Edward G. Happ gave an inspiring talk as part of his Chairman Report during the NetHope Global Member Summit, which took place last week in County Kildare, Ireland. He summarized his remarks on his blog. Here's an excerpt:
I’d like to tell two stories.The first is about my generation. Ten years ago, seven NGO IT leaders got together in San Jose. Some of my colleagues around the table tonight were there at the Cisco Campus and Dipak Basu’s dining room table in September 2001. We all faced a common problem about how to take technology out the last mile to where our organizations work in the field. We had a shared need. More importantly, we believed that technology could make a difference in the work our organizations were doing in the far reaches of our programs. We could seeit working. We had connected the dots in our imaginations. And we dared to trust each other to do something about it together; because none of us was going to succeed going it alone. This was how NetHope got started.Our dream was that we could bring technology to where it was most needed faster, better and cheaper if we did it together. And we believed that as a group we could be a stronger partner with the technology companies with whom we needed to work. Both of these goals have proven to more true than we ever imagined ten years ago.
