The Sustainable Wellington Net

Developing an electronic community network for the environment/conservation community

Mike Ennis and Tom Robinson
(sustainable.wellington.net.nz)

We are the main organisers / coordinators / administrators for the Sustainable Wellington Net. I have been involved in the Peace and Environment movement for a long time primarily at a grass roots level, I am currently secretary of Action for Environment. Tom has also been involved with Wellington Environment groups and is also a very talented programmer and web designer.

In this paper I will give firstly some background to the development of the Sustainable Wellington Net (SWN). I will then outline the process of setting up the SWN and then briefly look at some of the features of the SWN. I will finally look at some of the problems we have encountered, some possible future directions for SWN and also some of the wider issues of the use of the internet by environment/conservation groups.

INTRODUCTION

The initial concept of The sustainable Wellington net started as part of a wider plan for a centre in Wellington to promote the aims of sustainable development - a "Green Centre". Throughout 1996 to 97 as a response to their adoption of the goals of Agenda 21 formulated at the 1992 UN Earth Summit, the Wellington city Council held wide ranging public consultations on the future development of Wellington. The outcome of this process was the "Our City/Our Future" document which was a strategy for the future of Wellington.

Goals, targets and initiatives were outlined in "Our city/Our future". One of the goals was to establish a "Green Centre" to promote and facilitate sustainable development in Wellington - on an individual, community, business and governmental level.

A steering committee was established to develop the idea of the Green centre. The committee was made up of community representatives from a diverse range of backgrounds. As a first step we designed a questionnaire which was sent out to environmental, conservation and community groups in Wellington designed to gauge the level of support for the idea of a Green Centre. A further aim of the survey was to get some idea of what services and facilities these groups thought the centre should provide. The responses we received showed there was very strong support for the idea. A large number of groups indicated that there was a need for a centre that would provide a whole range of resources on environmental issues - a sort of one stop environmental shop.

Unfortunately the realities of the availability of long term funding in Wellington mean that the physical Green Centre is going to be a long term project. There have been a number of environmental centres set up in NZ but only a few have survived for any length of time. It is the basic problem of having this fixed-costs-financial millstone around your collective neck. We did not want to take the step of making a commitment to a physical centre without any assured long term funding.

The organising committee then looked at other options for promoting our aims and meeting the needs which our survey had identified. It was decided to use the communication and information sharing potential of the Internet to, in effect, set up a "virtual Green Centre", which could fulfil many of the functions of a physical Green Centre but at a level of cost which meant it could be set up quickly and maintained relatively easily. The concept meshed well with feelings I had about the need for some sort of network to link Wellington groups together to encourage the sharing of resources and ideas and to coordinate action on things like lobbying and making submissions.

THE FIRST STEPS TO THE SUSTAINABLE WELLINGTON NET

I will look at this process in two parts; firstly the initial work we did to define the framework, format and content of the SWN; secondly the selection of our networking platform.

1. Defining Format and Content

In setting up the SWN we felt that it was vital for us to:

1. Clearly define our community
2. Clearly identify the needs of that community

To try and resolve these points we designed a short questionnaire which looked at a number of points:

• Whether groups had Internet access, what level of access they had, and how much they used it
• What services that the SWN could provide would be useful for their group (we gave a list of possible things that we could provide)

The questionnaire was sent out to all Environment / Conservation groups in the Wellington Region. The response rate was approx 45%. The feedback we got was interesting and useful, particularly regarding the services that groups thought we should provide. The four key things that were emphasised in the responses were:-

a) A directory of Wellington Environment / Conservation groups

b) Updates on current Wellington issues

c) Links to useful info

d) Community notice board / Green calendar for Wellington

The results gave a very strong indication that groups felt the SWN could be useful to them and that they wanted us to focus on local issues.

2. Selection of Networking Platform

I will just digress a bit at this point to give a little bit of background to our choice of webhosting platform and to put in a strong plug for the 20/20 Trust.The WCC is in the process of setting up a Wellington Community Network, and to manage this they have set up a trust structure called the 20/20 Trust. Three key projects which the 20/20 Trust run are a seminar programme providing info on the use of the Internet which is aimed specifically at NGO?s; PC Recycle which is a computer refurbishing scheme designed to provide computers at no or low cost to schools and NGO?S. The 20/20 Trust also manages the Wellington World Wide Web (or W4 as it is better known), this provides free website hosting for NGO?s.We chose to locate the SWN on this Community Webhosting scheme.

The choice of this for our base was, to be frank, based initially on the pragmatic point that it was free (given our total lack of funding this was of some significance). It has been a been a good choice, it has provided adequate space for growth and a nexus for basing associated community websites. Also our vision of developing an Environment/Conservation electronic community network fitted in well with their concept of a wider Wellington community Network. The Sustainable Wellington Net would fit within this network as one of a number of "Special Interest Groups".

SETTING UP THE SWN WEBSITE

With some clear idea of our community and their needs and a secure host we then began the practical work of setting up the SWN. This developed in a number of stages:

1. Firstly we just had the Front page, mission Statement, a directory of groups and a links page.
2. We have progressively added new pages

1. this is the front page of the site with the introduction and our Hot Topics section. The Hot Topics are current environmental issues in Wellington.
2. This is the network page. It really is one of the key parts of the site. As well as info on groups there are hotlinks to their sites.
3. This is our current Editorial page. We have experimented with this trying to provide in depth comment on current issues. Issues discussed have covered a wide range of topics ranging from international down to an individual level. Issues covered have included the WTO, CJD, GE foods, transport in Wellington and installing solar water heating in your home. We would like in the future to have guest editorials from other Wellington groups
4. We have experimented with using the website as a resource for specific campaigns. This is the current page we have for the Chaffers Park Campaign. Other ones we did were on Food Irradiation and the 1999 Central Govt elections where we surveyed Wgtn Central candidates on environmental issues. This is something we would like to develop in_the future.
5. This is the Green Calendar page, it is probably the only comprehensive one for Wgtn.
6. This is the Green Map of Wellington we are developing. It?s part of a globally connected network of Geen Map sites aimed at promoting community sustainability. The idea is to give info on environmental and ecologically significant sites - places of natural beauty, bike and walking tracks, Green Businesses. It will also list environmental "black spots".
7. This is our mission statement :-"To utilise the communication and info sharing potential of the internet to promote and facilitate ecologically sustainable development in Wellington" We feel that it is essential for a Community Service website to be as accessible as possible. To further these aims Tom did a substantial redesign to make the site more user friendly and to ensure that it :-

• Would be fast to download and not graphics intensive
• Would display correctly and be usable by any browser (including text only ones)
• Would comply with the latest HTML specifications (HTML 4.0, CSS)
• Would be friendly to people with disabilities (the site is Bobby Approved)

[Over to Tom]

Thank you Mike The Sustainable Wellington site has been designed to meet a number of Internet standards as I'll explain:

Given that there's no one company or organisation which controls the Internet means there's often an element of anarchy about it.

There are a number of standards bodies which attempt to remedy this, but given the above, they can only make recommendations, not enforce them. One of these bodies is the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. This was created in October '94 and currently has 400 member organisations and 60 full-time staff - so when they make a recommendation people tend to listen!

One of their standards is about the underlying code beneath a web page, or HTML.

Another standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines which ensure the web is accessible to people with disabilities. The Center for Applied Special Technology, or CAST, provides a free checking service called Bobby. Bobby is used to check that 3 million web pages per month meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - For example, Bobby checks that pages will make sense if read aloud by computer instead of viewed on the screen.

I'm pleased to say Sustainable Wellington has passed both the W3C HTML test and is Bobby approved. And back to Mike.

CONCLUSION

The SWN has been operating just over a year. January 1999 was our first real month of operation and the total number of visits to the site for that month was 31. (To be frank probably 60% of these hits were Tom and I). Thankfully there has been a substantial growth since then. In March over 500 people accessed the site. There has also been a real growth in the use of the SWN by local groups, particularly the Action alerts and the Green Calendar.

A key priority for our future development is to increase the use value of the SWN to Environment and Conservation groups in Wellington. We want to make it something that is integral and indispensable to the work of the groups in our community. Given our limited funding, a lot of the publicity for the SWN has been essentially word of mouth (or cyber word of mouth). We have had to make a lot of use of the local media to publicise the SWN and we have taken advantage of any opportunities for networking and meeting with groups in our community. We have also produced a Green Bookmark with information about the website and the note "please bookmark this site". We have distributed this at places like Organic food shops, libraries, CAB?s etc. A number of Wellington groups have sent them out with their mail outs. At the Environment and Conservation Organisations annual conference in Wellington we set up a display and an operating terminal with a cached copy of the website. This was very useful as a trial run and we hope to repeat this at future events.

There are still real problems that we are facing. Some of these problems are a result of the realities of NGO?s in NZ. Firstly there are a very large number of groups even at a local Wellington level. (ECO , a national umbrella organisation of Environment/Conservation groups has about 70 odd members nationally, but in Wgtn alone there are approximately 65 Environment/Conservation groups). This has both a positive and negative aspects. It creates a very diverse and strong grass roots movement but it also can result in fragmentation and lack of communication. (The facilitation of communication, networking and the sharing of resources and information was something we saw as a key function for SWN). This problem can be exacerbated by a parochialism or conservatism in groups. (Our survey showed that while all of the respondents had internet access only 40% used it for their groups work). One group who replied to our survey commented that they had "little or no time to make use of internet possibilities". This just seems tragic, but unfortunately is all to common.

There are a number of directions we are looking at for the future development of SWN:-

a) Producing a hard copy of the Green Map

b) Green business directory

c) Links to Environmental Business network, Cleaner production info. The internet is interesting, and it is a challenge to environment/conservation groups, particularly at a local grass roots level.

It has the potential to change significantly how groups operate and organise.

A recent MA thesis by Clem White on Environmental groups and the internet ("Environmental Activism and the Internet"gives some interesting insights into this process. White found that 71% of the groups who responded said that using the internet was of significant help in their work.

The specific areas where he found it of value are:-

• Communication - it facilitates communication, and is cost effective and fast. White quotes the example from the US. In 1994 Senator Bennett Johnston attempted to rush through legislation to allow the dumping of nuclear waste in the Mojave Desert. The Nuclear Information and Research Service used the internet to send out action alerts, which generated enough letters and emails to compel Johnston to drop the project within a week. The Director of NIRS said:- "We never even used a piece of paper. This was a case when using the postal system would have been just far too slow".
• It facilitates coordinating actions over a wide geographic area :- A good example of this is FOE Australia?s use of the internet to generate worldwide protests to the World Heritage Committee in Paris over plans to mine uranium at Jabiluka in the Kakadu national park in the Northern Territory.
• Allows access to information resources which previously were inaccessible. (The speed with which I gathered the info for the Food Irradiation Campaign page is a good e.g.).
• It enables groups to do more with their limited resources

The internet has the potential, to some extent at least, to level the playing field. To redress the massive imbalances in power and resources between environmental groups and industry

US commentator Mario Marino posed the question about community networks: " are they part of a ephemeral social phenomenon that is destined to merely stall or implode . Or do they represent a vibrant social force capable of adapting to a rapidly changing world and community needs, and achieving positive, lasting social change in their communities?"

We believe very strongly in the latter proposition and we hope that the SWN will develop as a major catalyst for the growth of community awareness of and participation in the sustainable development of Wellington and NZ.