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.

Statistic Name	DrakNet	Avg. Kiva User*
Number of Loans Made	31	5.1
Number of Successful Invitations	5	0.24
Number of Loans Made by My Invitees	36	0.81
Number of Gift Certificates Given	2	0.39

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]

Project	Points Generated	Results Returned	Total Run Time (y:d:h:m:s)
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2	30,289	109	0:024:05:36:08
Help Fight Childhood Cancer	42,151	63	0:038:12:26:48
Nutritious Rice for the World	22,765	69	0:022:01:40:08
Help Conquer Cancer	78,164	134	0:077:02:14:35
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2	83,851	132	0:097:23:22:43
FightAIDS@Home	76,271	106	0:081:04:35:07
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search	11,937	18	0:011:06:10:08
The Clean Energy Project	2,473	3	0:001:22:33:16
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together	24,909	41	0:029:22:44:00

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!

A few months ago, I was reading this article on CNN.

(CNN) — Emblazoned on a long, tall, concrete barrier in the midst of a rocky Middle Eastern landscape is this spray-painted message: “Mirror, mirror on the wall. When will this senseless object fall?”
Messages of peace, marriage proposals and jokes are among the most popular graffiti requests.

It’s one of more than 900 graffiti messages that have been spray-painted by Palestinians on the controversial wall that separates Israel and the West Bank.

The painters take orders through a Web site that lets customers get a message on the wall. For the equivalent of $40, a Palestinian will spray paint the message and send three digital photos of it.

Anything goes — marriage proposals, jokes, notes to friends — as long as it isn’t extremist, hate-filled, or pornographic, said Faris Arouri, one of the founders of the site.

read the rest of the article here…

and for a moment, I thought it would be really cool to get our company name on the wall – and then in the next moment, I thought this particular wall was really not one I wanted my company name on, for a variety of reasons, nor did the moment and ability to send a thought to this particular place seem like an appropriate vehicle for self-promotion. I did, though, want to do something on behalf of “us”, and everyone that hosts with us that focuses on peace in so many different places in the world.

So, this is what we came up with, and we hope you like it.

(more…)

We usually get only a small bit of information on the results of the Kiva loans that we make. In September, an essay was published on the Huffington Post outlining what a microloan did for Yenku Sesay, a Kiva loan recipient in Sierra Leona. A snippet of the essay “From Machete To Microfinance: A Double Amputee’s Recovery” by Nicholas Sabin is below, with a link to the rest of the article.

Yenku Sesay looks down where his hands used to be. He answers my question with a sickening quickness: “1998. May 6. 10am.” That was when the rebel army, led by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), invaded Yenku’s village of Kondembaya in northern Sierra Leone and took him prisoner. The rebels burned the village and gathered the civilians under the central cotton tree.

This was one of the places where the RUF began its practice of amputation on civilians during the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone. The RUF reasoning behind the amputations was that civilians had used their hands to vote for a corrupt president and they did not deserve to keep these appendages. Yenku pleaded with the rebels not to cut off his hands. But the rebels took a certain enjoyment from the process. Each prisoner was pushed forward for his or her punishment and had to choose slips of paper in a gruesome lottery. The paper either said “short sleeve” or “long sleeve.” Yenku pulled two long sleeves. His hands were severed with a machete, first the left, then the right.

Many of the victims did not survive. Yenku would likely have soon died if his father had not taken decisive action. Yenku’s father used the family savings to hire a motorbike to take Yenku for treatment in a hospital hours away in the country’s capital city, Freetown. Though Yenku eventually recovered from the physical wounds, his life was destroyed. He was incapable of taking care of himself and eventually resorted to begging in the streets of Sierra Leone. At about 21 years old, Yenku’s daily life had been reduced to asking for handouts, with little hope of change, little chance for something better.

Were it not for a microloan, Yenku is sure that he would still be begging today. In 2006, Salone Microfinance Trust (SMT) approached Yenku about taking out a group loan with four other local borrowers. No other institutions were even willing to consider Yenku for credit because of his amputee status. However, through lengthy discussions with Yenku, SMT saw in Yenku natural business skills and a drive to be self-reliant. He was approved for 300,000 Leones from SMT, the equivalent of approximately $100 USD. Yenku used this money to develop a modest retail business. At first the business was no more than Yenku selling small items in the street, such as packaged biscuits, soaps, and other sundries. Over the past two years, by reinvesting the profits and building his credit with SMT, Yenku’s business has grown to become a small shop selling an assortment of clothing, shoes, drinks, and other packaged food products. Though his shop may be considered small by US standards, the difference it has made in Yenku’s life is dramatic.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nicholas-sabin/from-machete-to-microfina_b_124727.html

Today, we made a group loan to a banking group in Cambodia:

Mrs. Chhorn Chhoeurn’s Village Bank consists of seventeen members living in Peareach Village in Kampong Chhnang Province. Each member will use their loan for different purposes. Mrs. Chhorn Chhoeurn is the president of the bank and leader of this loan group.  She is 24 years old and the mother of two children who both attend the local school.  Mrs. Chhorn Chhoeurn owns a small plot land where she can cultivate rice for a living. Her husband, Mr. Chor Vy, has a small kiln in which he can produce coal to sell. In this business, he now faces a small obstacle because he cannot transport wood in order to make coal. Thus, his wife, Mrs. Chhorn Chhoeurn, decided to ask for a loan to buy a cow cart to help with transport.

This is a village bank loan consisting of mainly end-of-term loans. Nine members have end-of-term loans and the rest have monthly payment loans. Group members are not required to pay any principal on the loan until the very end of the loan term. End-of-term (EoT) loans are AMK’s main product because it is the most beneficial to Cambodia’s poor. It allows them to repay portions of the principal whenever they are financially able to do so. Most clients start to make payments many months before the end of the loan term. Almost all of AMK’s clients make their payments on time. AMK has a delinquency rate of only 0.09% and AMK has a default rate of 0% on Kiva.

You can always view all our microloans on our Kiva Lending Page.

One of our recent additions to our servers at no charge through our non-profit program is the Wake County Autism Society.

The Wake County Autism Society (WCAS) is a nonprofit organization supported by volunteer board and committee members. They are an affiliate of the Autism Society of North Carolina (ASNC), which is an affiliate of the Autism Society of America (ASA). They work together to benefit individuals and their families affected by an autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

We believe that individuals with an ASD can be productive members of our community or can grow through appropriate interventions and treatments so that they become productive members. In addition, we believe that the Wake County community can grow through acceptance of and interaction with individuals with differences to be a complete community that welcomes a diverse population.

Though we’re in Texas, we received an application from them that really reminded us why we absolutely love this program. In the field that we have asking the organization to answer why we should support them, we read:

We feel that we are an extremely progressive non-profit which is struggling under the weight of so many families begging for information concerning services and programs in our area. As you probably know, it truly is an epidemic, and the numbers of children being diagnosed is rising drastically. Please visit our current website to see what we do. Our current hosting service comes up for renewal in a month, and they are raising the rate on us. A truly ‘free’ hosting service would be a blessing.

I’m not sure why the raise in rates kind of “got me”, but I have to admit it did.

We actually shared some of this application with some friends in a discussion about why we choose to do this and how sometimes it really does just make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Interestingly, one of the friends we shared it with reminded us that we had another friend who lived in that area and also had a son with Autism. A quick email to her and we found out that friend had depended on WCAS for support in her own struggles – and yet that wasn’t how WCAS found us.

This friend also informed us that we had to give them free hosting, which thankfully, we had already decided to do or she may have reached through the Internet and slapped us around a bit.

This was one of those really neat stories that also just happened to demonstrate what an incredibly small world it really is.

OK, ok, we admit we’ve been playing with our new server too much and we have been totally and completely irresponsible in our quest to be good global citizens.

H. Zagou BOKOE was born in 1985; he is married and is responsible for two people. A very courageous and determined man, he has owned a shop selling paint for three years. Business is booming because he is the only one in his district and he sells good quality paint. He has a large and steady customer base. Not having enough funds, he is often short of stock, and his customers complain all the time. Faced with this situation, he might lose his customer base.

To bolster his business and to prevent his loyal customers from going elsewhere, he is requesting a loan to enable him to increase his capital and to buy paint in bulk in order to make a profit. This will improve his household’s standard of living.

Translated from French by Daniel Kuey, Kiva volunteer

Monsieur BOKOE H. Zagou est né en 1985 ; il est marié et a à sa charge deux (2) personnes. Très courageux et déterminé, il tient une boutique de vente de peinture depuis 3 ans. C’est un commerce florissant car il est le seul dans son quartier et vend des peintures et de bonne qualité. La clientèle est abondante et régulière. N’ayant pas assez de moyens, il est souvent en pénurie de stock et ses clients se plaignent tout le temps. Devant cette situation, Monsieur BOKOE risque de perdre sa clientèle.

Pour renforcer son commerce et éviter que ses fidèles clients n’aillent s’approvisionner ailleurs, Il sollicite un crédit qui va lui permettre d’augmenter son capital et d’acheter en gros les peintures pour en tirer plus de profit. Ceci améliorera le niveau de vie dans son ménage.

This is our first loan to Togo!

We’re rounding out May with three new Kiva loans – ya’ll apparently like the new PayPal subscription options!

Our first Kiva loan is to Asha Rawat, who lives in the town of Bagdol, in the Lalitpur region of Nepal.

Most people in this region run small businesses such as grocery stores, small hotels and stationery stores.

Mrs. Maharjan is a widow who lives with her two sons. Three years ago, her husband, Mr. Tilak Rawot died, giving her sole responsibility for her family. Both of her sons are in school, one in the 10th grade and the other in the 6th.

Mrs. Rawot opened a small hotel three years ago. She also runs a shop where she sells different types of Nepali food, along with tea and coffee. She has applied for a $225 loan to buy food supplies for this business.

Our second loan was made to Margaret Aidoo of Ghana.

Margaret Aidoo is a fifty two year old widow and mother of five children. She believes in hard work and dedication and that is the secret of her success. She owns and operates a local restaurant and sells local foods like fufu, banku, ampesi, and rice balls.

Fufu is prepared from pounded cassava and plantain and eaten with soup. Banku is prepared from milled maize grains and eaten with hot pepper or soup. Ampesi is a boiled plantain or yam and is eaten with any stew.

She wants to use this loan to buy more raw materials, like bags of maize, baskets of cassava, plantain, meat, fish, vegetables and firewood. She belongs to the community group called Nyame Boafo Trust Group. In this group, members guarantee for one another as social collateral and act as peer pressure to repay the loan.

And our third loan is to Teodora Bautista Cristóbal of Mexico.

I have already started building my home but I lack the materials needed to finish it. I need finishing liquids and bricks for some rooms. I’m requesting a loan of $1,2000 so I can complete construction.

Translated from Spanish by Marty Greenstein, Kiva Volunteer

Tengo ya tiempo que empecé a construir mi casa pero me esta faltando material para terminarla, me esta haciendo falto los acabados y la losa de algunos cuartos. Es por eso que solicito un préstamo de $1,200.00 dlls. Para terminar la construcción de la vivienda.

The Staten Island Children’s Museum is located on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York.

The museum hosts interactive exhibitions and creative workshops offer plenty of opportunities for hands-on, first hand experiences that nurture children’s natural curiosity and creativity. They have public programs like a daily story time and feeding time (watch the museum staff feed bugs!), weekly programs like Clay Day, Crafty Kids, Explore and Discover, and Kidz Cook, in addition to their current exhibits.

Stop by The Staten Island Children’s Museum located at 1000 Richmond Terrace on the grounds of Snug Harbor Cultural Center, or stop by their web site http://www.statenislandkids.org/ to find out about current exhibits, hours, and entrance fees.

The Staten Island Children’s Museum is hosted by DrakNet at a steeply discounted rate through our non-profit program. We just wish they were closer so we could go see them feed the bugs, too.

Right now, my computer is really busy working on my behalf. It’s helping me to check my GMail, monitor what my friends and acquaintances (and Henry Rollins) are doing via Twitter, making sure there are no more tickets in the ticket queue, aiding my monitoring of my servers, and helping me to complete structure-based drug discovery calculations required to identify promising drug leads to combat the related dengue, hepatitis C, West Nile, and Yellow fever viruses.

I know. You want me to run one of those parts by you again, right? What, you didn’t know Henry Rollins twittered? Come on, where have you been?

My little computer is a few years old, and I really don’t do much with it. I code, and code some more, and ssh in, and I browse, and that’s about it. What to do with all that excess computing power? Could I really make my computer into a force for good just by its mere existence?

Actually, I can, and so can you – by making it a part of the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid’s mission is to “create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better.”

Many people are familiar with the Seti@home project, which is a single distributed network dedicated to one goal – to search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Like the Seti@home project, the World Community Grid uses a distributed network of personal computers to bring a massive amount of computing power to projects that need a vast amount of computing power but who may not, for whatever reason (*cough* money *cough*) be able to afford access to the world’s supercomputers to gather the data and calculations that they need at a speed they could utilize it in. By joining the Grid, you allot a portion of your computing power, disk, and memory to one or all (the Grid’s choice) of the current following goals:

• Nutritious rice for the world
• Help conquer Cancer
• AfricanClimate@Home
• Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
• Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
• FightAIDS@Home

It literally takes only a few minutes to sign up – we were up and running in a very short amount of time, and as we chose to participate in all the programs, the first thing our computer got to do was participate in research for the Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together program. Help conquer Cancer is waiting to start.

We have created a DrakNet team (called, most appropriately, “DrakNet”). When you sign up – and you will sign up, won’t you? – simply click on teams and search for DrakNet, and click to join if you’d like to participate with us. Click to join and form a team to compete against us. Just click to join! Your computer has a deep seated desire (it’s run by a “mother” board after all) to be useful to and take good care of humanity, really!

World Community Grid supports users on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Check specific programs for specific requirements. We can tell you from a experiential standpoint, we did not notice any slowdown on our computer in the least bit – though we also have to disclose we are not gamers. After downloading the program, you can choose whether to run the program continuously, or run it only when you yourself are idle and the computer is not actively in use.

We will periodically post statistical updates to let folks know how much our team has accomplished, and the team’s open to anyone even remotely connected, so tell your friends, tell your family, and if your cat has a computer just for those icanhascheeseburger.com submissions, have your cat sign up, too! Follow this link to sign up and automatically be added to the DrakNet team. You can leave the team at any time.

We also wanted to let you know about another distributed computing project, the Folding@Home project. This project’s goal is understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases like Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. The difference between World Community Grid and Folding@Home is that Folding@Home is devoted to one particular goal, while the World Community Grid lends itself to many diverse goals and is open to applications for its use for widely divergent research. If one of your motivations to participate is due to a loved one that was stricken with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s or a disease that would be better served and honored by your participation in Folding@Home instead, we wanted to let you know about it.

Heck, if you have 3 computers in your house, you can have one looking for aliens, one looking to feed the world, and one looking to cure Parkinson’s all at the same time!

Who thought you could accomplish so much by getting off your computer and going to the park on a Sunday!

VORTEX Repertory Company was incorporated in October 1988 to create innovative productions of original work. In its first year, VORTEX presented five productions at Mexic-Arte Multicultural Museum in downtown Austin. From 1990-94, VORTEX operated The VORTEX Performance Café on Ben White Blvd. and now owns its own facility, The Vortex on Manor Road, a cherished home for the arts in East Austin. VORTEX was the first theater to make a home for the performing arts in historically under-served Eastside, now a blossoming Independent Theatre District. The VORTEX facility is artist owned and operated.

VORTEX has successfully produced hundreds of quality performances for more than 16 years and is widely recognized as the pioneering leader in Austin’s alternative theater scene. VORTEX has received numerous awards for artistic excellence including 27 B. Iden Payne Awards and 15 Austin Critics’ Table Awards. More than 200 productions world premieres of musical theater and opera, world premieres of collaborative works and ritual theater, vibrant productions of classics, new plays by Austin playwrights, and Austin premieres of new works.

VORTEX proudly produces original cutting-edge work by internationally-recognized guest artists including Karen Finley, Tim Miller, Quentin Crisp, Heather Woodbury, Rob Nash, and Penny Arcade. This programming brings important work to Austin to enrich spectators and artists, broadens the public’s horizons, and spreads the word about great performers and audiences at The VORTEX in Austin, Texas all across the national arts scene.

DrakNet donates the hosting for the primary theater site at http://vortexrep.org as well as the Viva Vortex site, which is a fund raising site for the theater. Not only does the Vortex put on some fabulous and cutting edge shows, Vortex’s free Summer Youth Theater teams adult professionals with teenagers to instruct students in all aspects of theater and presents in a fully-designed production. This program has a thirteen-year history and has received funding from the Texas Commission on the Arts and the City of Austin.

DrakNet is proud to be the chosen host of such a cutting edge theater company, as we’re even more proud that we can donate the services so that theater can use their budget to do what they do best – provoke and entertain right in our backyard.

Our second loan of the month is being given to Abbass Maatouk of Southern Lebanon.

Abbass is a 37 year old man. He has one child. He lives with his family in southern Lebanon, in Nabatieh.

Abbass is a car blacksmith. This is the sixth time he has asked for a loan from Al Majmoua. With the loan, he is planning to develop his business by starting to sell cars, in addition to doing his work as a blacksmith.

In less than two months, your PayPal payments have made 5 loans to 5 people from places as diverse as Lebanon, Tajikistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nigeria, and Mexico. We’ve made loans to fix cars and build houses as well as to purchase food and clothing and cars to expand businesses all over the world, and we’ve been joined by one of our clients, who’s made four loans as well! Nice going, folks!

To view updates on how all our loans are doing at any time, be sure and drop by our Kiva Lender Page.