Dnevnik Daily writes about IRBF

The potential that the Internet represents for the activity of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) is enormous, and its applications are still being discovered. However, for a huge number of Bulgarian organisations to be online is a unachievable luxury. In our century this is definitely a disadvantage, which affects the global activeness of the non-governmental sector.

This is the output that has been made from the research of the Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation at the end of 2002 amongst representatives of the Bulgarian NGO sector. According the Foundation, only an insignificant number of the organisations have a national range, and it often happens that NGOs working in the same areas do not know of each other’s existence. This obstacle impedes activists from different parts of the country, as well as those in other countries, to discover partners and work together.

A website for each NGO?

The solution, that IRBF offers to this problem is that the active organisations, no matter what their size or financial possibilities, can find their place (even if small) on the Internet. IRBF has bought a virtual web server and the domain called: ngo-bg.org. This space will be provided to social NGOs, that have not got a website, to be able to create one themselves and with a little assistance, to publish it online. For a limited quantity of web space, the service will be free, and, for bigger projects, the NGOs will have to pay, but according to Christina Haralanova, Managing Director of IRBF, only symbolic amounts for maintenance.

The domain ngo-bg.org will allow the non-commercial organisation to possess a secure high quality Internet address with the following type: name@ngo-bg.org. The idea for this initiative is to avoid yahoo.com and hotmail.com - e-mails for work correspondence, having in mind that these e-mails sound suspicious for most international partners and especially for funders, and from the aspect of security, they are not reliable enough. The domain with ngo-bg.org will show that the corresponding organisation is of the NGO type (in English this is the abbreviation for "non-governmental organisation"), coming from Bulgaria. The use of the .ORG domain is of a great importance and defines the organisation as a "juridical person with not-for profit aims".

On the website Ngo-bg.org there will soon be offered instructions for NGOs on how to obtain and use an e-mail and how to make a website. Each organisation using the mentioned services will be listed on the gateway website, being able to publish news related to its development, information regarding current projects, etc.

The Social Rights Network Project

The Social Rights Network Project is part of the IRBF general aim, focusing on support for social NGOs in Bulgaria. The project works in certain directions.

In the first place, it aims to be a platform for popularisation of Bulgarian NGOs from the different social areas. This means, that every NGO that would like to announce their activity could do it through IRBF. This can be done by sending them news about undertaken initiatives or projects in progress and they will be published on the news site Social Rights Bulgaria. According to Christina Haralanova, the main concept for this initiative is that NGOs from the same areas of work to be able to co-ordinate their work and exchange experience.

European partners for the Bulgarian NGOs

Christina Haralanova considers that one of the major functions of IRBF is to connect Bulgarian social NGOs with related European ones. The objective of the Social Rights Website is to assist such alliances by presenting news, analysis and articles in Bulgarian and English. It is very important for Bulgarian NGOs to get experience from their EU colleagues and to cooperate in joint projects.

For this reason, the information on the Social Rights Bulgaria website is available both into Bulgarian and English languages. The researches show, however, that depending on whether the reader is from Bulgaria of from abroad, he/she will need different types of information. For this reason the contents of the site in both languages differs. In the English version, for example, news from Bulgaria is stressed that should be useful for foreign NGOs to get to know details about the social changes happening in our country, the initiatives of Bulgarian social NGOs, and the pre-accession process towards the EU. The main objective, according to Christina Haralanova, is to show that the NGO sector in Bulgaria is actively working. The Manager of IRBF says also, that based on the visits of the website, there seems to be bigger interest from abroad than from Bulgaria.

European Civil Society Internet Rights

The above mentioned is rather to be expected, having in mind the fact that the project has a European background. The IRBF idea arose out of the experience and the work of the European Civil Society Internet Rights Project, funded by the Open Society Foundation - New York and finalised at the beginning of 2001. It aimed to provide information and advice about lobbying European institutions, as well as introducing to the NGO sector the opportunities and problems in using the Internet and ICTs. However, the most important task of the project was to prove the necessity of having "Internet Rights" to be an analogue of human and social rights in the modern world of computer communications.

IRBF is the first of a number of projects, related to the popularisation of the Internet in order to defend human and social rights planned to be realised in Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans Region. As it is used as a pilot, the experience will later be used in other countries, too.

The team

Its founder is Chris Bailey from the UK, a former co-ordinator of the European Civil Society Internet Rights Project. Together with Christina Haralanova, who also took part in the European project presenting research about Bulgaria and the Balkans Region, Chris Bailey set up the basis of the Bulgarian follow-up of the European project.

The interesting part is that the team has been created by people with different nationalities who work together to make possible the realisation of the project. Besides Christina, there is one other Bulgarian woman, Tania Georguieva, who is a law student and a voluntary assistant and consultant regarding legal matters at IRBF.

Two Dutch interns also took part in the Social Rights Network Project. These are Martie Vlorjik and Michel Vilemsen from the Information Sciences and Management Department of the Saxion Hogeschole Deventer University who passed their half a year internship at IRBF. Martie and Michel did a 6 months investigation concerning the information needs and Internet access of Bulgarian Social NGOs. They created a database of Bulgarian and European NGOs and assisted in the design of the website and logo.

The ICT expert at IRBF, Mathieu Lutfy is Canadian, who provides his experience in the area of Free Software. His will is to create opportunities for not-for profit organisations to communicate efficiently with each other with limited resources.

The SPIP Publishing System, the Free Software and the Bulgarian social movements

IRBF participates in the project, realised by the French NGO called uZine, for the creation of the SPIP publishing system for the Internet. This system has been used for the elaboration of the website Social Rights Bulgaria and the NGO-bg.org.

SPIP is a useful and simple to use system for publishing information on the Internet, developed and distributed as Free Software under the GPL licence. It can be used by readers and editors without the need of technical and specialised skills like html, ftp, etc. The system has been translated into more than 15 languages. The Bulgarian translation has been carried out by Christina Haralanova. Information regarding SPIP into Bulgarian is available on the general site of the system.

SPIP is well adapted for Bulgarian users, as the objective is to be distributed amongst the social movements and NGOs for the elaboration of their websites. The administrative module of the system is completely translated and flexible enough to serve the different needs of the organisations. For people who will be using it, it is not necessary to know English or other foreign languages, nor to be professional computer programmers. Although the system is just entering in Bulgaria, it is well known in Europe and all over the world, being used mostly by social movements for their visibility and participation in the Internet.

Source: Dnevnik online, author Kristina Hristova