Center for Civil Society International ([email protected])
Wed, 26 Feb 1997 13:19:24 -0800 (PST)
Center for Civil Society International is pleased to announce a major
revision and upgrade of its acclaimed Web site, hosted on the Friends and
Partners servers in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Pushchino, Russia.
Technically, the installation of a new operating system (Solaris) on the
Knoxville server has improved access times to our Web site by a factor of
almost ten. This major upgrade was accomplished in early February by Greg
Cole's Center for International Networking Initiatives (CINI), operator
of the Friends and Partners platform which CINI makes available to CCSI
and a number of other nonprofits.
Substantively, thanks to the intensive work over several months of
Webmaster Deirdre Shelly, CCSI's Web site has simultaneously doubled in
size and become much easier to use. While the previous design required
extensive browsing to find items of interest, this redesign has made all
of CCSI's most important resources accessible from the homepage.
The site is now divided into four major sections:
* US-NIS Organizations
* NIS Organizations
* Electronic Resources
* Print Resources
Each of these sections interacts with 15 categories: Agriculture,
Business, Education, Culture and Exchange, Environment, Education, Culture
and Exchange, Health and Medicine, Law and Human Rights, Media, NGO
Development, Public Administration, Region Specific, Religion, Social
Welfare and Disabilities, Women, and Youth.
Using a simple matrix of "clickable" cells, a person visiting the site can
now just click once and see, for example, all NIS Organizations on the
site which are active in the field of agriculture or, just as easily, all
electronic resources related to public administration--and so on.
NIS Organizations is still the largest section on the web site and it can
still be browsed by country or by area of activity of the organization.
But now, each area of activity under NIS Organizations is linked to the
three other major sections on the same topic. For instance, if you
browse NIS Organization's "Environment" category, there are now quick
links to lead you to environmental organizations in the US Organizations
in the NIS section, and to environmental Print Resources and Electronic
Resources (including links to other Websites on the topic). This allows
the visitor to find all the relevant information on any given topic that
is available on the CCSI Website. If you visit all four sections, you
will get a complete idea of the organizations and resources in your field
of interest.
Two new additions to the Web site are under the "Special Resources"
section of the website. An "Educational Advising" page is aimed at
students and researchers in the NIS and contains lists of colleges,
funding sites, lists of advisors in the NIS and Eastern Europe, and other
advising resources on the Internet. The "Job Search Resources" page is
aimed at individuals in the West who might be seeking work in the states
of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It includes job
announcements, information on volunteer and work camps in the NIS, links
to Russian job sites, listservs, and print resources as well as exchange
and training programs.
The CCSI Web site is being improved continuously and will experience
another major expansion in 1997 thanks to a recent grant for this purpose
from the Eurasia Foundation. We will be providing more news about this in
coming months. In the mean time, CCSI encourages all CivilSoc members to
visit our new Website at: http://solar.cini.utk.edu/~ccsi/ And be sure to
visit our Guestbook and leave us your comments and/or suggestions for
further improvement!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Sun May 23 1999 - 13:34:16 EDT