Bellanet

Bellanet International Secretariat is an international organization that functions out of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada. Its aim is to build institutional and individual collaboration skills and maximizing the potential of ICTs to support collaborative development work.

Goals

Bellanet's International Secretariat says it "promotes and facilitates effective collaboration within the international development community, especially though the use of ICTs (information and communication technologies).

Bellanet aims to "support effective development practice by sharing its expertise in information and communication technologies as well as its skills in facilitating organizational learning and the sharing of knowledge." It does not offer grants or loans, but builds online communities, promotes knowledge sharing, and furthers open development.

Bellanet says it encourages the use of online dialogues to support development collaboration and promotes "better knowledge sharing" to help organizations "learn from experience".

It is currently exploring the potential of free software, open standards for equitable and sustainable information sharing, and open content to ensure the "wide distribution of information without compromising the intellectual property rights of its creators".

Host Offices

Bellanet has 3 hosts which enable it to expand its work in the South:
* AITEC Uganda in Kampala, Uganda
* [http://www.sapint.org South Asia Partnership International] in Kathmandu, Nepal
* [http://www.sulabatsu.com/ Sulá Batsú] in San José, Costa Rica

Bellanet seconds staff in these three hosts which are known as Bellanet Africa, Bellanet Asia and Bellanet LAC respectively. The office in Ottawa is known as Bellanet International, hosted under ICT4D program, IDRC.

Bellanet also has an unofficial European host via [http://home.bellanet.org/index.php?module=htmlpages&func=display&pid=17 Lucie Lamoureux] , a Bellanet Associate, working out of Brussels, Belgium.

Bellanet Asia

Bellanet Asia is a joint initiative of Bellanet and the South Asia Partnership International. It was set up in Nepal in August 2003 and its objective was spreading Bellanet's scope of work to South and South East Asia.

Projects

*Itrain
*Dgroups
*Km4dev

External links

* [http://www.bellanet.org Bellanet International]
* [http://blogs.bellanet.org Bellanet's Blogs]
* [http://blogs.bellanet.org/index.php?/pages/docs.html Bellanet's Documents and Publications]
* [http://www.sulabatsu.com/ Sulá Batsú]
* [http://www.sapint.org South Asia Partnership International]
* [http://www.idrc.ca International Development Research Centre (IDRC)]
* [http://www.Dgroups.org Development through Dialogue]
* [http://www.km4dev.org the Knowledge Management for Development]