It’s eight weeks until we introduce our new system at Stockholm Water Week and a lot of things are happening in parallel. While our IT team is deep into software development to rebuild our website and core products, I want to share progress we are making with partners.

Over the past month, we have gathered 17 pilot projects - local field partners spread across India, Madagascar, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Nepal, Malawi and Ethiopia - with help from our initial signed up partners. It’s promising to see that the first funders have also come forward to commit to projects, so we can truly start providing people with safe drinking water and sanitation and field-test the Really Simple Reporting module in a matter of weeks.

A special thanks goes out to the company Plieger that has decided to contribute to the UN year of Sanitation by funding three projects to celebrate its 75th anniversary later this year. To bring some of the initial projects to life and explore dynamic ways of reporting we have agreed with Ben White from Africa Interactive that local African reporters will be making short films about the current situation in two project areas in Tanzania and Cameroon, over the next weeks. I’m convinced they will do a great job.

The Akvopedia is also expanding. Merel Hoogmoed and Bastiaan de Veen from Acacia Insitute, Karin Weijers from Ibota, Nick Dickinson from IRC and David Castello from Waste are creating an initial structure that focuses on appropriate water and sanitation technologies and approaches that have proven to be successful.

A new manual explains how to create an Akvopedia article and we now have the capacity to assist new collaborators. Over the next weeks we will have to mobilize different organizations and networks, to find more volunteers that are willing to invest some time on a structural basis. It would be great if we could get the UNESCO-IHE Alumni network involved here as well.

I am also delighted that Ravi Jambagi, the director of Indus Technology who last week signed a cooperation agreement with us, has offered in-kind help in bringing Akvo to life in India. In true Akvo spirit his daughter Akhilla will join us during her holiday to gain some experience and make sure we are in tune with the younger generations.

I have written before about the steps we need to take before we can become financial sustainable. The EU tender procedure did unfortunately not work out. We got treated with a ‘non realistic and not relevant’ stamp, a letter which I shall put on my office wall to remind me of what we are trying to change. On the 1st of July we expect to hear from our submission at the Schokland Funds in the Netherlands. Indications right now are quite positive.

Yesterday Frederik Claassen initiated a visit with Margriet Schreuders at the Nationale Postcode Loterij head office in Amsterdam that turned out to be a real meeting of minds. The Postcode Loterij generates capital for development (over 225 M Euro) and we will be aiming to get on the list of organisations that receive structural funding from them. Margriet valued our innovative and entrepreneurial approach and we shared some thoughts about ways in which our tools might help the Postcode Loterij to visualise how their investments are spent to the general public, in a dynamic way.

On the Corporate side, Mark has been working on refining our pitch. Our talk this week with Paul Faeth at Global Water Challenge confirmed there are a lot of opportunities in this area, but it will probably take some time to materialise. A special thanks goes out to Bram Ellens at eBay that only needed a few words to get our concept. He has been very helpful in mobilizing his IT network, so thanks for that.

Next week Monday I will be visiting Brussels to learn more about the program aquawereness that Agnes Biesiekierska works on. It will be a great moment to get in contact with the network of Corporates that are involved and witness the progress our partner EWP (European Water Partnership) has been making recently. EWP has many corporate members and we hope we are able to explore opportunities to explain how our system could help its members develop new methods to connect their customers, including mainstream consumers, to development activity.

We met with three of the Tenq team, including Mariska de Vries. 24 June 2008.

This week Mark and I also had the pleasure of finally meeting Tom van de Ven and Mariska de Vries at Tenq. Their office is beautifully situated on the Keizersgracht in Amsterdam and sets the scene for the great things they are up to. A percentage of the income that Tenq generates is spent on water and sanitation projects, and we explored possibilities for cooperation that we will follow-up on shortly.

Today I met Siegfried Woldhek, the director of Nabuur, in their new office who has been kind enough to share his experiences in setting up an IT based development organisation. We aim to establish Akvo as a non-profit foundation before August and the set-up of Nabuur (empowered management team, small supervisory board and a heavyweight advisory commission) might ensure the operational flexibility we are looking for. Nabuur is in the process of launching a new website in August and we agreed to organise a follow-up meeting in August to give our cooperation ‘hand and feet’.

Lastly I wish Dieuwertje Damen a lot of success in trying to realize an Amsterdam Water Bar. You have the spirit to make it work and we are happy to help you out. Mark and I really enjoyed the time we spent talking with you.

Peter van der Linde is co-founder and partner – director of Akvo.

Peter and I met again with Ben White of Africa Interactive on Tuesday. I’ve been impressed by Ben’s team’s work to establish a growing network of citizen journalists in Africa. Africa Interactive’s goal is to have a local network of reporters who can act and write independently, and make money through their work, utilising new digital routes to publication. Its home page video describes it better than I ever can.

It’s immediately clear that this network of reporters can enhance the way that NGOs describe local water and sanitation projects, before, during and after they get funding. You’ve probably gathered from our ‘movie theme’ marketing images that we’ve always considered movies to be a fantastic way to bring water and sanitation work to life. Akvo is being designed so that movies can, over time, play a big role in our matchmaking system, which matches funds to projects, and in Really Simple Reporting, which provides a simplified stream of project updates via tools such as SMS and video.

Films don’t just provide a great way to describe solutions, but they help an NGO set out the objectives without being forced to into admin-laden form-filling bureaucracy. And on the basis that a film of a community with no proper sanitation is followed by a film of the same community with sanitation is a powerful report - a way to capture actual changes to physical infrastructure and a way to document social change.

Over time we see films helping to expand the number of people willing to fund small-scale water and sanitation projects. Only so many are organised to review reams of reports, or even the more tabular data that will be in Akvo’s matchmaking system. A film can inspire and engage at a whole new level. Especially if the film is online, so all you need to do is share the link.

Ben White (left), commercial director at Africa Interactive. Luuk Diphoorn (right) of Akvo. Delft, Netherlands, 24 June 2008.

Two films in two weeks?

We struck a deal on the spot with Ben. Africa Interactive will commission its mobile reporters to visit two of our first-phase projects, with the goal of producing video output inside two weeks from go-ahead by the community involved.

The first film will focus on a project managed by Akvo partner Simavi. Already matched to funds, it’s in Arusha, Tanzania, and will provide clean water and sanitation in a local primary school. The local partner is CBHCC (Community Based Health Care Council). The project is in the startup phase and will be one of the first to go live on Akvo later this summer. It could be a prime candidate for a follow-on film later as they start using Really Simple Reporting (RSR). Simavi has confirmed the school principal and the NGO representative will be helping us get the insights and material needed.

We are exploring several options for our second film, from our list of 17 initial projects this summer. We should have it confirmed in the next few days. It’s important we don’t force a film crew on a community - they, and the supporting NGO, need to want it.

Africa Interactive can offer this kind of film-making at a price that makes it attractive to funders, we think. Would you, for example, prefer to invest in a €10,000 schools project that had a written description online, or a €10,400 schools project that combined a written description with a film report on the situation, the implementing team, and capturing the views of the people who will benefit? All of which you can share with others online to get their buy-in, and to follow progress. I know where my money would go.

Creating new networks of reporters around the world who show sensitivity, understand context and can (sometimes) bring humour and optimism to play around the world has long fascinated me. Finding a different way to work with reporters is crucial for an open source project like ours. Just as it costs too much to send in specialist auditors to monitor every project, sending a film crew over from, say, the Netherlands or the United States, with the right experience and ability to get around from Europe would cost at least €15,000.

We’re looking forward to testing this out. If we can prove the process works, we’ll be building local capacity to report on water and sanitation projects in a repeatable, sustainable manner. I’m now away until 15th July. Over to you guys, Ben. Look forward to seeing what you can do.

It’s an open-source sanitation project, and if that isn’t weird enough, they’ve got a Bollywood-parody promotional angle. Note the OLPC there. The world gets a little weirder every day. -Bruce Sterling, Wired.

Since we started talking about Akvo at World Water Week in Stockholm, in August 2007, nothing has garnered us as much positive feedback as the Akvo posters. Yes those.

When we were about to begin our side event, a minister from an African country walked in and she said: “That woman, who built herself a toilet. I want to meet her!” People would walk up to us and ask if we had any posters to spare and when were out, the ones posted in the toilets disappeared. Several times people would come up to me and point to the posters and burst out: “I love them!

Mark Charmer was in Amsterdam the other day with Peter van der Linde and met Vincent Wijers, the man behind the posters. Mark told me afterwards:

Vincent is like a vision filter. He questions, challenges, searches. The first 30 minutes is always hard - you argue with him, he claims you don’t have a clear sense of what you’re about. And then you spend an hour absolutely in tune. Then he goes away. And you see what happens. -Mark Charmer

We are extremely grateful to Vincent for lavishing us with his visions of Akvo. It wouldn’t have been the same without them.

Academic institutions are usually amazing places to learn, but can be tough organisations to work with. With limited resources, they tend to focus on the recruitment of great students and on high standards of teaching in their core areas. Working with outside organisations tends to focus on injecting money or equipment via dedicated programmes (in my other line of business, the amazing work of Brigid O’Kane at the University of Cincinatti comes to mind here). Or it involves work placements (I keep in regular touch with Geoff Wardle at Art Center Pasadena, who has great students seeking experience in Europe). That said, I’m still waiting for my invite from the RCA to Joe’s final exhibition this Thursday, despite having acted (willingly I must stress) as his visionary, psychotherapist, editor, dad and tour operator at various points along the way. And finally there are full-scale business incubation initiatives. That’s not a process that’s delivered anyone I know with the big break they needed yet. But maybe I know the wrong kind of people.

So I’ve been curious to see how Akvo can engage with UNESCO-IHE. Akvo is based on the UNESCO-IHE campus in Delft in the Netherlands. It’s a home we share with the Netherlands Water Partnership, which has been based on ‘IHE’s campus since it was formed in 1999.

UNESCO-IHE’s former head of the urban water and sanitation department, Caroline Figueres, played an important role in getting Akvo onto the development map and she continues to support us in her new role leading IICD, a great organisation focused on best practice ‘ICT’ (education language for IT and comms) in the developing world. Her extensive understanding of how water projects actually work out will be invaluable to us, when combined with the power of an organisation focused on developing world IT implementation best practice.

Having UNESCO-IHE actively supporting us would make a big difference as we now seek to scale up our base of active contributors online. Its mission is to educate successive generations of water experts. This video tells the story of how a Dutch education establishment grew from the late ’50s to create a unique new organisation in 2003. The Institute is owned by all UNESCO member states and is the largest water education facility in the world. It’s the only institution in the UN system authorised to confer accredited MSc degrees.

Peter, Malte and I met yesterday with Erwin Ploeger and Maria Laura Sorrentino to talk about how we could connect with the Alumni programme. There are around 13,000 ‘IHE alumni around the world. I’m like a rag to a bull on this one – as far as I’m concerned these people are spread around the world and could be a tremendous asset to us all as Akvopedia editors and contributors. How to encourage them to do so is something I’m looking forward to discussing with Chris Watkins tomorrow, who is coming to visit us here in Delft. What we’re not currently clear on is how much these water practitioners will be willing to start using a wikipedia of water. Ideally this is something we should have researched, but we haven’t. That would have been far harder, more resource-intensive and more time consuming than creating the Akvopedia in the first place. But we now need to get professionals contributing, even simply as high level quality monitors.

UNESCO-IHE’s Maria Laura Sorrentino talks with Akvo. 23 June 2008.

Another opportunity with UNESCO-IHE is to integrate what we’re learning - and doing - into their curriculum. How much should its graduates know about open source and related new technologies? How can this change how they organise projects and networks of people?

Finally, by the end of the summer it will be possible for ‘IHE alumni who are working on projects to upload those that are seeking funding into the Akvo Matchmaking system. If in doubt, access to development funds could be the trigger.

This is another moment where our collective ability to integrate networked organisations with hierarchical ones is going to be a big factor. You can read more on my thinking on that topic here. Certainly we need the next generation of water development graduates to understand how open source, open communications and the internet change the way projects can be specified, matched to funds and reported on. And to benefit us, their interaction needs to break out of a regular, repetitive form based on email shots and industry or alumni newsletters. We need them to begin contributing to the new processes and tools we are building. Every few days. Help us make this happen.

Open source hardware doesn’t have to be very sophisticated to have a huge economic impact. Detail of a rainwater harvesting system in Kongarahalli, southern India

The Economist had an article about open source hardware, in the latest Science and Technology Quarterly, which a tweet from Tim O’Reilly made me notice. The article talks about how open source software, such as the Linux operating system and the Firefox web browser, has inspired some computer and consumer electronics companies to extend the ideas behind open source to hardware products.

The author envisions a future where “Some day, perhaps, fabricating machines will be able to transform digital specifications (software) into physical objects (hardware), which will no doubt lead to a vibrant trade in specifications, some of which will be paid for, and some of which will be open-source.” and ends the article with “All of which suggests that open-source hardware will really start to make a difference when big hardware makers and consumer-electronics firms begin to embrace the idea.”

It seems a curiously narrow western view that the “big thing” is when you can feed a specification to you desktop 3D printer and out pops an open source iPod.

Billions of people live under crushing poverty and 40% of the worlds population doesn’t even have adequate sanitation, they go behind the nearest bush, or use a bag as their toilet and throw it over the nearest wall. Something which causes more death every year ¹ than all the ongoing wars put together, untold misery, sickness and lost opportunities.

I would argue that the real economic revolution comes when the billions living in poverty are lifted out of this misery and are not only given a chance to live a decent life, but also become active participants of the world economy. It is now generally accepted that the cheapest way to lift people out of poverty is to tackle the water and sanitation issue. Each dollar spent on water and sanitation has a knock-on effect in other areas of US$3 to USD$34 ², i.e. spend money on water and sanitation and you get poverty reduction for “free”. And we plan to use open source as a tool to do this. It is actually around this central idea that Akvo was conceived, with a focus on the water and sanitation issue and not limiting ourselves to the idea that hardware has to be made by other machines and be consumer electronics to be valuable open source.

People in the water and sanitation sector, working with so called appropriate technology, have been working with an open source philosophy for a long time, albeit without the quite sophisticated licensing that most open source software comes with, i.e. GNU GPL licenses and the like. Many, if not most, water and sanitation appropriate technology solutions are in the public domain, an even more open version of open source if you will.

We started Akvo to promote this type of information about open hardware water and sanitation solutions as well as actually create a repository of information, the Akvopedia, as we found that specifications, instructions, and other information which is needed to make water and sanitation hardware, was surprisingly hard to find on the internet.

My colleagues from the water and sanitation sector had already started publishing books describing different hardware solutions, Smart Water Solutions and Smart Sanitation Solutions, when I first met them. These books have been wildly successful and they couldn’t bring enough of them with them to give away at conferences and exhibitions. They have been translated to a number of different languages by other organisations and reprinted several times, to the point where we have lost track of how many has been distributed. The PDF versions of the books are some of the most popular downloads at the web site of our partner IRC, they average two thousand downloads every month for the last half year.

But printed instructions about open source hardware only go so far. Once the page is printed it is static, and you can ever only reach as many people as you print copies of the book (a truth with modifications as we also distribute PDF files as well). But the vibrant trade in specifications The Economist envisages can only happen if we open up the printed page even further, which we have done with the Akvopedia.

Our vision is that the Akvopedia will become the place to go for specifications, instructions, drawings and advice on how to build open source water and sanitation hardware, so that we once and for all can tackle the massive water and sanitation problem that exists today.

The Akvopedia is only in its infancy yet, but we are convinced that these types of efforts can have and will have a huge impact in fighting poverty in a slum near you, soon.

Thomas Bjelkeman is the founder of Akvo.

1. Dirty Water: Estimated Deaths from Water-Related Diseases 2000-2020 [PDF], Pacific Institute Research Report, Peter H. Gleick, August 15, 2002 ↩
2. Driving development by investing in water and sanitation, Five facts support the argument [PDF], World Health Organisation, Stockholm International Water Institute ↩

We’ve wanted to connect for some time with the team at Appropedia, so it was great to be approached by Chris Watkins, who found me through my Wiser Earth profile (Peggy Duvette and her team in San Francisco will love to hear that). I met with Andrew Lamb, its UK-based director on Wednesday in London.

Appropedia is a pioneering wiki focused on appropriate technologies that promote sustainability, poverty reduction and international development. As with the best open source ventures, the vision and mission is both focused and evolving all the time:

“To build the infrastructure, and help make the connections and populate free content to effect that vision. One of our main goals is to be the living resource library of individuals and organizations working towards a sustainable, healthier future, so that efforts can be spent evolving instead of duplicating past efforts.”

First impressions could indicate that Akvopedia directly overlaps with this more established wiki and they’d be right to an extent. But it was clear quickly that they, like us, recognise that great teams committed to open source working find ways to build off (and connect) eachother’s efforts. Appropedia has a broader focus, with a large (US-oriented) editor network, and has worked hard to learn lessons from the evolution of Wikipedia. In turn the Akvopedia is cultivating an editor network rooted in specialist water and sanitation experts and is being optimised to support from the start our initial programme of more than 75 pilot projects around the world. This is a jigsaw that can fit together.

Topics we discussed included:

Licensing. The Akvopedia will publish all content under GNU’s Free Documentation License (FDL). This is the same as Wikipedia uses. We’ve been asked by some to standardise on the Creative Commons Share Alike, By Attribution license (CC-BY-SA). The Wikipedia Foundation is exploring migration to CC-BY-SA but we’ve are leaning towards sticking with the proven approach and let Wikipedia do the innovating, as discussed on our Akvopedia mailing list. Thomas feels that it is much easier to get our content providers comfortable with the FDL license because we can say “it’s the same one Wikipedia uses”. Right now, anything else could slow things down. Andrew’s team at Appropedia is going through the same thoughts and has also decided to stay with FDL for now. This was reassuring.

Overlap. We are going to experience many situations where similar content could be posted on both wikis. Today there are no ground rules on how to handle this. Does a search in Appropedia also point to specialised content in Akvopedia? Does a search in our wiki flag wider articles on Appropedia? Indeed where does the differentiation kick in? Positioning wikis against eachother is fraught with problems. All we know is that our users may not just focus on water and sanitation, so Appropedia’s breadth will be valuable to them. Yet our specialist experience and contributor network will give Appropedia users unprecedented depth and insight. That’s before we address issues of language translation, or maintaining similar versions of content on both our wikis.

We talked about the evolution of content curatorship, where different resource ‘brands’ structure similar, open information in unique patterns designed to be easily understood by their target users. How and when this will happen I’m not sure. What seems unlikely is that the world will see the development of one universal wiki, particularly given Wikipedia’s governance issues and ongoing tensions about containing or not containing its growth.

Andrew also talked to me about emerging plans for an Open Sustainability Conference touted for October in Boston. We’ll throw our hat into the ring for that, to be sure. I also suspect it will be of interest to people such as Akvo friend and open source analyst James Governor at Greenmonk Associates. James, maybe a great time to mobilise some of those passionate open source clients of yours into action?

Our Akvopedia team is expanding right now in Delft and we met last Monday to plan the expansion of the resource this summer. IRC is leading our implementation, and right now the team is developing the core templates and prioritising initial content uploads. I’ve been devoting time to examine how we use communication to scale up our network of contributors quickly - I’m exploring ideas such as two-week Sprints where teams agree to focus intensively on collecting and editing certain types of content. Certainly I’m concerned about the Field of Dreams scenario - “If you build it they will come” is a romantic idea but we have to work hard to motivate contributors to act boldly, rather than tinker.

Andrew Lamb has a fascinating background having led several social ventures before becoming a director of the Appropedia Foundation in February. A Cambridge engineering graduate, he was CEO for some time of Engineers Without Borders UK, who he still supports, and is a co-founder of The Humanitarian Centre. Today he wears multiple hats at RedR, which provides skills development support to aid workers globally. He also helped design a robotic unicycle, which obviously would endear him to me.

I’m organising for Chris to meet the team in Delft when he visits the Netherlands in July. We’re looking forward to working with all of you guys.

“Every little piece in your life will mean something to someone”

It’s a big idea - and the lyric in a song called ‘The Weight of The World’, by Editors.

At the time I heard it, I was thinking about Akvo’s purpose both for those who use it and those who create it. And it got me asking this question:

“Could everything you do, and everything you know, mean something to someone out there?”

I’ve raved on to many of you about the arguments of writers such as Chris Anderson and Tapscott-Williams. Both The Long Tail and Wikinomics argue that the massive efficiencies of digital storage, high quality search and low cost distribution open up big possibilities. The chance for millions of niche markets for products and expertise, maintained by people with great specialisation, all supported by generalists who create modular tools to help them find their audiences and make the process work.

In isolation the idea might seem crazy - surely billions of people seeking answers can’t possibly find the needles in the haystack? Especially if it’s not “managed”. After all, the information you find is never in the end as good as you seek. And that will never change, surely? Like talented kids left to express themselves through graffiti, the world will pass by and ignore the clues.

Making knowledge move

Fortunately something else is happening in parallel, to shape this intriguing possibility. Alongside the above is a new generation of knowledge disseminators who are beginning to change how information is communicated inside and outside organisations. These people - and they may well include you - dramatically speed up the pace at which insights are bounced around the world, or indeed bounced around an organisation. And they use tools that are categorising and structuring information without needing centralised databases or knowledge structures.

They use a mix of communication systems, some of which are direct person-to-person, but many of which are ‘ambient’, meaning they are published and can be followed but aren’t forced on people. For example, they may post a link to an online social network, where they’re visible to their ‘followers’. Or they may flag a quick link to someone using email, SMS, instant messaging or similar tools. Or they may include a link or reference in a blog article or in a comment on someone else’s.

Why they do it is the surprising bit. Right now, The New Participants aren’t normally paid to do the task at hand. They may be in a related sector, or they may be aspiring to do the work professionally. Or they may have done it in the past, before retiring or focusing elsewhere. But the general rule is that they only need a computer and a web connection to participate, either at home or at work. In the past this kind of person couldn’t get involved - they needed access to a closed corporate network or specialist equipment, subscriptions or publishing tools.

A lightness of touch

So what information gets sent? At first, surprisingly little. The initial data flows are usually very light - often just a short caption and a web link. My Twitter feed, for example, is limited to just 140 characters. What these people aren’t sharing is large pdf documents, or Powerpoint decks, or 300 page Microsoft Word reports.

But this lightness is deceptive, as the web link will often lead to a piece of online content that can contain many links to further detail, so the information pile is deep, but doesn’t burden those who aren’t interested.

Now is a great time to start publishing content in ways that these disseminators can harness and it’s vital that Akvo becomes as open and discoverable as possible, right now. That way, we can be watched, used, shared, improved and built upon by these new networks of participants.

In my next article I’ll be describing how we need to work to support these networks, and how we can ensure almost all our work is discoverable and transparent unless there is a very good reason not to be. This includes some of the psychological barriers we all feel as we begin to publish, openly, our own work, and we learn to cope with the resulting attention.

Mark Charmer is a co-founder of Akvo and directs its communications. Thanks to everyone who has been so patient with me, after I broke my arm last month. I can now type again, so I’m no longer behaving like an angry teenager without a purpose.

Photo: Graffiti in Cartagena, Spain (presumably by an angry teenager). Mark Charmer, May 2008.

Summary – During the month of May Akvo has been focusing on development of Akvo Really Simple Reporting (RSR) and get the Akvopedia team started. Several of the team have been hampered by sickness (including food poisoning, a fractured arm and several colds) or on holiday during the month, which limited the work we were doing somewhat.

We have added one heading under the Organisational development, Akvo organisation

Product development

Akvopedia
Status:

Akvo RSR
Status:

Organisation development

Akvo partners
Status:

Akvo people
Status:

Akvo funding
Status:

Akvo communications
Status:

Akvo organisation
Status:

Technical infrastructure

Akvo web site update
Status:

Akvo web server infrastructure
Status:

Akvo video conferencing tools
Status:

Akvo Stockholm infrastucture
Status:

End of report summary.
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Six weeks after securing €535,000 of grant investments, most of the team are focused on building the first Akvo tools. Yet while the pressure is on to deliver operational tools for partners quickly, reality also forces us to focus right now on securing the funding for the years ahead.

Contracts for the initial grants have now mostly been signed, and I’d like to thank all these investors for being very forthcoming to overcome administrative obstacles and formalities, so we can get the contributions into the Akvo bank account.

Our business plan forecasts financial sustainability in the fourth year of operations, mainly by charging funding groups and NGOs a modest subscription fee for the use of certain key functions in the Akvo Matchmaking and Akvo RSR modules. Corporate Social Marketing programmes and consulting services will be big contributors, too, where we will offer tailored project matchmaking services and consumer reporting tools. These tools will enable FMCG brands to cost-effectively manage innovative new campaigns that engage their customers in direct funding of small-scale water and sanitation projects, on a large scale.

For now, we have to be financed by a combination of grants, subsidies and soft loans as depicted in the diagram above. Our aim is to secure all funding necessary to bridge the coming years, before we get to Stockholm Water Week 2008 in late August.

The brown shading (Grants) represents our second stage funding, which has now been secured. Frederik Claasen, previously a banker at ABN Amro, helped us refine a business plan that positions us to secure a soft loan (blue box). Frederik has been developing our specific offer for specialist development bankers and we have a long list of organisations to meet over the next few months. We’ll pursue our five star candidates into the summer. Any reactions here are most welcome.

Decision-making in Subsidy tracks (yellow shading) can take a long time – NWP’s experience over the years is a timeframe of 6 to 12 months. So we’ve already submitted two proposals for support.

One is a proposal to the Schokland Funds of the Dutch Ministry for Development Cooperation. This subsidises up to 40% of the costs of innovative initiatives that contribute to the Millennium Development Goals, and would help fill our ‘Subsidy’ (yellow) space. We expect the results to be made public on the 1st of July, so that will be an important day for us.

On the 7th of April we received notification from EuropeAid in Brussels that our application (concept note) for support from a call for ‘Non State Actors and Local Authorities in Development – Actions in partner countries’, passed the administrative check. This confirms we got through the onerous EU paperwork hurdle, a feat in itself. In a matter of weeks I expect to get notification whether we actually passed the first round.

So I’m comfortable that we are on the right track. I will write about our partner developments separately soon.

Peter van der Linde is director of partnerships at Akvo

In an earlier blog I described the attempt at a new way of reporting the status of the work we are performing here at Akvo. This is the first of these new reports. You can see an overview with bars showing approximately how far along we are in each area, and if you want to see more detail you click on the link at the bottom of this blog post. The Completed tasks are what has been completed in the last month. The Tasks coming up are what we anticipate working on in the coming month.

Summary – During the month of March and April Akvo has raised the funds to be able to operate for six months and build Akvo RSR, set-up partnerships, develop the Akvopedia and launch the new products at Stockholm World Water Week. Infrastructure tasks and hiring people are well under way. The first intensive collaborative development session, the Akvo Sprint, for Akvo RSR was completed successfully.

Product development

Akvopedia
Status:

Akvo RSR
Status:

Organisation development

Akvo Partners
Status:

Akvo People
Status:

Akvo Funding
Status:

Akvo Communications
Status:

Technical infrastructure

Akvo web site update
Status:

Akvo web server infrastructure
Status:

Akvo video conferencing tools
Status:

Akvo Stockholm infrastucture
Status:

End of report summary.
[Read more →]