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!

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!