One of the critical missions of PopG is to encourage business, education and sports communities to use the PopG collaborative teambuilding platform, as well as to donate some of their PopG desktop time to local, national and international "partnership twinning" for human capacity building.

When the Olympic governing body allowed for the first time the US professional basketball players to compete in the Olympics they were dubbed by the US media as the dream team because they were so much better than any other (basketball) team ever assembled. Today, Groove + PopG can offer governments and NGOs a dream collaborating Internet platform for dream teams of "remote desktop volunteers" as support teams connected with local "in-community" action teams.

In the white paper referenced below “There should be more to collaboration than Email”. There are features that focus group participants mention as their “dream” Internet collaborative tools that match with the Groove Workspace collaborative features. So we now have the opportunity of dream teams with dream collaborative tools. These collaborating for productivity dream teams & tools could advance the mutual learning and capacity building effects of the billions of dollars that will be spent by donors on initiatives for local, national and international capacity building in the beginning of this 21st century.

I noted in the International Herald Tribune of 19 February that Dataquest the market research unit of Gartner Inc reported that computer users would rise 7.9% this year to a total of 138.7 million worldwide. Thus offering for the first time via the PopG + Groove teamwork platform an opportunity for capacity building dream teams & tools from millions of desktops. These teams are composed of two parts with a remote support group of specialist "partnership twinned” via their computers to local action groups, with both remote and local groups merged into one collaborating for productivity deployment team. These two part dream teams become thousands of communities of practice providing learning and capacity building for each other and the individuals and communities they are working with.

This is presented as an example of what could be used in a TV advertising appeal for remote (i.e. desktop) capacity building volunteers. Perhaps the UK Channel 4 presenter Jon Snow introduces this appeal for desktop volunteers. John had this to say about his cross cultural experience: “Completely changed my life, without a doubt - I wouldn't have become a journalist if it hadn't been for being exposed to other cultures. In addition Jon Snow could say something like: “Today you can be exposed to other cultures, while helping to narrow the digital divide from your desktop”.

Then the minister of higher education in Afghanistan Mohammed Sharif Faiz says at his desk: (actual quote from a International Herald Tribune article): “The question is whether Afghanistan can set up a modern education system that can act as a bulwark against fundamentalism and prevent the country from slipping into an economic black hole. Unless our Afghan universities and colleges are established and given the means to operate today, there would be a revival of fundamentalist ideology.”

Then an Afghan female teacher presents the closing line of this appeal, with some Afghan university males and females in front of PCs. The students are looking at a white board via the Internet on their PCs with some numbers on it and the local Afghan teacher’s remote support team teacher is in her home in the UK, US or wherever, writing the numbers on the white board. The Afghan teacher’s appeal: “Why not give an hour a day from your desktop to help build our nation through our youth”. End of appeal.

Local, national and international capacity building is the governments, the non-government organisations and every citizens business. The extraordinary importance of “narrowing the digital divide gap” is pointed out in the article Visions Worth Working Toward: Narrowing the Widening Gap by Steven W. Gilbert president of the Teaching Learning Technology Group. This article can be found at http://www.tltgroup.org/resources/vwwt.html Perhaps Channel 4 and its Web site would like to initiate this “partnership twinning” program in the UK by sponsoring a PopG + Groove Server(s), with links from their Website appeal to these servers. Along, with the PopG + Groove Server – PopG and its Groove partners offer deployment options that include pre-configuring your Groove on PopG, a training package and continuing help-desk support, which are all facilitated via the PopG + Groove space, screen and mouse sharing technology.