursue their independent goals while building a sustainable community. While we are all dealing with wastage of resources, we thought of starting several places where we can reuse and recycle available resources and reducing our footprints in the process.”

-Deepta Naha

What is हैकरgram?

है – Hai – Hindi word for “Is”, refers to Being

कर – Kar – Hindi word for “Do” refers to Doing

-gram – Something written, drawn or otherwise recorded.

(src – http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-gram)

….and it also sounds like the Hindi word for village

So… हैकरgram is an effort to –

Identify and locate communities committed to becoming both functional and sustainable

Document and share who these communities are being and what they are doing to become sustainable and functional

We do this at http://hackergram.org

-Arjun Venkatraman