ASEANWEB Expands Coverage
of Cultural Cooperation Activities

"After surfing through the ASEANWEB, I didn't find anything in print about the culture, customs and life styles of each race found in ASEAN countries," complained an Internet web surfer recently, in an E-mail message to the ASEAN Secretariat.

Well, the ASEANWEB will soon be expanded to cover these areas. The experts of the ASEAN Committee on Culture and Information will convene at the ASEAN Secretariat in February to hyperlink the homepages of member countries with the ASEANWEB to provide in-depth information on their cultures, information and mass media.

The COCI experts convened initially in Manila last October following a decision made by the ASEAN Ministers Responsible for Information and the COCI to expand the scope of the ASEANWEB. Since its installation in December 1995 as an information facility of the ASEAN Secretariat in Jakarta, the ASEANWEB has initially focused on official documentation made by the ASEAN Secretariat of the broad range of activities and meetings of the Association, including a thumbnail sketch of the ASEAN organization, brief country profiles and hypertext links to official and related homepages in ASEAN member countries. At the COCI experts meeting, Philippine Press Secretary Hector R.R. Villanueva cited the ASEANWEB as a vital facility of ASEAN that is "the foremost instrument to advance our common concerns for cultural identity and cultural harmony, for the spread of human knowledge and information, for social growth and economic harmony, in our time and in our region of the world."

He also stressed that the outlets of information are no longer the prerogatives of any social class as they have become the patrimony of all and should therefore faithfully reflect the broad spectrum of society's concerns.

At the experts meeting, representatives from the member countries, except Myanmar, presented their respective country papers on the website project. Website project manager Belina Capul of the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) briefed participants on the project details while Reymond Darwin Wilaisono of the ASEAN Secretariat computer unit filled them in on the ASEANWEB.

Member countries are now working on their respective homepages which will cover the broad areas of culture and information based on guidelines on technical design and content agreed upon by the COCI experts meeting. These national homepages will then be hyperlinked to a regional homepage and to the ASEANWEB. The experts will be convening again next month to work on the finishing touches.

The expanded ASEANWEB will be launched by the ASEAN Ministers Responsible for Information at their next conference scheduled in Thailand in March. The new ASEANWEB would enable member countries to link up instantly with one another and access to information from the rest of the world through the Internet thereby facilitating information exchange regionally and internationally.