What’s Old is New Again

A partial and brief history of Bellanet innovation

Way back in 1998 I was involved in the International Development Markup Initiative (IDML).   Its amazing to take a look back at some of the things Bellanet was doing then to see them reappear.    When I first started at Bellanet we were working with a group called infoDev.   infoDev had just started as an organization and at that time IDRC was managing part of their project review process.   As well, Bellanet was asked to create their original website.   We also created a very labour intense display of all their development projects.   This was before online databases were really mainstream and everything was done using html.    It was interesting esp. since we worked with infoDev to put their pipeline of project proposals online.   The idea was to encourage groups with similar ideas to collaborate together.

We later created an online database of all their activities and soon realized this could be a powerful tool for organizations to use.   Within months we had created the African Activity Information Management System which later evolved into GKAims – Global Knowledge Activity Information Management System.   It was called Global Knowledge because at that time, the Global Knowledge Partnership didn’t exist and was still part of the World Bank and managed by infoDev’s director.    The idea was simple.   We would create a place for organizations to share their project information.  We would give them a login and password and they could change the look and feel of their page to match their organizations website look and feel.    I found a screen shot of it GK-Aims from the way back machine.   Sound familiar?   Take a look at AKVO.org now 14 years later.

Next Dgroups.   The humble beginning of Dgroups started when I first realized I could link our mailing manager – Lyris (using a foxpro database at the time) with a tool we had been using for GKaims called Cold Fusion (later to be bought by Macromedia).   I connected Cold Fusion to the Lyris Database and voila,  suddenly in a very rough way I could display mailing list messages on a website.    My colleague Kevin was a whiz with mailing lists managers and databases and figured out how to remove all the funny characters from the database from displaying on the screen, and we ended up with sites like the DML Initiative Website.   Eventually we realized we were on to something.   I think it was at that time that David Balson (Bellanet’s Director) started calling these pages, collaborative workspaces.   It was still really early days, but the demand increased  and increased.   At some point it became unmanageable technically to sustain all these one-off copies of code. As we started to update our systems, the code would break and each of those sites would need to be changed.   The workload was increasing without much payback for us.    Eventually we got smart and began to create one code base for all the workspaces.   Mark Faul played a huge role in that along with Shady Kanfi.    But still there was no Dgroups.   That was the last step, and at one point or another we realized that we needed to create the meta tool so people could create these spaces on their own.  A tool to create tools!    While all this was happening Bellanet was engaged in discussions with many partners, forming strategic alliances and partnerships.    And so starting with IICD and Bellanet through I think David Balson and Peter Ballantyne, the idea for the Dgroups Partnership was born.   Dgroups for Development Groups was simply a spin on Yahoo Groups.    Since then we have seen the emergence of Google Groups, grou.ps and so on.  Shady Kanfi really became the champion of Dgroups.    Lastly it was Sarah Kerr, who worked very hard to create the model for a Dgroups association as we eventually transitioned Dgroups to a neutral location.   From there groups like IICD, ICCO, Hivos and others played a significant role in creating and managing the Dgroups Foundation.

Lastly, DML.   DML stood for Development Markup Language.    I had been involved in some data sharing initiatives before that.  Most of it at that time was managed by librarians.   My director David Balson was very entrepreneurial and really keen to try new ideas that could lead to better development collaboration, so we ran with this idea of creating an XML dtd for sharing project/activity information.   It was based on CEFDA and some of the work of Idris.   They were excellent examples of early development collaboration around project/activity data.   What we wanted to do, was to build upon that effort but with technology like XML.    Fortunately the whole area of aid effectiveness was just heating up and the World Bank became very interested to build upon this work of DML-then later IDML – then later the IDML/Aida standard.    Now fast forward to 2012 and the area of open development data is perhaps one of the biggest trends in ICT4D at the moment.    The IATI standard, which my colleague David and I helped to create along with aidinfo and the input of many, built upon some of that early thinking when we created IDML.   Its interesting as well to see tools like the openaidregister.org for smaller NGOs.   This is exactly what we did for smaller NGOs with IDML so they could enter data into the Aida development gateway database.  Just ask Steven Davenport or Virgina Yee.

what’s old is new again.   /m