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10/3/2015 The Challenges of Building an International Virtual Community Using Internet Technologies

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The Challenges of Building an InternationalVirtual Community Using Internet

Technologies

Mario de Paula Leite GOUVÊA <[email protected]>LEAD InternationalUSA

Contents

IntroductionSetting the infrastructure: choosing the right technologiesInternet was the right choice: the problem was its availability in developingcountriesNext step: start building the community as the infrastructure improvesBuilding a presence on the World Wide WebDeveloping Web-based information systemsHow to minimize the effort of distributing and updating informationglobally?Virtual conferencesConclusions

Introduction

The Leadership for Environment and Development program, LEAD, was establishedin 1991 by the Rockefeller Foundation with the basic mission of capacity building forselected potential leaders whose actions will contribute to the decisions made aboutenvironment and development issues in most parts of the world. LEAD Associates areselected from five different sectors of society: government, media, business, academia,and nongovernmental organizations. They are between the ages of 28 and 40 andcome from more than 40 different countries through the 12 LEAD Member Programs:Brazil, Canada, China, the Commonwealth of Independent States, Europe, India,Indonesia, Japan, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, and six countries of Southern Africa.LEAD Associates are expected to attend 16 weeks of training in a two-year period.Their employers contribute to the LEAD program by allowing them to be absent fromtheir jobs during that time. Every year LEAD selects a new Cohort of Associates. ACohort is composed of 15 mid-career professionals from each LEAD Member Programtotaling approximately 180 individuals.

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Figure 1. Group of LEAD Associates during an International TrainingSession in Beijing, China.

A major challenge for decision makers in all countries in a globalized world is topromulgate policies for environment and development that improve the quality of lifefor their people. The development of those policies will require innovative thoughtand sensitive, creative management for their development and implementation. TheLEAD training program is designed to stimulate thinking that transcends traditionalboundaries between cultures, nationalities, disciplines, and generations. Every yeareach of the LEAD Member Programs organizes several national training sessionswhere they bring 15 Associates together at a time to participate in a one-week sessionwhere they are exposed to issues related to environment and development throughseveral methodologies such as case studies, field site visits, lectures, and participatorylearning techniques. In addition to the national-level training, each Cohort ofAssociates participates in two International Training Sessions and one Mid-TermInternational Session. These sessions are designed to bring together a group of 200 ormore Associates from the LEAD Member Programs to a setting with which they areunfamiliar and where they are going to be able to study problems similar to those theyhave back in their countries. Associates work in small multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary groups where they can share and learn each other's views on the issuesthey study. In addition, these multicultural groups go out to the field and have theopportunity to interact with local experts and visit local communities. Once Associatesfinish the two-year training program they graduate and become LEAD Fellows whoare eligible to apply for funds for conference participation, projects, and internshipsthrough the Fellows Program.

The major challenge back in 1991 was to link the LEAD Member Programs and LEADAssociates using a cost-effective means of communication to keep the Network ofLEAD Associates alive once they went back home. At that time access to Internet wasmainly available to academic institutions in developed countries. LEAD then wascomposed of its headquarters in New York and Member Programs in seven of themost populated developing countries on earth: Brazil, CIS, China, India, Indonesia,Mexico, and Nigeria.



Figure 2. Map showing number of Associates/Fellows per LEAD MemberProgram (as of December 1999)

Setting the infrastructure: choosing the righttechnologies

The first challenge in establishing the LEAD Network (LEADnet), by then called GINS(Global Information Network System), was establishing the basic informationtechnology infrastructure in each of the LEAD Member Programs required tointerconnect them via e-mail. Some of them were hosted by academic institutions,which made access to an established e-mail network relatively easier. Other programswere hosted by independent organizations without a basic information technology(IT) staff and infrastructure. The initial step in setting the infrastructure to support acost-effective communications network was to hire a local indigenous staff to establishtheir local area network (LAN) and e-mail, support Associates' connectivity, andinterface with the local PTTs. They are now called LEADnet Coordinators. The secondstep was to select an e-mail provider that could be used in the seven countries hostingthe LEAD Program. The technology selected at the time was MCI-Mail which allowedfor the exchange of e-mails via local PSTN (Packet Switch TelecommunicationsNetwork), local dial-up to MCI centers, or international dial-up from the MemberPrograms to MCI in the United States.

Once the e-mail network was set up it was realized that e-mail communications alonewas not enough to support the LEAD Program; there was a need to exchangeinformation and knowledge using a data repository. In addition, the costs of providinge-mail access to all the Associates using MCI-Mail were prohibitive because themajority of the LEAD Programs had to dial-up internationally. Different options wereanalyzed, including the possibility of establishing one bulletin board system (BBS) ineach of the LEAD offices. That option was soon discarded once it was realized that



there was a tremendous potential in using the Internet and its related technologies tosupport the LEAD Program.

LEAD soon purchased one Data General UNIX Workstation for each of the LEADMember Programs and two for LEAD headquarters and organized a comprehensiveworkshop for the LEADnet Coordinators in establishing a LEADnet node. That wasthe first LEADnet Coordinators' Workshop. The training consisted of installing andmanaging UNIX, setting up SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) to support dial-upconnections, setting up Gopher, FTP (file transfer protocol) server, and configuringTCP/IP (transmission control protocol/Internet protocol) and DNS among othertopics. The Workshop, organized by the University of Kentucky in July 1993, exposedthe LEADnet Coordinators to the World Wide Web (WWW) for the first time througha session on the X Window System version of Mosaic. The training was conducted onthe same workstations the LEADnet Coordinators were going to utilize back home.The hands-on workshop simulated the environment the attendees were going toencounter back in their countries -- they had to install and configure the operatingsystem and applications from scratch. The simulations included the installation ofSLIP and e-mail on personal computers (PCs) to simulate the environment the LEADAssociates were going to use.

After the workshop was finished, the workstations were shipped to each of the LEADoffices. Problems with customs and precarious infrastructure conditions in some ofthose countries delayed the full deployment of the first phase of LEADnet. Thatcaused an uneven development of LEADnet.

Internet was the right choice: the problem was itsavailability in developing countries

As LEAD Associates joined the LEAD program they would receive a computer,modem, printer, and an account to access e-mail and the Internet through LEAD. Inaddition to the equipment and account they would receive intensive training on howto utilize their equipment, e-mail, and the Internet. Initially there was a difference inthe kind of services provided by the LEAD Member Programs. Some of them wouldprovide their Associates with full access to the Internet through a dial-up SLIPaccount. Others such as LEAD China would develop a users' package containing allthe necessary Internet software required to access the Net as well as detailedinstructions. Others could not even get their offices connected to e-mail due totelecommunications infrastructure problems, exorbitant data traffic costs due tomonopolies, and lack of proper training in setting up their own network (someLEADnet Coordinators were unable to attend the first workshop).

Temporary solutions were found for some of the problems: LEAD Nigeria wasconnected via UUCP (UNIX to UNIX copy protocol) to LEAD International throughlong-distance calls. The server in New York would call LEAD Nigeria's server severaltimes a week to download and upload messages sent to and from [email protected] address. The UUCP connection was transparent to the users; theSendmail.cf file translated the UUCP addresses on the New York server. That



connection was used from 1995 until 1998 when LEAD Nigeria started utilizing theservices of an Internet service provider (ISP) in the United States to store their e-mailmessages and one ISP in Lagos for their dial-up connections. LEAD Nigeria still hasproblems today due to the fact that the office is located in a remote area in Lagoswhere basic telecommunications infrastructure do not work. A microwave radioconnection is being set up between the LEAD office in Lagos and an ISP to provide theoffice with full Internet connectivity and to support the telecommunications needs ofthe LEAD Associates and Fellows from LEAD Nigeria.

LEAD Associates are selected from several different regions of the countries whereLEAD Programs exist. In some cases Associates come from remote areas where basictelephone infrastructure is almost non-existent, in others unavailable. In those remoteareas where telephone lines do not work as expected and electricity goes down often,the only way Associates can access the resources provided by LEAD is by using paper-based material and/or the LEADnet CD-ROM. The CD-ROM is produced annuallyand contains an offline copy of LEAD International's Web site, the database of Fellowsand Associates, videos about the organization, publications by partner organizations,and the software necessary to browse its contents. It contains most of thedocumentation used in past International Training Sessions and is distributed to allthe Associates and Fellows keeping those without the minimum infrastructure toaccess e-mail or the Web connected to the LEAD Community.

Some of the LEAD Member programs benefited from the infrastructure existent intheir countries. LEAD Brazil, in its early stages back in 1993, benefited from theNational Research Network Internet Backbone (RNP, Rede Nacional de Pesquisa)which connected the major universities in Brazil and covered a large part of thecountry, enabling LEAD Associates and Fellows to access the Internet by making alocal call to the nearest RNP point of presence. Brazilian Associates located in the cityof Sao Paulo benefited from the fact that LEAD Brazil is hosted inside the Universityof Sao Paulo, which has high-speed Internet connectivity directly to FAPESP(Fundacao de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Sao Paulo), one of the RNP nodes andthe main node of ANSP (an Academic Network at Sao Paulo) which has severalinternational links to the United States and interconnects most of the universities inthe state of Sao Paulo. LEAD Pakistan Associates had access to e-mail through SDNP(UNDP's Sustainable Development Networking Programme) and LEAD MexicoAssociates could access the Internet though "El Colegio del Mexico," the organizationhosting LEAD Mexico.

As the Internet developed, access to it became widely available and ISPs started toappear all around the world and in the LEAD Member Program countries. Soon theLEAD offices stopped acting as "ISPs" to the LEAD Associates and startedconcentrating their efforts in further developing the information systems LEADnetprovides to the LEAD Community. Nowadays most of the Associates that join LEADalready have experience with computers as well as their own e-mail accounts.

Next step: start building the community as theinfrastructure improves



In 1994 the minimum common denominator in terms of access to Internet resourceswas e-mail. Most of the LEAD Associates were able to access e-mail, though notwithout connectivity problems such as bad telephone lines, power failure, equipmentproblems, and configuration problems. At that time Internet software was notstraightforward to configure. The Microsoft Windows operating system did not comewith built-in support for TCP/IP so third-party software had to be installed andconfigured. Most of the e-mail software used by LEAD at the time was server-based e-mail systems such as PINE or ELM. In order to access those systems, be able toretrieve attachments, and print messages from the UNIX server in the local printer,LEAD Associates had to receive basic UNIX training and instructions on how to useuuencode and uudecode, deal with MIME attachments, use ftp, set terminal options,etc. All the functionality that comes built-in in today's operating systems and Web-based e-mail systems had to be carefully covered during the LEADnet trainingsessions. A lot of time was spent in order to perform tasks that are taken for grantedthese days.

The first step in integrating the LEAD Community was to set up an electronic mailinglist to allow Associates from different countries and Cohorts to communicate. Theidea was to create a mailing list to link all LEAD Associates and Fellows from the firstCohort to the active Cohort at the time. The system chosen was LISTPROC, which atthe time was available for free and supported the major features available in mostmailing list servers: moderated list, digest, automatic archival of messages, etc. TheLEADnet staff compiled LISTPROC on the DG/UX system, configured it, and sent anannouncement to all the LEAD Fellows and Associates via e-mail asking them tosubscribe to LEAD-L, the first international electronic mailing list of the LEADProgram.

A few months following the announcement, the number of Associates subscribing toLEAD-L started to increase. The demographics of the list was a direct reflection of theconnectivity status of LEADnet. Most of the people subscribed to LEAD-L were fromLEAD Canada (which started in 1994), LEAD Mexico, LEAD Brazil, and LEAD CIS.Figure 3 shows the LEADnet Connectivity Status in October 1995. This map does notrepresent the Internet connectivity status in those countries but the connectivitystatus of each of the LEAD Member Program offices.



Figure 3. Map showing the LEADnet Connectivity status in 1995

The LEAD-L mailing list never reached its intended purpose: to connect all the LEADAssociates via e-mail. There are several reasons for that. The main reason is the factthat the Associates had to subscribe to the list by themselves; they were notautomatically subscribed to it when joining LEAD. Reasons for not subscribingincluded connectivity problems, lack of knowledge on how to subscribe to LEAD-L,lack of experience using an e-mail package, equipment problems, and fear ofcomputers. In 1996 LEAD had 550 Associates and Fellows, of which 237 weresubscribed to LEAD-L.

In order to reach all the LEAD Associates and Fellows utilizing a singlecommunications channel, LEAD-L was deactivated and replaced with a new mailinglist based on a Microsoft Exchange Server. Each of the IT staff members of the LEADMember Programs, the LEADnet Coordinators, created a mailing list in his/her ownserver for each of the Cohorts of LEAD Associates and managed those lists from thatmoment on. A list for each cohort was created at LEAD International, whichautomatically forwards e-mail messages to the National and Regional cohort mailinglists created by the LEADnet Coordinators. A list for all the cohorts was then createdat LEAD International that forwards e-mails to all the Member Program lists reachingAssociates and Fellows from Cohort 1 to Cohort 8. As a new Cohort of Associates joinsLEAD, a mailing list is created in each of the LEAD Member Programs and linked tothe allcohorts list at LEAD International. The lists are managed by the LEADnetCoordinators and do not require the Associates to subscribe. They are automaticallyadded to the list, which gives them access to the worldwide network of LEAD Fellowsand Associates.

In 2000 LEAD has 1122 Fellows and Associates, of which all are automaticallysubscribed to the allcohorts list. Now the only factors limiting their access to thenetwork of LEAD Fellows and Associates are related to technical difficulties and not tothe lack of information on how to subscribe.



Building a presence on the World Wide Web

In early 1994 the LEAD International Web site was made available to the LEADcommunity. The Web site was hosted in a Data General Workstations running DG/UXand the NCSA httpd Web server. The Web site contained basic information about theLEAD Program as well as online guides containing links to Internet resources onTrade, Environment, Development, and Food.

Later in the same year LEAD Brazil developed its Web site and in the following yearother LEAD Programs followed: LEAD CIS, LEAD China, LEAD Mexico, and LEADIndonesia. In 1996 the LEAD Europe program started and their first Web site wasdeveloped. In 1997 LEAD Japan joined LEAD and developed its first site. The lastLEAD Program to establish a Web site was LEAD Southern Africa in 1999. At first theLEAD Web sites were going to be physically hosted at each of the LEAD MemberPrograms, but as the Internet developed it was realized that it would make more senseto host some of them in servers located in the United States where they would benefitfrom a better developed infrastructure. The first Web site to be hosted at LEADInternational was LEAD Indonesia's Web site, which was hosted from early 1996 untillate 1997 when LEAD Indonesia was able to host its own site at a reasonableperformance level. LEAD India's first Web site was developed in early 1998 andhosted at LEAD International. An ISP in the United States is currently hosting it andits mirror is at LEAD International, which also hosts sites for LEAD Pakistan andLEAD Southern Africa.

In early 2000 LEAD had 13 different Web sites: LEAD International, LEAD Brazil,LEAD Canada, LEAD CIS, LEAD China, LEAD Europe, LEAD India, LEAD Indonesia,LEAD Japan, LEAD Mexico, LEAD Nigeria, LEAD Pakistan, and LEAD SouthernAfrica. By the end of the year 2000 with the inclusion of a new LEAD MemberProgram in Francophone Africa, LEAD will have 14 Web sites serving the LEADCommunity.

Developing Webbased information systems

Soon after LEAD established its presence on the WWW, the potential of thetechnology was realized and LEAD started developing Web-based informationsystems to support the LEAD Community. The main purpose of the LEAD Web siteswas to provide the LEAD Community with access to information on the subjectsrelated to the LEAD Curriculum, to support the training program and networking.

In order to support the networking of LEAD Fellows and Associates, a databasecontaining information on them was developed in early 1995 and made availableonline. The database was generated on a UNIX workstation utilizing AWKprogramming language to convert the information from a file generated by dBase intoseveral HTML (hypertext markup language) pages containing the name, e-mailaddress, picture, and biography of LEAD Associates. That database was fullysearchable utilizing a simple search script. The development of that online databasewas the first step in utilizing the WWW as a tool to enable networking among the



members of the LEAD Community. Through it they were able to access the biographyof other LEAD Associates sharing the same interests as them and contacting them byfollowing the link to their e-mail addresses.

During the same year in cooperation with IPS (Inter Press Service), an organizationproviding information on global issues backed by a network of journalists in morethan 100 countries, LEAD started providing LEAD Associates with password-protected access to IPS News. At that time IPS did not have a Web site and distributedits news by a BBS. The LEADnet staff developed a automated system to retrieve thenews files everyday utilizing a daily scheduled Zmodem file transfer from IPS toLEAD, and then convert the files into HTML pages consisting of a daily table ofcontents and individual news pages. It was developed on a UNIX workstation utilizingthe AWK programming language. The system provided LEAD Associates with up-to-date access to a new service. The IPS news section of LEAD International's Web sitewas discontinued once IPS started providing it through their site.

As Web technologies evolved, LEAD started setting up Web sites to support each of itsInternational Training Sessions. Each of those Web sites would contain a ConceptPaper, information on the venue of the session, and information about the speakersand their papers in advance so Associates could get ready before arriving in thecountry where the session was held. After the session took place, pictures and theproceedings were made available online. LEAD Web sites were then more than justonline brochures; they were starting to provide more relevant information supportingthe training program.

As time passed the number of LEAD Member Programs increased from the initialseven most populated countries in the world to 13 Member Programs in the year2000: LEAD International, LEAD Brazil, LEAD Canada, LEAD CIS, LEAD China,LEAD Europe, LEAD Francophone Africa, LEAD India, LEAD Indonesia, LEADJapan, LEAD Mexico, LEAD Nigeria, LEAD Pakistan, and LEAD Southern Africa.

With the increasing number of LEAD Member Programs, number of Associatesjoining the program, and number of training sessions being organized around theworld, the complexity of putting information online almost reached an unmanageablestage. At one point LEAD had 11 Web sites around the world, each with its own look,navigation interface, and information structure. There was no uniformity; it was notpossible to jump from one site to the other; and each had the contact information in adifferent place and used different colors. By looking at two of the LEAD Web sites in1997 it was hard to guess that they were part of the same organization.

In order to avoid the LEAD Web sites turning into a chaotic group of Web pagesrandomly dispersed throughout the globe without any structure, LEAD Internationaldeveloped the "LEAD Web Site Development Guidelines." That was a documentcontaining information on how to structure each of the LEAD Web sites utilizing anewly developed graphical user interface, navigation bar, and information structure.The guidelines were presented during the Third LEADnet Coordinators Workshoporganized in Switzerland in July 1998, parallel to INET'98, which the coordinatorsattended.



Figure 4. Some of the information systems available through LEADInternational's Web site

How to minimize the effort of distributing andupdating information globally?

The development of the LEAD Web Site Development Guidelines was the first step intrying to harmonize and simplify the process of distributing information to the LEADCommunity throughout the LEAD Web sites. The second step was to create onlinedatabases to support the information services provided by LEADnet in order tominimize the effort required to add and update contents.

The reason for migrating most of the information distribution processes to database-based systems was very simple: by separating content from the design, future changesto the graphical user interface and information architecture of LEAD Web sites wouldbe much simpler. Instead of having to change hundreds of pages containing data anddesign elements, only a couple of pages containing a design template and the queriesto the database systems had to be changed. What is more, by separating content fromdesign it was possible to allow an international audience to update information onLEAD sites through the use of Web-based interfaces to the database, without havingto give them direct access to our Web servers' file systems.

The first database to be created was the LEADnet Photo Library, an online library ofphotographs taken during LEAD International Sessions. The photo library providedLEAD Associates and Fellows with access to hundreds of pictures online they would



otherwise be unable to see. Without the Internet those pictures would be hidden insome bookshelf in the LEAD office in New York. The pictures are classified accordingto the location, date, training session, and contents. The classification of the imagesallowed LEAD to better develop its International Training Session pages. Instead ofcreating individual pages containing pictures taken during a specific session, we cannow insert a query to the database that will return the pictures related to that session;for example, there is a query that retrieves all group pictures taken during a trainingsession in China, in 1998, including the picture in Figure 1. The system was developedutilizing Microsoft's SQL (structured query language) Server and Allaire's Cold FusionApplication Server.

A major improvement caused by the adoption of Web-based relational databasesystems was on the way LEAD International used to update information on its Fellowsand Associates. The first database of LEAD Fellows and Associates was a standalonesystem based on dBase. Each of the Member Programs had access to its own subset ofthe database and was responsible for updating it. Without a proper communicationsnetwork the only way to exchange data was by shipping diskettes containing sectionsof the database internationally and synchronizing the data centrally. That systemnever worked as expected and was later replaced with a completely Web-baseddatabase system which allowed each of the LEAD Fellows and Associates to updatetheir own information using a username and password. Each of the LEAD Memberprograms was provided with an administrator username and password, which gavethem access to the information related to their country/region. This system is stillbeing utilized today and has proven to be a better alternative to the previousmethodology.

The audience utilizing the database is composed of individuals from more than 40different countries where the first language is not English, the language of the LEADProgram. That fact forced us to develop an editing system to allow an English-speaking person to go through the information entered and correct it, making sure itfollows our standards for publications. The editing system is simply another interfacethat gives the editor access to a subset of the database. The new interface took nomore than a few days to be developed.

These two Web database systems proved to be reliable and easily expandable whichsuggested we should further explore the technology to improve the LEADnet services.We then decided to develop an online Database of Conferences containinginformation on upcoming conferences related to environment and development. Thatis an extremely simple online database that can be updated by the LEAD Associatesand Fellows through the Web. Any Internet user can use the update interface of thisdatabase without the need for a password. In order to avoid people entering contentsof an inappropriate nature, an intermediary draft database was created. Data enteredinto the online Database of Conference by a regular Internet user goes directly intothe draft database, which is reviewed by a LEAD staff member and then transferred tothe actual database using a Web interface.

The next steps in utilizing online database technologies were the development ofLEADcat, a search engine/catalogue of links to Web sites containing information ontopics related to environment and development and an International LEAD Calendar



of Events.

The International LEAD Calendar of Events was developed to better integrate thework each of the LEAD Member Program does in terms of organizing LEAD TrainingSessions. Each year LEAD organizes close to or more than 80 training sessions andmeetings worldwide. In the past, information about those events was collected on anas-needed basis. Even after the development of the LEAD Web Site DevelopmentGuidelines, which included a standard for the location and design of the CalendarWeb page on each LEAD Member Program Web sites, the process of gatheringinformation about LEAD Events was time consuming and required someone to visiteach of the LEAD Web sites looking for that information and then collect and processit. We solved that by creating a centralized Web-based database of events that can beupdated by each of the LEADnet Coordinators from the Member Programs. Thecalendar database contains all the information you would expect to find in a calendarof events in addition to a link to the Web page containing detailed information aboutthat specific event. That link gave the calendar the functionality of a jump-start pagefor Associates and Fellows looking for information on LEAD Events happening in thefuture and the functionality of an archive by providing visitors with links to sitesholding information on LEAD events that happened in the past.

Figure 5. Basic architecture of the LEAD International Calendar of Events

In addition to providing links to regular LEAD events throughout the LEAD MemberPrograms, the Calendar also contains information about "virtual" events organized byLEADnet.



Virtual conferences

An interesting aspect of the LEAD Program is the fact that an Associate from oneMember Program will have the opportunity to meet another Associate from anotherMember Program on several occasions. They will meet face to face in at least twoInternational Sessions during the Associate phase and maybe other times in theFellows Program phase. They will meet on several other occasions in the virtual worldthrough the exchange of e-mail messages, participation on a pre-International Sessionchat session, or participation on a live virtual interactive chat session (webcast + chat)

Live interactive chat sessions utilize streaming technologies (audio/video) combinedwith a chat room and the "broadcast" of URLs (uniform resource locators) and slidesto support a virtual conference on the Internet. This system allows for synchronousand asynchronous sharing of information because the live sessions can be recordedand posted on the Web for later viewing.

LEAD utilized the technology successfully three times in 1999, and is planning toutilize it many more times in the years to come to bring a disperse multiculturalaudience to share their knowledge and ideas.

Figure 6. Screen shot of one of the live interactive chat sessions organizedby LEAD International: Can We Feed Ourselves? a live interactive chatwith Professor M. S. Swaminathan

LEAD International currently uses many third-party tools to support its mailing lists,



BBSs, chat rooms, and other information systems available through its site. Futureexpansion of the services provided by LEADnet to the LEAD Community includeutilization of XML (extensible markup language) to ease the process of updatingcontents while keeping the design ready for modifications, better integration of theexisting systems, and development of an integrated media library which will giveLEAD Associates access to a categorized database of documents, videos, liveinteractive chat session archives, interviews, and e-mails exchanged through mailinglists.

Conclusions

In order to reach the point where LEAD could host virtual live interactive chatsessions over the Web, a lot of work had to be done to solve some of the basicinfrastructure and connectivity problems. Not all of them have been solved today butif we had waited for all the LEAD Member Programs to reach a stage where all ofthem had full Internet connectivity we would not even have a Web site.

With that in mind here are some recommendations for multinational nonprofitorganizations trying to build virtual communities:

Do not wait for the technology and infrastructure to catch up; developsystems taking into consideration the minimum common denominator ofyour audience but at the same time utilize the latest technologies tominimize the effort required to distribute information globally.Push new technologies to your users in nonessential areas of your Web site.Always provide technological alternatives when dealing with a diverseinternational audience.Utilize a participatory approach; user feedback and input are extremelyimportantForge partnerships with other organizations and share resources.Minimize the amount of human intervention necessary to execute a task; letthe computer do most of the work!

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