The Internet Gold Rush
The backbone has to be there. Now !
40+ million pages, 1000 Lions pages ? Talk about grains of gold sand in Sahara. How to find them all ?
8 national nodes a year ago, 26 on Nov 1’st, 57 now...
5-15 clubs are joining each week now. In 6 months it will be 20 a day. Who is handling it ? Who answers their questions ? Who guides them ?
Notes:
There is a TREMENDOUS urgency in setting up the infrastructure for the Lions Internet right NOW.
If we have a look at how many clubs are today on the Internet the figures are still surpricingly low. In the whole world there are just about 630 sites online, whereas the actual number of lions clubs is manyfold higher. Today up to 15 clubs are joining the net each week but looking back how the figure has been rising it is easy to anticipate that in about half a year this will be 10 to 20 new clubs each and every day. This is a tremendous rush. There is no way that the few people who get paid salaries at lions offices throughout the world would have the time or competence to help all these newcomers, answer their questions, make links to their sites to bind them up to a comprehensible whole and guide them to the do’s and do not’s of getting online.
To handle all this, a well organized, hierachical structure of voluntary lions members with expert knowledge is absolutely necessary to create and there is a tremendous hurry with all this. We need international guidance and cooperation, national level guidance and rules, district level people who can go and help the newcomers on the spot and global level players who specialize in certain fields, for example youth exchange, Lions Quest, Sight conservation etc.