Fast Foundation

Database of Despair

Paul Meyer is just the sort of partner that the Markle Foundation is eager to fund. "He is an innovator, the kind of person to help fill our pool of intellectual capital," says Baird. "He sees ways that technology can help with intractable problems. We need to make bets on people like Paul."

Even before he was uplinking satellites in Kosovo, Meyer was a resourceful guy. Right out of college, he became an advance man for Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign. He says that job helped him learn "how to mobilize people, how to convince people to do new things, how to talk people into doing things that are against their better judgment, and how to not take no for an answer." After Clinton won, the scramble for jobs began. Meyer delivered some papers from Little Rock to Washington. After dropping them off, he realized that he had made it inside the White House. Now he had to find a reason to stay. "I just didn't leave," he says, only a little sheepishly. "I just sort of sat down at a desk and claimed it." Meyer eventually became a speechwriter, spending two-and-a-half years at the White House. He quit in 1995 to attend Yale Law School.

While Meyer liked the law, he changed his mind about joining a big-name firm when he read an article describing the technological needs of African refugee camps. So in February 1999, he secured his first grant from Markle and hopped a plane for Guinea, where there were nearly 1 million refugees from the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Working with the International Rescue Committee, Meyer implemented a system called "Child Connect." It used a Lotus Notes database that organizations could search to help families locate missing children. Desperately short on computers, Meyer went to IBM for help. The company said that it would donate equipment, but that it preferred to work on the emergency in Kosovo, where massive civil displacement and U.S. bombing were underway. So he said yes to Kosovo -- but sent half the equipment to Guinea anyway.

Many organizations and companies, from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to Microsoft, were already trying to create an online database for refugees in the Balkans. But most refugees had no way to get online, and they moved so often that information on their whereabouts quickly became dated and worthless. Meyer decided that making data available immediately was critical. So with money from Markle, he hired Albanian techies to pull together a monster database of refugees' names by assembling the lists compiled by such groups as Catholic Relief Services and the International Red Cross. Besides creating an online list, called the Kosovar Family Finder, that could be accessible to refugees in foreign countries, Meyer went low-tech, printing a Kosovar Family Finder phone book, complete with yellow pages. Both the online and print directories listed almost 20,000 heads of family, each of whom was missing family members, from 23 countries. Meyer stuck stacks of the books on all of the food trucks being sent across Albania and then helped hand them out at different camps.

Having helped more people in six months than most do in a lifetime, Meyer went to Macedonia and tried to figure out why it had been so hard to implement his database idea in the first place: "I realized that technology can play a vital role in helping humanitarian workers share information and coordinate. But without an infrastructure, it was worthless." In Kosovo, the small bit of technology infrastructure that had existed had been largely destroyed. So why not create a new one -- an Internet-service provider for the local and the humanitarian communities? "Looking back, it's embarrassing how naïve I was," Meyer says with a laugh.

The first order of business was finding wireless access to the Net. After all, the war had destroyed Kosovo's telephone lines. Meyer tracked down a satellite dish in a Macedonian refugee camp that had been donated by the founder of InterPacket Networks Inc. But the dish was already being used by the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Meyer asked the USIA for some bandwidth access, but the agency said no. Undeterred, he cold-called InterPacket and convinced them that he could use the dish more effectively. Meyer also secured a $175,000 loan from the International Rescue Committee and hired another company to move the dish to Pristina. The economic model was as follows: Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and big relief agencies would pay a fee for access, which would subsidize the local university, the press, and other Kosovars who needed a communications system but who had no money to pay for one.