There have been a number of important developments in the past few months.  The new Board of the Foundation has been busy since its election in April 2009, while WA Research has keep on improving the platform and its performances – unfortunately in both cases the communications have not been at the same level as the efforts and the work done. Let’s then try to catch up and take a snapshot of how things are at the moment.

Numbers don’t lie..
As of  June 2010, Dgroups counts 2035 active communities. During the past 20 weeks, more than 70 new groups were created, with average frequency of 3.5 per week. As evidence of increased use of Dgroups, this year is seeing the weekly creation surpassing 15 groups per week, which did not happen in 2009. Equally, number of new groups per week rarely falls under five per week. As of June 2010, these groups are used by 139.336 registered users, up from 113.619 since February 2010.

Thanks to the work of Damir and colleagues at WA Reasearch, the performance of Dgroups has been improving significantly over the past months. The service is stable, most email delivery problems are resolved. A good email sending reputation has been established with large Internet service providers, and we are seeing less and less spam blocks. Email delivery to users is now almost instantaneous, even though weʼre sending about 2.3 million messages per month…

Technical development and web user interface redesign
A large number of usability and stability improvements have been deployed too – and the user interface has been translated and made available also in Portuguese, Mandarin, and Russian.

However, the most important think is the one yet to come: a major visual redesign is currently in progress, and we have great expectations from the preview we could see! A staging web site should be made available during the next months, and we hope to deployed into production in Autumn should there be no major objections or problems. Once the new design is final and in production, we’ll focus on adapting organizational skins to fit the new look and feel.

Support system
We have reintroduced the old support system that proved to work fine in Dgroups1. This is a cascade support system, where users rely on groups admins; admins on the admins peer-support group and creators; creators on their peers and on WA Research as last option. The email address support@dgroups.org has been closed, but we’ll make sure we’ll have a good help file (on the Dgroups help Wiki) and a lively Admins Community.

Partnership and annual meeting 2010
As a follow up from the 2009 members meeting, we are working on the finalisation of several legal and policy documents – such as Terms of Use, Creation Policy etc. We are also drafting a new business plan, and try to ensure that the level of membership stays high enough for sustaining the existence of Dgroups as a whole. Still lot to do needs to be done in this reagard, and we hope that different members can play an active role in this matter. A milestone in this sense will be the next Partners’ meeting, currently planned for the second half of November.

Future Blogging

When I  logged in onto the blog dashboard I saw one comment awaiting  moderation, saying:

“It seems this blog died??? not sure if there is a new blog. the wiki too seems rather dated”

Well, we’ve listened. From now on we will resume regular blogging. In the next post we’ll explain the new management and coordination arrangements for this year and continue with the updates. In the meantime, you’re very welcome to drop by here, and share with us your ideas about Dgroups, what you like and dislike, how you use it and what’s in it for you. We’ll do our best to keep the conversation going, and ensure transparency in the way things progress.

Pier Andrea Pirani

Euforic Services

From the GM website:

The Global Mechanism (GM) was established by Article 21 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). It began its operations in October 1998.

The GM is a subsidiary body of the UNCCD. Its original functions of general broker and match-maker have evolved over its first ten years of operations, in the wake of the changing international financial architecture, its new modalities for resource allocation and the increasing importance of domestic budgeting processes in developing countries.

As a consequence, the GM is increasingly specializing in providing a range of financial advisory services to the country Parties to the Convention in close cooperation with International Finance Institutions (IFIs) – in particular the World Bank Group, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the regional development banks. The European Commission and bilateral donor agencies are also long-standing partners of the GM.

The Global Mechanism is hosted by IFAD offices in Rome. Contact person for Dgroups is Maurizio Navarra.

Read more about Dgroups and its current members.

• Helvetas
• Hivos
• ICCO
• IICD
• Sula Batsu

The group last met in The Hague in January 2007. Since then, an elected executive committee has worked towards:

• In 2007/2008: Moving the dgroups 1 platform out of IDRC (to IGLOO)
•  In 2008-2009: Migration to a new platform and a new provider (WA Research)
•  In 2008-2009: Establishment of a new Dgroups Foundation

On the agenda for the April 2009 meeting:

1. the new platform, its usability, hosting, and support provisions
2. priorities for further platform development and enhancements
3. election to the Foundation Board, discharging the current executive committee
4.  strategic directions for the coming years
5. management, coordination, financing arrangements for the coming years

The meeting is organised by Euforic in its overall coordinationrole for the partnership. More information.

The intention is to keep the Foundation small and smart: It will have a Board elected from members of the partnership. More operational activities like platform hosting, support, and communication among the members will be contracted to others.

The next meeting of the Dgroups partnership is in April 2009 where some important further governance and strategic decisions will be taken.

Organizations interested in joining Dgroups can find more information online. We welcome any non-governmental, governmental and inter-governmental bodies and any other type of organization that shares the objectives of the Foundation.

Helvetas has so far been gradually introducing and using Dgroups into its activities. It also acts as sponsor for the very active KM4dev Dgroup – where people discuss and share knowledge sharing and knowledge management experiences in the development sector.

In its earlier days within Bellanet, SDC provided support for the platform – helping to ensure it would be both a tool providing specific services as well as a wider common good for the development community to benefit from. SDC colleagues indicated that they intend to continue their membership of Dgroups, particularly making use of it to facilitate communication and exchange in their thematic networks. They indicated they might consider providing additional funds to support the further development of the platform and its outreach into communities in developing countries.

View our presentation to SDC colleagues:

On April 15 and 16, members of the Dgroups partnership will meet in The Hague to review progress and plans.