CCSI Turns Two, Goes On Line


Center for Civil Society International turned two years old on July 1 and this newsletter, "Civil Society . . . East and West," turned one. We started CSEW a year ago, in order to tell about innovative projects, important resources, and other news of interest to the hundreds of U.S. third sector organizations working in Eurasia and Eastern Europe. It goes to about 1,000 readers, including some in the region.

In March we added a section called "Net Talk," to focus on the rapid and exciting developments linking the U.S. and NIS (new independent states) through the worldwide computer networks.

We want CSEW to be as readable and responsive to readers’ interests as possible. To help us achieve this goal, this Fall we plan to call a number of you, to ask your opinions and ideas about the publication. If you get such a call, please spare a few minutes to give us this feedback.

You are also welcome, of course, to send us your opinions about "Civil Society . . . East and West' at any time, without waiting for a call from us!

CCSI Resources Go Online

After a Spring spent in Internet school, as it were, learning about such things as ftp (file tranfer protocol), gophers, and HTML (hypertext markup language), our New Communications Technologies Project has begun to take real form. We spent much of the summer preparing over 250 documents for upload to the excellent "Friends and Partners" World Wide Web site developed by Greg Cole and Natasha Bulashova. See "Net Talk," inside, for more information, then check it out!

What’s next? For one, we intend to add continually to this site. We will also periodically revise and update materials that have been posted there. Addition-ally, we plan to start a Listserv (electronic mailing list) soon, through which people can receive this newsletter and other announcements from us automatically over the computer networks.

Insofar as content goes, we feel we have developed reasonably good flows of information about American "third sector" projects and activities in the NIS. We have not done as good a job as we would like, however, in collecting information from and about indigenous third sector organizations in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc. With this issue (see pp. 2-3) and forthcoming ones of "Civil Society . . . East and West," we intend to remedy this deficiency.

Watch these pages for more news on CCSI’s expanding work and other developments.

Holt Ruffin
Executive Director

This article is from the July/August 1994 issue of
Civil Society ... East and West

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The URL for this page is: http://solar.rtd.utk.edu/~ccsi/csew/94-07/ccsi-two.html
Last updated: October 8, 1996

Center for Civil Society International
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