As members of NetHope continue their annual meeting in Redmond this week, it's fascinating to look at how the landscape of technology has moved from responding to crises to creating solutions tailor-made for development itself.

These worlds are increasingly converging in places like Seattle.

On Thursday evening at MOHAI, NetHope co-founder Ed Granger-Happ of Save the Children and CIOs of Oxfam, CARE and The Nature Conservancy will talk about how information and communications technology affect the work of humanitarian agencies in "International Relief, Development and Conservation in the Cloud."

SCOTT COHEN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Kentaro Toyama shows a project designed to help people who are illiterate use computers.

Also Thursday Microsoft will announce a $2.4 million software donation to The Nature Conservancy to develop a virtual world for collaboration, based on SharePoint and other technology.

The software will help The Nature Conservancy bring together scientists, conservation managers, volunteers and hundreds of local partners working in 700 offices in 30 countries, allowing them to collaborate virtually and respond to rapidly changing conditions.

The Nature Conservancy, like other non-profits, has seen its donations fall during the global recession. One of the first things to be cut from constrained NGO budgets is information technology, yet that plays an increasingly important role in the speed and efficiency of humanitarian efforts.

Other hot topics discussed in the context of philanthropy include text-message donation campaigns and mobile phone banking for microfinance projects.

Kentaro Toyama, assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, writes a cautionary note about how technology projects involving PCs and mobile phones can sit like rusting tractors in a field unless they're designed with local institutions and people, who are willing (and able) to maintain them.