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SANIB-SINAG
5 July-December 1998
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The first quarter limited our promotional activities to faxing out mini-posters on these special occasions: Valentine’s Day (synergism of two hearts); anniversary of the EDSA Revolution (a victory for synergism), Women’s Day (women’s empowerment and liberation), Holy Week (synergism behind the miracle of loaves and fishes), Earth Day (synergy of activities), and Mother’s Day (synergism in the womb).
But the trend for the rest of the year was set by the launching, for Earth Day ’98, of Saniblakas InfoShare where we started e-mailing to as many environmentalist NGOs and individuals as we could our solicitation of information on their planned activities and our bulletins to share all the information that we were able to collect.
That launching project of InfoShare was delimited by the reduction this year of our office capability and the backing out at the last minute of two would-be volunteers from the youth. But it gave rise to two other distinct Saniblakas InfoShare projects: the first one was the launching of the forum on the Internet about the "EdR DekaLog ‘95" (see item No. 5.3 in this folio) and the second one was the production of feature stories for a new broadsheet daily newspaper on a free-use introductory basis (see item No. 5.4).
Responses to the forum project have been very encouraging, considering its very limited reach up to now because it has had to rely on the e-mail. In the beginning, Saniblakas had to piggyback on a personal e-mail address (edreyes@epic.net) but the foundation recently acquired an e-mail address of its very own, "Saniblakas@iname.com," thanks to the efforts of Eddie Velasquez, deputy executive director of the Kamalaysayan campaign network for sense of history of which Saniblakas is an active member-institution.
We are currently suffering a big technical difficulty in both hi-tech and low-tech communications, because the Saniblakas office has lost its phone connection. E-mailing activity has resumed in another office but much adjustment has to be done before we can move on as before.
Still, we are seriously preparing to "upload" the Saniblakas foundation’s very own website on the Internet very early in 1999. The Kamalaysayan website, which carries the foundation’s brochure information will have mutual links with the Saniblakas site, which will carry the InfoShare features and the Saniblakas cyberspace forums to ever broader frontiers. (Note: If you are now reading this in the Internet, it can only mean that we have already mounted the website even just with the initial pages in their very initial or crude form. We have learned to take small steps when we can't take big ones.)
We are well aware of Obet Verzola’s warning or reminder that the Internet is basically a tool tightly controlled and dominated by the world’s powerful elite which is the nemesis of people’s self-empowerment through synergism. But we are heeding the call issued by CODE-NGO through its laudable quarterly journal, called Memo, for civil society to explore all possibilities and potentials for using cyberspace for the interests of the people. And we are inspired no end by the victory of the NGO Davids that banded together through the Internet and slew an a-borning giant Goliath monster called the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI, see item No. 5.2 that follows this article).
All considered, we are hewing closely to the spirit of the "EdR DekaLog ‘95" as we pursue all our efforts in cyberspace. To paraphrase: "The Information superhighway is good, but for our own human lives, we seek, share and build together human wisdom for individual and collective empowerment."
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