humanitarian.info

I’m serious. I just saw tigers! And bears! And bats! I never dreamed that the NetHope Member Summit would be this interesting, frankly. This year, it’s being hosted by the World Conservation Society, who have their HQ at the Bronx Zoo in New York. I’d rather have my office here, so I’m going to apply for a job (probably as a cleaner).

The reason I’m at the summit is because ECB4 is now a donor. We are funding NetHope to form an Emergency Response Working Group which will manage two of our key projects – the ICT4Emergencies.org resource site, and the ICT Skill Building programme – and on Monday we had the first meeting of the Working Group.

It went very well – all the ECB4 agencies were represented, along with ActionAid and a couple of other observers. I’m confident that NetHope offers a very sustainable home for those projects, but this is just the start of that process. The real challenge is managing the transition from ECB4 to NetHope, and I’m fully looking forward to abusing my power as a donor to make sure it happens smoothly.

The other thing I hope that this partnership does is inject a little bit of ECB into NetHope. NetHope tends to be dominated by technical talk, and they have a terrible time connecting to their agency business processes – i.e. the actual work that we do. It’s no use installing a VSAT if you don’t know what it’s going to be used for, etc, etc. So the focus for ECB4 in the partnership is twofold: to ensure the success of those two projects, and to help NetHope to become more responsive to the member agencies actual requirements.

I’m very optimistic about this, but then again I just saw a polar bear!

(Cross posted on the ECB Team Blog.)