CDEP Digital Tools
BhoomiTech Heritage and Development Foundation, under its Community Digital Ecology Program (CDEP), provides every software application developed through the program to communities absolutely FREE of cost. All applications are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2.0 or any later version (GPL-2.0-or-later), which gives every community the right to use, study, modify and share the software, and requires that any improved version is shared under the same terms. What is created for the community will always remain with the community.
Heritage has never belonged to a single person or institution. A folk song, a weaving motif, a healer’s remedy, a word for a forest plant found in no dictionary: these are a community’s shared inheritance, held in trust across generations. The tools that preserve them should be held in the same spirit.
The communities CDEP serves are often the least able to pay for technology. If archiving their heritage depended on licence fees or subscriptions, those most at risk of cultural erasure would be the first shut out. Removing that barrier is why CDEP exists.
There is a deeper reason too. CDEP does not build archives for communities; it gives them the tools to build their own. An archive truly belongs to a community only if the tools behind it do as well. Proprietary software can be discontinued, locked behind a paywall or controlled from afar. The GPL ensures that no archive built with CDEP tools can be taken away, and that no tool built for the common good can become a closed, private product.
This openness also shapes how the tools are made. Software that captures a living culture cannot be designed by programmers alone. It needs scholars who understand what must be recorded and how to respect it, technologists who can build simple and reliable tools, and community members who test them on the ground and tell us what truly works.
That is why we invite voluntary consultation and participation from our members. Voluntary work keeps CDEP guided by purpose rather than profit, builds trust with the communities we serve, and makes the program sustainable, because a tool built by many hands is maintained and improved by many hands. Every contribution is recognised, and every output is directed towards real use in the community.
We believe heritage should be free to preserve, free to protect and free to carry into the future. If you share this belief, we warmly invite you to join CDEP.