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Electronic Networks help people share experiences and join forces to fight AIDS
EMAIL NETWORK OFFERS HELP TO SOUTH

17 June, 1998

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND --  While the modern world has given people the means to meet, the AIDS pandemic deepens alienation especially in the developing world.

With AIDS in its second decade, valuable experience and knowledge about how we should counter it is available. Active sharing of these lessons helps to ensure appropriate responses and programmes. The major challenge is to help people share their experiences most effectively, to mobilize and rethink the meaning of solidarity.

Electronic networks present one of the few effective options for Bridging the Gap – helping people to help one another. Thanks to the timely advent of the Internet our collective response could outsmart HIV and the reach of the pandemic.

The Concerto forums, an integral part of the 12th World AIDS Conference in Geneva, are a synthesis of past experiences. They allow people attending the Conference to communicate in an additional way, and those not attending to nevertheless contribute to it. The momentum generated by one conference continues and spreads onto the next, bridging another gap.

Since 1996 a pioneering forum called SEA-AIDS has served Asia in this way, joining over 1200 organizations and individuals. Over 75% of participants say it helps them to find other people working on the same topic as them – people they did not know before joining the forum. Over 90% of participants report that they pass on information from the forum to others – including those without computer access.

In Europe, similar efforts were made by Hivnet.ch in Switzerland, where it is firmly established with over 1000 visitors to its web site daily. It is already a model for other countries.

The Concerto forums are part of the Geneva Conference Community Liaison Network, which also includes a newsletter and key correspondents around the globe. They cover Sex Work, Networking among People Living with HIV, Access to Treatment and Care, Community-based Research, Immigration and Human Rights.

Forum topics were suggested by non-government organizations and networks working with the organizers on the Community Rendez-Vous - a global meeting of community workers that precedes the Conference. An additional forum serves journalists and media organizations.

Concerto is expanding rapidly with over 2000 people joining in the six weeks since it was launched in early May. Services are provided free of charge to users. It is anticipated that Concerto will branch out organically into a number of forums serving regions such as Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America…

The real value of electronic forums is not just the large volume of practical information exchanged around events such as conferences, but that people are actually brought together continuously from very different corners of the world, discussing experiences, sharing concerns and needs - aware they are living in one world that is being threatened.

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