The Internet & Electronic Communications

Definitions

electronic conferencing - like a bulletin board or log book where one person posts a topic that they would like to share or discuss. The people who read that topic can then post their responses to the original.
e-mail - an electronic message sent over the Internet to an e-mail "address", just like a piece of mail is sent to a street address.
e-mail address - a point of Internet access, like a mailbox, that allows people to send messages directly. This is most commonly used form of the Internet.
Internet - a collection of phone lines and other wires that allows computers all over the world to share information with each other.
modem - a device that allows your computer to transmit and receive information with other computers over the phone. It hooks up to your computer and into the phone line. Sometimes, modems are internal, which means they are already installed inside your computer.
on-line - a term used to describe a document or information that is stored in and can be accessed through the computer network. 
World Wide Web (WWW)- a system that organizes documents and other information resources on the Internet, like a massive library.  The web is where the graphical user interface (GUI), or where all the nice pictures and buttons are stored on the Internet.

With all the media attention and hype around the Internet, it's hard not to know of its existence. But what can it do for community groups? Well, it can help to get the word out, reduce printing and long distance phone costs, facilitate group communication and decision making, and organize archival information. Best of all, learning to use the Internet is easy and doesn't cost much.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a massive collection of phone lines and other wires that allows computers all over the world to share information with each other. While this network is be used for all sort of applications, there are three main Internet tools that you should know about and consider using when you first start out.

E-mail: An e-mail message is simply an electronic message sent over the Internet. Anyone with an Internet account can send e-mail to anyone else on the Internet at no cost (or close to it). An e-mail message can include anything from a simple note, to a whole report that started out in WordPerfect, to a picture of all the people in your group.

Conferencing: Electronic conferencing is like an e-mail bulletin board. One person posts a topic that they would like to share or discuss. The people who read that topic can then post their responses all around the original. Conferencing is an excellent way to hold discussions between people who are located far away from each other. Conferences can be private (you control who can read or write messages), semi-public (only a certain community can access them) or public (everyone on the Internet has access). Two popular conferencing systems are the Web Networks/Association for Progressive Communications conferences which focus specifically on social change issues and a system called UseNet which covers a general set of topics and is available to anyone on the Internet.

World Wide Web or WWW: is a system that organizes documents and other information resources on the Internet. One way to think of it is a massive on-line library. The WWW is the place to turn is you want to get your information out to the world at a low cost. It's also a good place to find information when doing research or building alliances.

What You Can Do

This list includes just a few of the things that community organizations can do with the Internet. Each entry includes a note which indicates whether you would use e-mail, conferencing or the World Wide Web to carry out that particular task.

Publish educational and promotional materials. 
Using the World Wide Web, it's easy to create your own `homepage' which contains the documents that your organization has produced. This has advantages over paper publishing in that it costs almost nothing and it is accessible to people all over the world.

Find information. 
The World Wide Web makes it possible for anyone with a computer to post their pulp non-fiction. Some of it's junk, some of it's incredibly useful. Once you learn to use WWW search tools, you'll be able to find a good deal of the information you need on-line (this is true more of some subjects than it is of others).

Lobby Politicians. 
Many World Wide Web pages sponsored by community groups now include a mechanism for sending faxes to politicians. With this type of page, you start by putting up a form letter on the issue that you are working on. From there, anyone on the Internet can customize the letter to add their own sentiments and then fax it off to the politician with their own name on it.

Hold Electronic Meetings. 
Private conferences can be used to hold discussions on-line. While this type of discussion can never replace face to face meetings, it is often useful when people don't live in the same city or when people find it difficult to come together at the same time (people don't have to be on-line at the same time to participate in a conference).

Organize Real Life Meetings. 
As e-mail lets you send messages to dozens of people with a single keystroke, it is often easier to send out meeting announcements over the Internet than it is to phone people individually. 

Save on Fax Costs. 
If you often send faxes to people in Ottawa, San Francisco, Cairo or anywhere that requires a long distance call, e-mail can save you money. Usually, e-mail massages sent anywhere in the world are free. All you have to pay for is your e-mail account (and you can even get this for free sometimes).

Save on Trees. 
Every time you use e-mail or conferencing instead of sending a fax you are saving paper. This is especially significant when you are sending our the same document to dozens of people.

Bounce written documents back and forth. 
When working on proposals, newsletters, press releases and other documents, it's often easiest to keep the text in an electronic format that can be opened by a word processor. This usually works best if you all have the same software. You can use tools like "Insert - Comment" in MS Word that allows you to put your own notes in response to a text. This lets everybody in the `chain of editing' open the document themselves and make their own changes. E-mail or conferencing is one quick and efficient way to facilitate this kind of information flow.

What You Need to Get Started

You can access the Internet with almost any computer that has a modem and a telephone line. Newer computers and faster computers do give you access to some things – like graphics – that you can't get with older computers.
The most important choice that you have to make when starting out on the Internet is where to get your access. The prices and options vary widely depending on who you sign up with. Here are some of the options:

FreeNets. Community networks – often known as `FreeNets' – provide free, community based Internet service. The advantage of FreeNets is that they don't cost anything and that they often provide a number of locally specific resources not found elsewhere on the Internet. The disadvantage is that they are often hard to get through to due to busy signals. The free net in Toronto is at http://www.torfree.net/ - you can find out about registering for an account with them. Public libraries also offer free dial up access, usually limited to a 1/2 hour a day.

Universities. Most universities provide some kind of Internet access for free or cheap to their students. Often, undergraduate students will only have access to e-mail while graduate students and faculty have the same level of Internet access that you can buy from a commercial service.

Commercial Internet Service Providers (ISPs). There are hundreds of companies that provide access to the Internet for a fee. Most of these companies provide complete access to the Internet, including the ability to view graphics, use a mouse and choose which programs you want to use to. Average costs vary from about $10 to $25 per month, with the price reflected in the quality of service, level of technical support and number of busy signals.

Web Networks. Web Networks is a non-profit ISP that caters specifically to the needs of community groups and social change organizations. It offers the same services and cost about the same as commercial Internet providers, but also includes a number of on-line tools and resources to meet the needs of people working for social change. Most notable among these special tools is a conferencing system with discussion areas focusing on a wide variety of social change issues. These conferences are shared with social change networks in other countries but are not publicly available to the rest of the Internet. They are at www.web.net

Setting up a website

Don't get fancy right away. You could put your office intranet and database online, for $20,000. Or for a few hours and some free software, you could put together a basic website that replicates the information you have in your pamphlets, order forms and published materials. Seeing as most nonprofits are in the business of distributing information and resources for free, web publishing is a great place to start.

Free email: www.yahoo.ca, www.hotmail.com and many more. Most ISPs provide one or two email addresses when you purchase a dial-up account. The nice thing about email that's accessible through the WWW is that you can pick up your mail from any computer.

Free websites www.geocities.com, many ISPs automatically host a webpage for you when you buy their dial-up package. They will have instructions on setting up your page and geocities has a do-it-yourself webpage builder on their site. I did my page at www.geocities.com/bill7award in 20 minutes by pasting in text from a pamphlet.

Free website editors - try a few different HTML editors to find one you like. They are basically clunky word-processing programs with one unique feature - you can make links to another page. MS Word has extension, Netscape Communicator comes with a nice Composer, and www.tucows.com lists dozens of free html editors and other useful software. Software that's free or cheap is called freeware or shareware - try searching for that on the Internet. Other sites for learning more about editing and programming are www.cnet.com (shareware site) and www.webteacher.com (tutorials on cgi and javascript)..

Register your domain through: http://www.9netave.ca/yahoo/ for .com .org and .net  ($70.00) or try http://www.cdnnet.ca/ for .ca domains. Your ISP should also provide this service for you for a reasonable charge (i.e. less than $200) and your hosting costs per month will be slightly higher ($10 or so a month). These domains are slightly easier to remember than the website name your ISP will assign you, but their real advantage is that if you change ISPs, your website name doesn't have to change. Many groups, however, start off wanting a domain name, and it isn't always necessary.

Promote your website by registering on various search engines for free at www.submit-it.com (look for the 'free trial' option.) On most search engines you can visit them directly and click on a 'add URL' sign. The best way to promote your site is to ask other people you know to link to it. Trade links with other groups and individuals.

Interactive components - these are the fun parts of the Internet, like guestbooks, forums, listservs, searchable databases. These are also the really expensive things to do. Your ISP will probably offer some basic goodies - usually a guestbook where people can leave comments and a counter to see how many people visit your. Some ISPs offer more options than others - I once used one that offered to host a discussion group forum for a fee of $300 for setup and $300 a year. WebNetworks also offers discussion areas for an even smaller charge. It's often easier to make use of existing resources and link to them from your webpage than design your own. Some cheap alternatives that might work are a) databases - there are many free programs that will help convert your resource listings to html files. It's not fancy, but it gets the information out there. One can be found at www.primasoft.com/dbhtmlp.htm. b) Forums, chat rooms and message boards are hosted for free at www.delphi.com. This site already hosts many support groups on hundreds of topics. c) email groups - there are thousands of listservs to join (find a bunch of them at http://www.onelist.com/), but to start your own, try downloading Listserv Lite for free from http://www.lsoft.com/products/default.asp?item=listserv.

Finding More Information

While there are hundreds of books out there explaining what the Internet is and how to use it, most of them are expensive or out of date before they make it to the store. As anyone who's been on the Internet can tell you - you can find anything on the Internet from language instruction to marathon training. The best way to learn about the Internet is to get a dial-up account and just start playing around. Browsing the Internet became to be called 'surfing' because its the same as riding one wave that leads to another, and another... Use the 'add to favourites' function on your browser to keep track of sites you like. Many sites will help you with a list of their links. Some sites are nothing more than lists of excellent links, such as http://www.psywww.com/resource/selfhelp.htm, which will send you off for days looking into self-help info online. If you feel uncomfortable starting out on your own, see if a friend or someone else in your organization will sit down with you and show you the basics. The two most popular search engines are www.yahoo.ca and www.altavista.ca. I'm personally fond of www.dogpile.com that searches the search engines for truly hard-to-find information.

adapted by Regan McClure, from an article by Mark Surman.