Closing Thoughts

It’s been quite a time here in Panama at the NetHope 2007 Summit. As I reflect on the past few days, there’s a tremendous amount of information to process – it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve always thought that NetHope was an inspired idea, but until the Summit, it’s been very difficult to access the full benefit of membership. Since I arrived at the IRC about five months ago, I’ve been faced with a myriad of challenges – some of which I’ve faced before, and some of which I’ve barely even contemplated. Chief among the latter are the challenges of delivering technology solutions to places like Africa, where bandwidth is a very scarce resource. Complicating this issue is the fact that just trying to learn about what our infrastructure footprint looks like in Africa seems nearly impossible. Lastly, the IT staff that supports the field reports into the country directors, and has almost no relationship with my IT group in HQ. The combination of these things makes for a complex set of challenges. My hope was that NetHope would be a resource for me as I navigate some of these issues. However, when I arrived at The IRC and began to learn about NetHope, I had a fair amount of difficulty getting specific info on some of my early questions. I kept looking for the listserv where I could send a note to the members asking for advice. There was none. The executive director made a few introductions for me, but I didn’t get a sense that that was his job, although he couldn’t have been more helpful. I did speak to a couple of NetHope members, and someone at Accenture, but none of it came to very much. So, when I heard there was a Summit in Panama, I wasn’t sure what to think. My boss, who used to be the boss of one of the founders of NetHope, suggested that I go, and bring along my new Director of IT Infrastructure. We both agreed that if we were going to participate in NetHope, it was important to attend the Summit. So, my expectations were fairly low as we approached Panama.

The first day started with Ed Granger-Happ, the CIO at Save The Children, and the current Chairman of NetHope, giving a compelling talk about the foundations of NetHope. While I subscribe to all of the ideals he mentioned, I still wasn’t sure how NetHope was going to help me. I kept looking for the knowledge-sharing opportunities with the other members, but since I didn’t know many of the members, these opportunities didn’t readily present themselves. There were updates on some of the projects that NetHope is working on (skills building, connectivity, etc), so I just absorbed this all, and kept trying to figure out how to take advantage of it. Day 2 was a field trip to a local indigenous tribe, and an opportunity to meet people in a more relaxed environment. Some good conversations, and spectacular scenery, but still nothing that would quite make the trip worthwhile. Finally, on the last day, I broke through. It started with a conversation with Kelvin, the CIO at Plan International. We started talking about what he’s doing with respect to connectivity in Africa, and it became clear that he’s solved many of the issues we’re struggling with. He introduced me to a few of his African IT staff who were there, and we talked a bit about what they did, traded business cards, and promised to stay in touch. Bingo – something real and actionable that I could take away from the meeting. Later that day, a few of us got together with a colleague from World Vision for an unplanned session to talk about their shared services effort. It was a very interesting session. In addition to talking about shared services, we had a very free flowing discussion about a range of topics, and I believe we all came away with more information. It was exactly the kind of information sharing that I had hoped the summit would provide. I’d really like to see more of these kinds of “Birds of a Feather” sessions at future Summits where one member presents their learnings about a particular topic. I’m pretty sure that the others who were there also felt that this was a great use of 2 hrs. Perhaps we could use TAG to create Communities of Practice areas where members could post questions, best practices, and have general discussions about issues we’ve faced. I also had the idea that each member could list the things they’ve done really well – that way if I have a question, I could see who’s solved this, and give them a call. Not sure which (if any) of these make sense, but some better and more effective way to communicate with other members would be very useful. I’m also a member of the New York CTO Club, which is basically a monthly meeting and an email list. I can ask any question of some of the top CTOs in the NYC area, and get a response within minutes. Enormously useful, and a good way to get to know people and develop a reputation without meeting face-to-face.

Another comment, as a new member, is that it would be helpful to have some sort of new member kit which introduces NetHope, gives an overview of the various projects that are being done (or have been done), and gives some sort of guidelines on how to access the value. Now that I’ve been to the Summit, I have some ideas, but if I had had something earlier, I could have made the Summit even more valuable.

In the end, like so many things, it’s about the relationships. I met some great people in Panama, and I will now make much more of an effort to continue these relationships since there’s clearly significant value to be gained. I’m thrilled to see more effort being put into marketing and fundraising, although I do have a general concern about the group spreading itself too thin. Are we doing the core activities well enough yet to start new initiatives? My guess is that the new initiatives are partially a result of where the funding is, and I think the NetHope team would say that they can do both. I hope so. There’s so much value to be gained, it would be a shame to fumble at this key stage.

One important point to make, though, is that the 3 days in Panama was very inspiring for both Chad and me. I can’t wait to get back into the office on Monday and start working on things. There's so much to do, and now I feel even more prepared since I have the support of all the NetHope members.

INSTEDD and Google.org

Marketing and Innovation

Breakout sessions this morning on Marketing and Innovation. The marketing session was run by Monica Harrington, a former Microsoft and Gates Foundation staffer. She’s donating her time to NetHope and helping to increase awareness of what we’re doing. She gave a good overview of her approach, and has a solid plan for getting things done. One point she mentioned was that we should be working with our internal marketing departments on telling our stories. I made the point that our marketing departments may not know how to tell IT stories, or have the time to focus on this, and that perhaps it was a good opportunity for NetHope to provide some value by giving us extra help. I suggested that perhaps NetHope should be talking directly to our marketing departments. Are there conferences that all our marketing and communications folks attend? It’s great to see effort being put towards this critical area.

On the innovation side, the session was led by Steve Cooper, former CIO at American Red Cross. He was suggesting that we setup an “Innovation Fund” to fund project with specific business value, as opposed to just tech projects. It’s an interesting idea, but I wonder whether NetHope is staffed effectively to add this to the list of projects. Bill said they could walk and chew gum at the same time – I hope so – I’d hate for NetHope to trip while opening a gumball.

Cisco - Crisis Communications video

Video from Cisco from their "Human Network" series, starring Rui Lopes from Save the Children, and commentary from NetHope's own Bill Brindley:

Long Day

Quite a day, today. Spent most of it with colleagues from The Nature Conservancy in Chagres National Park. Went up river to visit an indigineous tribe - too tired to write much, so I'll just post some pictures. More tomorrow...

IFRC PADRU visit

Took a very interesting tour of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies' PADRU (Pan American Disaster Response Unit) facility this afternoon. Some of the highlights (going on memory, so might be a bit inaccurate:)

- They stand ready to send supplies for 20,000 beneficiaries
- Can mobilize supplies for another 5,000 every 48 hours ongoing
- Have an HF radio network setup with email capability - worldwide
- Put together "kits in a box" - IT Kit, Office Kit, Radio Kit, etc. - field staff can be up and running very quickly in a variety of situations
- Ericsson has donated some GSM repeaters (see pic) to be deployed in a disaster where cell service is completely destroyed or otherwise unavailable - they call it the "million dollar bet"; that is, if they decide to deploy the repeater, they're working under the assumption that they might not get it back. In some cases this could actually be a million-dollar investment, since there would be a scenario where the repeater just becomes part of the permanent cell network wherever it was deployed.

It's utterly mind-boggling how the IFRC manages the logistics around their disaster response - it goes way beyond technology. At the end of the day, it makes me remember that tech is simply a means to an end. It's humbling to think, since most of my career has been tech for tech's sake (or for the sake of profit.)

Downtime

Hanging out in the room getting some work (and postcards) done. Grabbing lunch in a few, then off to the Red Cross' PADRU tour!

CMO Love

Marc Sirkin, our Chief Marketing Officer, hooked us up with a link, so figured we'd return the favor:

npMarketing blog

Shared Services

After a discussion about which shared services NetHope should be focused on, we got another presentation from WorldVision about how they’ve approached shared services. One thing to note up front is that WorldVision has a significant amount of money (just under $1B), and all of it unrestricted, I believe. They have a pretty nice framework for shared services, and he shared some slides he used to talk to business units and executives. Good stuff. They embarked on a multi-year benchmarking process which compared them to other companies – none of which were NetHope members. All of them appeared to be large, public, Fortune500 companies. Interesting. At the end of the first analysis, they hired Accenture to help them learn in detail about their infrastructure in Africa. All of this is towards figuring out what to offer in a shared services model. It reminds of what I’ve read about other large companies – didn’t expect to see that at a NetHope meeting. I'm sure there's a lot to learn from them - just haven't quite figured out what it is yet. He's going to present in more detail on Thurs morning - that's should be enlightening.

Shared Services

Does shared services make sense across every size/type of org? For someone as huge as WorldVision, probably, as we found out in the last presentation. At the IRC? If you consider centralized email, Intranet, and other applications to be a shared services model, then it's something we feel could work very well both domestically and, eventually, in the field. As I mentioned previously, cost is a factor, but in this case, the challenge is also managing such a large project effectively and getting buy-in from the various constituents.

So the first day is winding down - one more presentation, then a discussion of tomorrow's field trips (looking forward to finding out more about those), and we're on our merry way back to the hotel for dinner and relaxation.

Connectivity

Had a very interesting presentation from our friend Matthew Liste from Goldman Sachs about connectivity. Wow – is this a complex area. The technology is somewhat foreign to me, and the players are new as well. As I think about how to solve various technology issues, the issues in low-bandwidth areas like Africa are particularly vexing. As with many things, WorldVision has taken a leadership role in this. They were spending $4MM globally on bandwidth, and projected that it would increase to $16MM in 3 yrs. That got the attention of senior management, and they spent a couple of years analyzing usage, and have created a centralized operations center to service their many offices. We may end up being able to leverage some of what they’ve done. Very exciting, but lots of work ahead to get something going.

Money

Probably the biggest theme underlying all of today's discussions is money. So many solutions exist for many of the technology problems we all face; unfortunately, we don't have unlimited, unrestricted funding to make some of these things happen. I've always been a big fan of the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community; the dilemma there is drawing the line between functionality, price, and support. The other piece of the puzzle, hardware, can be solved by things like group negotiated pricing (thank you NetHope) and alternate sources like eBay, etc.

An example is a conversation we just had in the lunch buffet line: the need for traffic shaping/Internet filtering to make the most of slow Internet connections. We're using Squid to do some of this in DRC, with plans to roll out in other parts of Africa, but this doesn't scale and isn't easily supportable.

Web 2.0

It was a somewhat interesting discussion, but focused mostly on consumer uses. I asked the question of whether anyone has used these tools within their organizations. Plan Int'l said they had, using Sharepoint, Skype, IM, etc. Also, Save has done something, but didn't really eloborate. I would suggest this would be a good opportunity for a case study - so many of us are looking at these tools, and why should we re-invent the wheel. I have to believe that there are some valuable lessons learned, that could be shared. There's no question that this could be an enormously valuable tool for us. I'm going to try to get more info on this in the informal discussions...

Social Networking Discussion

Panel discussion on social networking - some questions were raised about the uses of social networking tools, the disinformation that exists (kids using fake names and ages, etc.) and the sheer overload of data that we face, not only as IT professionals, but as consumers of that data in general.

Shaun Robinson, who is currently a college student, spoke a bit about how he uses collaborative workspaces for projects, and the fact that this new generation of online apps is crucial to the college population.

Not much talk about how social networking and Web 2.0 relate to NGOs.

My feeling is that NGOs need to approach any social networking presence as a marketing tool; it's best to establish an approved profile and dedicate people to carefully manage relationships and content on these sites.

Another point that would have escaped me (note to self: think globally) is that the culture of social networking varies as widely as the culture of the country where it's being used. What's appropriate in the US might not be acceptable in Singapore, for example.

Hey, David has the mike. Good question, and refocusing on topic: is anyone here using any collaboration tools or peer-type technologies? Some answers: Skype, SharePoint, SecondLife spaces, IM as team communication tool.

We interrupt this broadcast...

We're about to take a short break for lunch. So far, in the interest of time, I've just been summarizing each presentation - now that we're in the groove of posting, I will start putting my two cents of commentary into each entry.

Back soon...

NetHope 3.0

Bill Brindley (CEO of NetHope) gave an overview of where NetHope would like to go (called NetHope 3.0). Good to have large, challenging goals, and if he even accomplishes only some of them, it'll be a huge boon the the member organizations. Shared procurement is one of the more obvious ones, but shared innovation is also compelling. The challenge, I think, is to find things that most people will actually want to take advantage of. Shared email, for instance. Intersting idea, and definitely works as a shared model, but would NGOs of this size actually take advantage of this? I doubt it - I think it's too critical to the organization to outsource. Perhaps others feel differently - we'll see. A very exciting future, in any case, and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes (and potentially helping to affect the direction in some small way).

Social Networking and Web 2.0

Adrian Scott - CEO of Ryze.com- sang with Placido Domingo!

Social networking sites - what do people use these for? Depends on site, etc.
What is a friend? Again, depends on many variables.

Younger audience judging people (even Presidential candidates) based on who/how many on friends list on social networking sites.

Scalability of relationships - can you really have a million friends?

Positive applications of social networking: group causes/mobilization, etc.

Ciudad Del Saber

CEO's Report

Sustainable NetHope:

- Well-funded ventures tend to succeed
- Creating value for member orgs
- Shared services model

Chairman's Report

Ed Granger-Happ, CIO at Save The Children, gave a very interesting talk, and made some good points about how we should focus more of our efforts on the field - our ultimate customers/clients. He contrasted the percentage of IT projects focused on the field vs. HQ with the number of staff in HQ vs field - they're inversely related. The point he didn't make (which Pat Long, CFO at IRC, former CFO at Save, and my boss made) was that projects focused on HQ aren't necessarily NOT focused on the field. IOW, it's not as if our projects for the HQ users don't benefit the field users - sometimes rather directly.

He also mentioned two books:
“Connecting The Dots” and “Forces For Good”, Crutchfield and Grant

Lastly, he used the term HQ humility, which I think is a very good thing for all of us to keep in mind.

SENACYT Panama

Panama is increasing their R&D around science & technology.

SENACYT's mission: turn science and tech into a tool for development in Panama

Repatriation grants to attract Panamanians who have left on fellowships, etc.

Infoplazas project: community centers with Internet-connected workstations. 85 already in place as of Sept. 07.

"Hagamos Ciencia" - Let's Do Science - new classroom learning initiative around inquiry-based learning.

Chairman's Report

Interesting fact: most of IT's assets/spending revolve around HQ, yet a majority of employees are in the field. "Law of Proximity": the folks down the hall get more attention than field workers.

How do we fix this? Better IT portfolio management.

Project Chunking - break down to lessen risk, adjust to changes dynamically, and realize benefits sooner. Connecting the Dots (Benko/McFarlan)

IT's promise: bigger, faster, cheaper...but is that all? No.

Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (Crutchfield/Grant)

At the end of the day, it's about the impact we make on the world.

Kicking off!

Opening session is underway...

Here we go...

Made it through airport security, waiting at the gate to depart. Very excited about the trip on many levels - the NetHope summit, getting to see the Panama Canal for probably the only time in my life, and just a general sense of adventure ahead.

More to follow later.

Off to the races...

Made it to the airport in good time – met up with Chad, everything’s gone smoothly so far. Both of us are excited about the trip and what we might learn. For my part, I’m looking forward to meeting more of my colleagues and developing ongoing relationships. There’s nothing like face-to-face meetings (and a little alcohol) to develop valuable associations. I keep thinking that many of the challenges we’re facing are being faced by others – why should we be reinventing the wheel? Hopefully there will be a general tone of collaboration within the group. Not really thinking much about Panama, but I suspect that will change once we get there.