the international network of Lions Clubs
3'rd international vice president of Lions Clubs International, Kajit "KJ" Habanananda, from Thailand giving a speech at the Finnish Lions' annual convention in Hamina, eastern Finland in June 1996.
To: Lions Clubs International
From: Ilkka Siissalo, Lions Club Espoo/Meri, district 107B Finland
cc: see last page
3’rd International vice president Kajit “KJ” Habanananda
Lions’ Internet service LionNet Finland webmaster
I have received your e-mail address, thank you very much. And as we agreed I have made a permanent link from the LionNet pages so that the LionNet users can easily send you personal e-mail messages.
The early phase Something like 19 months ago I set up an Internet World Wide Web service for my own Lions club, LC Espoo/Meri. At that time it was apparently only the fifth Lions related WWW service in the world. There was one club from the Bay City area, California, one from Canada, one from Sweden and one Finnish Leo club, the Leo Club Espoo/Olari from my own district. Very soon after the start of my service I attended a local Lions meeting headed by the that-time DG of district 107B, lion Harri Ala-Kulju, who was later to become the country chairman for Finland. I told lion Harri about the Internet and the great possibilities I saw it could have for the Lions and suggested that we should open a broader and better WWW service on the net that would cover at least our district if not the whole country.
Lion Harri got instantly interested and introduced me to lion Kari Kemppinen from LC Espoo, who was the PR-committee chairman of district 107B. Together Kari and I planned and built the first country-wide Lions’ Internet service. It was inaugurated just before the 1995 Finnish annual convention in Kokkola. Lion Kari arranged a small, but nice presentation stand to the Kokkola meeting where we handed out press releases and gave presentations with a small portable PC connected to the network only with a hand-held GSM radio telephone and a GSM data card. Afterwards we wrote an article about the service to the Finnish language edition of “The Lion”.
We got a permission to use Finnish University and Research Network Funet’s world-famous server “Nic.funet.fi” alias www.funet.fi for free. The machine is owned by the Finnish Ministry of Education and it’s among the 10 biggest Internet file servers in the world. We took an ambitious start and greeted the users “welcome to the homepages of Lions Clubs International”, as “provided by the Lions district 107B Finland”. Very shortly afterwards - to our great surprise - we started receiving a stunning amount of anxious greetings from all over the world: USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa etc. etc. In the beginning most of the material we had published was in Finnish, but very soon we realized that we had to start producing more in English. And the more English language material I made, the more we got nice e-mail feedback.
After that meeting things started happening fast. Secretary general Jussi Kuittinen from the Finnish Lions office made a decision that the office shall be connected to the Internet by means of e-mail. We also met the Hamina annual convention organizers and got their support for the idea of bringing the Internet alive on the Hamina conference venue. On the international side movement was rapid too. Within three months the number of users grew more than 50% and before the Hamina convention LionNet was active in one way or another in seven countries. I arranged for the technicalities in setting up the world’s first world-wide Lions e-mail list service that helps the communication between the various webmasters throughout the world.
It was more than a week of hard work, day and night, but it was worth it. We estimated that maybe over 1000 people visited the stand during the convention day. According to the logs hundreds more have visited the WWW pages we made during the day.
1. Exchanging of information between Lions in various countries
The LionNet, although still faily small, has already proved the tremendous strength of the Internet in bringing together lions from different countries and cultures. This not only helps us in avoiding to “reinvent the wheel” but also spreads information about useful activities and ideas that have been used in one part of the world and could be used elsewhere as well. With its speed and feedback mechanisms the Internet is far superior to any printed media in this aspect. The publication of the speech you gave in Hamina, together with your digitized picture giving it within less than an hour after the speech ended, and the reply from Pennsylvania, USA, within the next hour was just a very modest demonstration of what can be done if we only want to.
The Internet can, and should, be used also for more interactive type of communication between the lions members. For instance, the monthly report forms or the arrangement for ordering club supplies from an electronic web-based catalogue come easily to mind. These don’t have to replace entirely the paper forms, but should rather be seen as easier alternatives for those who can and want to use them. (For instance I have often heard the saying that the Lions HQ doesn’t want to use electronic forms, because not every club in the less developed countries can use them. This seems to be in a ridiculous contradiction with an e-mail letter which I recently received from Zimbabwe, asking me to “do something” so that they would finally get an Internet based alternative to the manual monthly report forms, because the Internet is working, whereas the local postal service loses approximately 50% of all written letters !)
2. Increasing the public knowledge about the Lions and our activities
Even as it is small today the LionNet can be regarded as the “biggest ever coordinated PR activity” - in quotes - of the Lions movement. As you know, there are something between 50 and 100 million users on the Internet. Even though just a very limited number of them actively try to find Lions information, our pages come up in generic searches from the WWW search engines. This was nicely demonstrated by for instance the letter I received recently from a medical doctor in Malesia. He was planning to set up a brand new eye clinic in his country and had found my page “Finnish Lions help to diagnose early glaucoma” and was thanking me wholeheartedly. My short story that I published together with the lions in Oulu, northern Finland, who had conducted the activity, helped him prove to the officials in his country that his idea of the new eye clinic was medically valid and useful. This is the kind of activity we wanted to promote more when we coined our slogan “On the Net We Serve”.
Especially I would dare to ask you if you could in any way help us so that the Oak Brook headquarters would somehow recognize the existence of the LionNet cooperation. Now that we are building this network of areal and country-specific nodes the HQ could have their chance and role as becoming the “LionNet International”, or super-node above all our existing and forthcoming areal and country-wide services. I have a fear that if the HQ do not join the international cooperation they might build yet another isolated “island” on the Internet, not contributing to the global Lions network village in the way that now would be possible for them. The speed with which the Lions’ webspace keeps expanding makes some kind of hierarchy on the net imperative. And I sincerely hope that the people at the HQ realize their unique chance in establishing this hierarchy now, because later it will be extremely difficult to build. Also, it would be an honour to us if they could display the name and maybe the slogan of our network somewhere on their pages. And I can also promise that all the LionNet webmasters will be more than willing to help Oak Brook in any way in joining the net if they just can tell us what kind of help they might need.
Secondly, I dare to ask your help so that if you please could communicate in your future contacts with the international directors and district governors the importance of not only coming to the Internet and being visible there but also the utter importance of cooperation and coordination, both within districts and multiple districts but also internationally. We would be much oblidged if you could recommend the idea of joining the international network we have started and we welcome new sites to the LionNet.
Thirdly, we all at the LionNet would be extremely glad to publish on the net and on the mailing list any material you may personally have, be it a homepage, speeches, stories of achievements, notices to clubs, an “International President’s column” etc. To keep the network alive and changing for the interest of our readers we welcome all Lions related material.
I believe with your support the Lion Net might have a bright future before it.
Yours sincerely,
Ilkka Siissalo
LionNet Finland webmaster
Lions Club Espoo/Meri, district 107 B 1’st vice president
siissalo@funet.fi fax: + 358 0 457 2302
LionNet Finland: http://www.funet.fi/pub/org/charity/lions/
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