Networking and development: The Comnet-it project

There is a growing awareness that the developing world needs to build up its resources of skills and experience as they relate to information technology. This provide an important research agenda to address the fundamental question of what this technology (defined in the widest sense) means within the political and economic context of two-thirds of the world's population. This paper reports on experience within COMNET, a networking project being coordinated and sponsored by the Commonwealth Secretariat, that attempts to address some of these ambitions and to use the network concept as a fundamental part of the project's own structure. As such, it is both a case study of a potential emerging form of organization and a project that is based on a commitment to the wider power and utility of networks (both human and technical) to promote and sustain change.