Awele Documentation Reap what you share

It is fundamental to keep in mind that an e-forum is only one among many communication media in a citizens' alliance.

Forums privilege persons who have access to the Internet, and among these, those who already have some practice in this type of work.

The obvious risk is that the discussions and debates are owned only by a handful of people.

You should therefore try to develop or encourage relays to other forms of communication and discussion: call up experiences on the field and the results of local working groups, encourage the work (the summaries, for instance) to be translated into local languages, or even into non-written forms, create links with other Web sites, etc.

For this, you must be able to depend on those, among the persons subscribed to the forum, who are local network members. Encourage them (publicly, on the forum, as well as through individual private messages) to share the summaries with their networks at local informal meetings, and then to inform the forum of what is said in those meetings.

... forum, regular mail, fax

The practical methods for links between forums, regular mail and fax will depend a lot on the nature of the forum itself, on the reality of the networks represented by the participants of the forum, and on other factors.

However, the connection between these two media – e-forum and printed communication – is indispensable to enlarge the debate and to get the broadest possible participation in the work among the interested persons.

The same messages or documents that serve to introduce the discussions in the forums should be circulated to non-connected persons by fax or by regular mail.

... require time to respond

These latter should consequently have the time to respond, therefore a deadline that will be the same for the forum, so that things do not get decided among the people discussing things on line before the non-connected ones have even received their mail. The two-week units that we recommend for the discussion of one topic (see Chapter II) take this element into account.

All the summaries that you – or the person who introduced the discussion – will write will be circulated simultaneously on the forum, by fax and by regular mail.

... and the time and the means for implementation

The connection between the forum and regular mail / fax requires time and means (photocopies, mailing and faxing expenses). This issue should be taken up with your team and its financial aspects need to be factored in when preparing a budget for a "remote debate."

Other elements to be linked to the work on the forum will be the Web site, face-to-face meetings, newsletters, individual or collective research, work on the field, experience sharing, non-written communication (you may have a section for short videos or sound documents on the associated Web site), external communication (the media, artistic events). You can and should keep these possibilities in mind.