Asian Women's Resource Exchange successfully hold 1999 Asian Women's Electronic Network Training Workshop in Seoul, Korea by Mylene Soto and Chat Garcia Ramilo source: http://www.isiswomen.org/ict/1999/com00009.html related URL: http://www.jca.apc.org/aworc/went99/ Twenty three participants from national and regional women's organizations in Asia came together for the first Women's Electronic Network Training Workshop (WENT'99) on June 21-26, 1999. WENT 99 was designed to "train participants on basic website development tools and other Internet-based group communication so that women's organizations may effectively use the technology to exchange and disseminate information on the 5- year review of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA)." The training workshop was hosted by the Asia Pacific Women's Information Network (APWIN), a center specializing in training women in information technology based at the Sookmyung Women's University. WENT 99 was held at the university's campus in Seoul, Korea. Sookmyung University President Dr. Kyungsook Lee has been appointed as the UNESCO Chairholder in Communication and Technology for Women in the Asia and Pacific regions from June 1998 to June 2001. The WENT 99 graduates were women from Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand. Five of them represented regional women's organizations based in Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Two other participants were from regional intergovernmental bodies. The training sessions focused on using and setting up group communications, web authoring, searching and organising information on women for the Web. Trainees were given a briefing about the global and regional Beijing +5 review process and activities to provide the training context. For five days, women collectively learned to build websites and to use mailing lists. At the end of the training, the participants came up with a website group project. The final output were 5 websites tackling issues along the 12 critical areas of concern of the BPFA. The titles of the websites captures what they are about. Asian Women [HAND-IN- HAND] Against Violence featured information on women's human rights and violence against women. Voices of Women in Asia- Pacific Region linked regional information on the review process. The Mango Stickey Rice's Domestic Violence Web Site, which was voted as the best website by the trainees, provided a comprehensive coverage of domestic violence from definition, resources, action and links to services. The Global Campaign 2000: Honor and Justice to Comfort Women was dedicated to the December 2000 Tokyo Tribunal on Japan's military sexual slavery. Women in the Himalayan Ecosystem, jointly created by trainees from India and Mongolia, highlighted the critical environmental issues for women living in the Himalayas. All of the participants planned to use the skills and information they acquired from the training in their organizations' general information work and specific Beijing review activities. Technical skills were not the only learning that the trainees brought home with them however. In those five days, the participants shared experiences and developed a camaraderie that has gone beyond the Seoul workshop. The words of two of the trainees echoes the collective sentiment of the group. "Thank you very much for the friendships and support. I feel a real women's network among Went'99 participants. Women's network, it's my dream". Reiko Aoki of the Asia Japan Women's Resource Center. "This sort of personal sketches of our short time together are treasures of the human side that, interestingly, rose above anything else in our Seoul's supposedly techno-laden workshop. In the final analysis, my greatest lesson was that it is the human side of IT (Information Technology) that connects, the rest (technology et al) just gets connected along". -Nani Buntarian, moderator of "Perempuan" the first and biggest women's mailing list in Indonesia The WENT'99 training team was a multicultural and multilingual team composed of women from Asia Pacific Women's Information Network Center (APWINC), JCA-NET, Association for Progressive Communications-Women's Networking Support Programme(APC- WNSP), Women's Information and Research Centre(WIRC)- Mongolia, and Isis International-Manila. WENT 99 was organized by the Asian Women's Resource Exchange (AWORC), an Internet-based women's information service and network in Asia. AWORC develops cooperative approaches and partnerships in increasing access to and exploring applications of new information and communication technologies (ICT) for women's empowerment. It also expands existing regional networks in the women's movement, promotes electronic resource sharing and builds a regional information service to support women's advocacies, specifically those critical for women in Asia. WENT 99 is the first in a series of technical training workshops on website construction to support the global review of the implementation of the BPFA. An African women website building workshop is scheduled to take place from September 6 to 10, 1999 in Johannesburg. This initiative is being implemented by SangoNet, Association for Proegressive Communciation (APC) partner in South Africa, on behalf of APC-Africa-Women, the regional network for Africa APC's Women Programme. On a global scale, the WomenAction network is organizing a workshop designed to build a global electronic network for the Beijing review will bring together women's organizations from various regions for a six day training and strategizing session. This global workshop will also be held at the Sookmyung Women's Unvierity from September 27 to October 2, 1999. WomenAction is a 16 member coalition that is launching a global network of websites to share information and track progress on the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women. AWORC is a member of WomenAction. WENT 99 generated a lot of interest in the region, with a total of 40 women applying to be included in training workshop. All WENT 99 trainees are now part of an information network Asia for the Beijing review. The success of the course has prompted AWORC to seriously consider organizing another training next year. So, look out for WENT 2000! *This trailblazing initiative of AWORC was supported financially by Japan Foundation Asia Center, United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) New York Office, East and South East Asia and South Asia Regional Offices, and Mama Cash. * Documentation of WENT'99 can be accessed from: http://www.jca.apc.org/aworc/went99/ * Chat Garcia is manager of Isis Manila's Resource Center and Information Program. She is also coordinator of the Asian Women's Resource Exchange. * Mylene who also works in Isis Manila was one of the 21 graduates of WENT'99. ================================================= Copyright © 1999 Isis International-Manila. Permission is hereby granted to use this document for personal use and for training and education activites of women's organizations provided that the article is used in full, the author and publisher are cited, and this copyright statement is produced. Permission is also given to mirror this document on WWW servers. ---------------------------------- Send mail for the 'huridocs-tech' list to 'huridocs-tech@hrea.org'. Mail administrative requests to 'majordomo@hrea.org'. For additional assistance, send mail to: 'owner-huridocs-tech@hrea.org'. Archives of previous messages posted to the list can be found at: http://www.human-rights.net/huridocs-tech.
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