The Bede Island Community Association
(BICA) is an umbrella organisation with 60 members operating in the
Leicester City Challenge area. BICA wanted to show members and anyone
else interested how useful the Internet might be, so volunteers
Veronica Frazier and John Cox carried out some research for a
demonstration.
The result of their work was a set of Web pages with links to other
sites that had information on topics likely to be of interest to
community groups - for example, children & youth, crime
prevention, disability, education and equality issues, as well as
several reference sites about national and local government. It took
several weeks of browsing around the Internet, as well as research in
magazines' and newspapers' Internet sections.
They commented: 'The most useful resource we used was the search
directory Yahoo. Approximately three quarters of the links we
eventually used came from categories within Yahoo- particularly the
UK & Ireland version of Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.co.uk/).
'We decided to focus on the web sites and pages as our experience
with newsgroups tended to be more bewildering than useful from a
novice's point of view. (We felt as if we were constantly coming into
a conversation midway and never quite figuring out what it was all
about.)
'After finding relevant sites and making bookmarks, John sorted them
into categories. This restructured bookmark file was then opened in
the web editor to create our own links web page. Using the web editor
was not much different from using any word processing or graphics
package.
'Eventually the list of links became too large to be viewed without
scrolling the page up and down, so John developed additional links
pages.
You can view the BICA pages we created at http://www.communities.org.uk
Our conclusions on what's really needed to help groups are:
Use someone else's Internet connection (like your local cyber cafe, if you have one or a friend or co-worker) for your first try. It has the benefit of someone else being around to help you out. Failing that ask someone with demonstration equipment to organise a workshop and talk the local authority into funding it. And above all, keep persevering (remember the light bulb and the telephone didn't take off overnight either).
The Internet is an additional tool
for communicating with other people in other communities around the
nation and the rest of the world. With proper training and everyone
using it as every day standard, the use of the Internet can greatly
improve the networking of individuals and groups - making distances
and time differences virtually inconsequential. When used
effectively, it can be cheaper than traditional telephone methods and
more responsive than traditional postal methods.
We are getting closer and closer to achieving immense benefits from
using the Internet every day.
Article by Veronica Frazier
Web Pages by John Cox
e-mail us at bicanet@foobar.co.uk
www.partnerships.org.uk/articles/bede1.html