A few years ago, DrakNet started a few initiatives aimed at doing a little bit for the world, and getting our clients involved in doing a bit for the world with us. While lots of companies write checks, we wanted to choose projects that people could make some level of an investment in rather than us simply writing blog posts tooting our own horn for taking the money you gave us and donating it.

We do, though, want to toot a horn or two here and give you an update on how those initiatives are working out.

Kiva

We began lending through Kiva.org, who’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty through microlending. The principle behind Kiva’s person-to-person micro-lending website is to empower individuals to lend to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

We chose Kiva for a few reasons. One, alleviating poverty is always a good thing. Two, entrepreneurship is something that’s near and dear to our hearts since DrakNet is an entrepreneurship itself and we love the idea of supporting small business owners all over the world. Three, Kiva is an ongoing endeavor that we can share with our clients – like us, you can see who the loans go to and watch the course of the loan and see the updates the same as we can.  We feel that helps people feel involved in the initiative itself. (We also often solicit people’s participation by asking people to choose the next country we lend to via Twitter.)

As of the time of this writing, DrakNet has made 31 loans in 22 months (as well as giving away two gift certificates for the “winners” to loan our money themselves), far surpassing our original stated goal of one loan a month. We’ve also had five clients join us in Kiva lending, and those folks have made an additional 36 loans, bringing the total number of loans originating in one way or another with DrakNet’s initiative to 67.

We’ve really enjoyed participating in the Kiva program, and look forward to making more loans in the future.

World Community Grid

The World Community Grid brings together people from across the globe who donate their idle computer time to create the largest volunteer computing grid benefiting humanity. DrakNet was officially welcomed as a World Community Grid Partner on June 2, 2009.

Thanks to clients joining us on the DrakNet team, we’ve managed to rack up quite a bit of run time:

Team Name		Status Joined-Retired		Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)		Points Generated		Results Returned
DrakNet		5/18/08 – Current		1:019:05:22:53		372,810		675

The above are our overall totals, and below, you can see our statistics by project.

Statistics By Projects

Statistics Last Updated: 2/5/10 00:06:02 (UTC) [ 3 hour(s) ago]

Our current team rank is 4,016 – keep in mind, that’s with a team of 5. Yes, just five. There are thousands of you (ok, not that many thousands, we’re a small company and all) and only FIVE people are on our team – and 2 work here!

We’d love to expand our team and rise in the rankings, so if you have a computer that wants to moonlight as a world saver and all around humanitarian, think about downloading a client and joining the Grid on Team DrakNet.

It’s far cooler than Team Edward or Team Jacob. Really!

Tags: Kiva, world grid

This entry was posted on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 11:52 am and is filed under DrakNet Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.