NetHope
Encyclopedia
NetHope, Inc., founded in 2001, is a consortium of 32 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that specializes in
improving IT
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...

 connectivity among humanitarian organizations in developing countries and areas affected by disaster. The organization has partnerships with Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

, Cisco Systems
Cisco
Cisco may refer to:Companies:*Cisco Systems, a computer networking company* Certis CISCO, corporatised entity of the former Commercial and Industrial Security Corporation in Singapore...

, Intel, and Accenture
Accenture
Accenture plc is a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company headquartered in Dublin, Republic of Ireland. It is the largest consulting firm in the world and is a Fortune Global 500 company. As of September 2011, the company had more than 236,000 employees across...

. Its humanitarian development, emergency response, and conservation programs are in place in 180 countries worldwide.

Founding

In March 2001, Edward G. Happ, then CIO of Save the Children, authored a paper entitled "Wiring the Global Village" that discussed two hypotheses:
  1. International nonprofits could solve the connection problem better, faster, and cheaper if done together rather than reinventing the wheel as individual organizations; and
  2. Nonprofits would be in a better position to partner with corporate sponsors as a group rather than as individuals.

This paper was presented to Cisco's corporate philanthropy group and became the basis upon which NetHope was created. Shortly thereafter, Cisco fellow Dipak Basu coined the name "NetHope."

Work

Places of operation

NetHope members operate in over 180 countries around the world. NetHope also operates four regional chapters in the following areas: East Africa, West Africa, Sri Lanka and India. Future chapters will be launching in South Africa
South Africa
The Republic of South Africa is a country in southern Africa. Located at the southern tip of Africa, it is divided into nine provinces, with of coastline on the Atlantic and Indian oceans...

, Bangladesh
Bangladesh
Bangladesh , officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh is a sovereign state located in South Asia. It is bordered by India on all sides except for a small border with Burma to the far southeast and by the Bay of Bengal to the south...

 and Panama
Panama
Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

. NetHope Headquarters are located in McLean, Virginia.

NetReliefKit

Working with Cisco Systems and British satellite firm Inmarsat
Inmarsat
Inmarsat plc is a British satellite telecommunications company, offering global, mobile services. It provides telephony and data services to users worldwide, via portable or mobile terminals which communicate to ground stations through eleven geostationary telecommunications satellites...

, NetHope developed the NetReliefKit, which is a solar powered wireless router that can connect users to the Internet via a satellite uplink. They were distributed for use with nonprofit organizations such as Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, and Mercy Corps. The kits are meant to be used for relief agencies to coordinate their response efforts. The device was deployed to provide Internet signals after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was an undersea megathrust earthquake that occurred at 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, December 26, 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia. The quake itself is known by the scientific community as the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake...

.

2010 Haiti earthquake

Within days of the 7.0 earthquake
2010 Haiti earthquake
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophic magnitude 7.0 Mw earthquake, with an epicentre near the town of Léogâne, approximately west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010.By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks...

 that destroyed much of Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...

, NetHope responded by setting up telecommunications links among a dozen relief groups, thanks largely in part to a $1.25 million donation from Microsoft and its partnerships with Cisco and Intel.
The 10 megabyte local network provided Internet connectivity and extensions to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)-style phones so that NetHope's members could coordinate the delivery of supplies in Haiti and send need assessments to the rest of the world.

However, the temporary network came under criticism a month later from local Internet Service Provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

s (ISPs) who said that this temporary network was taking away their business. Inveneo
Inveneo
Inveneo is a 501 non-profit organization based in San Francisco with focus on Information and Communication Technologies for organizations supporting underserved communities in the developing world, mostly in Africa...

, the company that NetHope tapped to build the network, defended the action by saying that in the days after the earthquake it was critical for NGOs to have reliable connectivity in order to coordinate their actions using resources such as Google Maps
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google, free , that powers many map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API...

. Local ISP wired networks appeared to remain functional in the aftermath of the earthquake, but had lost electricity to their wireless base stations. An agreement between Inveneo and the local ISPs was to be made so ISPs would start receiving money from NGOs using their bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...

.

2004 Asia tsunami

NetHope had already been developing the NetReliefKit with Cisco and Inmarsat, but when the tsunami in the Pacific hit, they saw it was necessary for NGOs to communicate with each other immediately, as many had lost this capability.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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