The Story of the LionNet -

the international network of Lions Clubs

3'rd international vice president of Lions Clubs International, Kajit "KJ" Habanananda, from Thailand giving a speech at the Finnish Lions' annual convention in Hamina, eastern Finland in June 1996.


The following is a copy of a long letter sent in July -96 to the 3'rd international vice president of Lions Clubs International

To: Lions Clubs International
3’rd International vice president Kajit “KJ” Habanananda

From: Ilkka Siissalo, Lions Club Espoo/Meri, district 107B Finland
Lions’ Internet service LionNet Finland webmaster

cc: see last page

Dear lion president

I want to thank you for the opportunity to meet you during the Hamina annual convention in Finland and the chance to present to you our Internet service, the LionNet. I can say that it was a very reassuring and pleasing opportunity to me, and I sincerely hope that this will be a beginning to a good and fruitful cooperation between the LionNet group and the LCI management and headquarters.

I have received your e-mail address, thank you very much. And as we agreed I have made a permanent link from the LionNet pages so that the LionNet users can easily send you personal e-mail messages.

Please let me tell you how this “LionNet” got started:

The early phase

Something like 19 months ago I set up an Internet World Wide Web service for my own Lions club, LC Espoo/Meri. At that time it was apparently only the fifth Lions related WWW service in the world. There was one club from the Bay City area, California, one from Canada, one from Sweden and one Finnish Leo club, the Leo Club Espoo/Olari from my own district. Very soon after the start of my service I attended a local Lions meeting headed by the that-time DG of district 107B, lion Harri Ala-Kulju, who was later to become the country chairman for Finland. I told lion Harri about the Internet and the great possibilities I saw it could have for the Lions and suggested that we should open a broader and better WWW service on the net that would cover at least our district if not the whole country.

Lion Harri got instantly interested and introduced me to lion Kari Kemppinen from LC Espoo, who was the PR-committee chairman of district 107B. Together Kari and I planned and built the first country-wide Lions’ Internet service. It was inaugurated just before the 1995 Finnish annual convention in Kokkola. Lion Kari arranged a small, but nice presentation stand to the Kokkola meeting where we handed out press releases and gave presentations with a small portable PC connected to the network only with a hand-held GSM radio telephone and a GSM data card. Afterwards we wrote an article about the service to the Finnish language edition of “The Lion”.

We got a permission to use Finnish University and Research Network Funet’s world-famous server “Nic.funet.fi” alias www.funet.fi for free. The machine is owned by the Finnish Ministry of Education and it’s among the 10 biggest Internet file servers in the world. We took an ambitious start and greeted the users “welcome to the homepages of Lions Clubs International”, as “provided by the Lions district 107B Finland”. Very shortly afterwards - to our great surprise - we started receiving a stunning amount of anxious greetings from all over the world: USA, Canada, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa etc. etc. In the beginning most of the material we had published was in Finnish, but very soon we realized that we had to start producing more in English. And the more English language material I made, the more we got nice e-mail feedback.

The beginning of the LionNet

The exchanging of e-mail messages soon led into lively and fruitful discussions between the very few Lions webmasters that existed at the time. Especially I got to know via e-mail lion Robert “Bob” Willis of Lions Club Edmonton/Millwoods in Canada, who had also opened a nice WWW service for his club. Together we decided that it was high time to get rid of “reinventing the wheel”, namely every single webmaster of every emerging WWW service wrote one page about what the Lions were, one page of the Lions’ code of ethics etc. etc., the same material, over and over again. We saw the urgent need of international close cooperation and coordination before the number of Lions clubs entering the net was to become too large for anybody to handle and the whole mass would splinter into hundreds of isolated “islands” on the net. Together Bob and I planned the idea of voluntary, close, e-mail based cooperation between the webmasters with heavily crosslinked websites, so that the occasional user who would find one corner of this Lions net could easily traverse the Lions cyberspace from country to country. Cooperation and crosslinking would also mean plenty of saved working time for each webmaster, which they in turn could use to bring their own local flavor in terms of pages about their own, local activities, instead of taking care of the “general information”. Bob invented the name “LionNet” to this new network and I contributed by inventing the slogan: “On the Net We Serve”. I renamed my service to “LionNet Finland” and Bob took the name of “LionNet Edmonton”.

The standstill

Months passed and new clubs poured to the Internet. Although we tried to establish contact with the other clubs on the net, almost nobody got interested in the international aspects of the Lions net. It was a lonely struggle. Bob tried to approach the Oak Brook headquarters several times, but didn’t get any reasonable response, not even a note that they had even received his messages. But then, during the last months of 1995, by sending tens of e-mail letters all over the world, I managed to attract a couple of other Lions webmasters to the idea. One of the most active pioneers was lion Jean-Paul Hepp of LC Antwerpen/Mercator in Belgium, who presented the idea of the LionNet to his district officials and started “LionNet Benelux” to cover the “Benelux countries” of Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg. “LionNet Greece” was also started on the island of Creete, Greece and the Leo’s quickly adopted upon my suggestion a similar structure, with the “LeoNet” central node being in Leipzig, Germany.

Breakthrough in Finland

In Finland we nevertheless received continuous and nice support, especially from the country chairman Harri Ala-Kulju and vice chairman Olli Ollila. At the same time the number of readers of “LionNet Finland” kept rising, and reached 4000 readers a month making LionNet Finland the biggest Lions service in the world. During January of this year Kari Kemppinen and I presented the LionNet idea and activity before the council of district governors meeting. It was a tremendous success, and especially international director Lauri Merivirta gave us his warm support, which we are very thankful for.

After that meeting things started happening fast. Secretary general Jussi Kuittinen from the Finnish Lions office made a decision that the office shall be connected to the Internet by means of e-mail. We also met the Hamina annual convention organizers and got their support for the idea of bringing the Internet alive on the Hamina conference venue. On the international side movement was rapid too. Within three months the number of users grew more than 50% and before the Hamina convention LionNet was active in one way or another in seven countries. I arranged for the technicalities in setting up the world’s first world-wide Lions e-mail list service that helps the communication between the various webmasters throughout the world.

Success in Hamina

As you witnessed, the LionNet stand at the Hamina annual convention was quite a success. I had talked the Finnish Internet service provider Telecom Finland into bringing us a super-fast, fixed, leased-line Internet connection to the conference site for free. I also launched a preliminary announcement into the international network that the Hamina convention will be the world’s first big Lions meeting alive on the Internet, with constant reporting on the net about how the meeting proceeds. Kari Kemppinen arranged for the loan of computer equipment, arranged the making of the banderolles, handouts and posters and planned the layout of the stand. The conference organizers arranged for the large railroad wagon we were in, together with electricity and other necessities. We also got sudden and very welcome professional help when lion Pekka Yrjölä from the Lions Club Vantaa/Etelä, district 107N, volunteered for help. Lion Pekka is a professional picture editor for Finland’s biggest daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat and specializes in electronic photography. He brought his employer’s professional still video cameras to Hamina, so we could publish photographs on the net almost instantly. We were also able to demonstrate the first time ever playback of live Lions video through the Internet due to my digitizing a clip of the newest Lions movie “Turning vision into action” and putting it into the video-on-demand server of Telecom Finland in Tampere, Central Finland.

It was more than a week of hard work, day and night, but it was worth it. We estimated that maybe over 1000 people visited the stand during the convention day. According to the logs hundreds more have visited the WWW pages we made during the day.

Since Hamina

The LionNet keeps on growing. Within a week we have had two new, active and nice-looking LionNet sites, LionNet Australia in Tasmania, Australia and LionNet Newfoundland in Canada. I have also had the pleasure of talking to lion Vera Delnon of Zürich, Switzerland, who is the local PR-committee chairwoman and responsible for arranging next year’s Europa Forum meeting in Zürich. She plans to repeat in Zürich what we did in Hamina. Lion Vera is also likely to join the LionNet cooperation and open “LionNet Switzerland/Liechtenstein” soon if the local council of district governors approves the plan. “LionNet Quebec” or LionNet Montreal” is soon to follow.

Possibilities for the future

The Internet, as you know, seems to be the media for the future. So far we have utilized it only as some kind of an electronic newsletter, regarded as an electronic supplement of “The Lion”. Obviously e-mail and the various conversation and news services are highly useful too. But for the Lions movement, I see the Internet crucially important in two aspects:

1. Exchanging of information between Lions in various countries
The LionNet, although still faily small, has already proved the tremendous strength of the Internet in bringing together lions from different countries and cultures. This not only helps us in avoiding to “reinvent the wheel” but also spreads information about useful activities and ideas that have been used in one part of the world and could be used elsewhere as well. With its speed and feedback mechanisms the Internet is far superior to any printed media in this aspect. The publication of the speech you gave in Hamina, together with your digitized picture giving it within less than an hour after the speech ended, and the reply from Pennsylvania, USA, within the next hour was just a very modest demonstration of what can be done if we only want to.

The Internet can, and should, be used also for more interactive type of communication between the lions members. For instance, the monthly report forms or the arrangement for ordering club supplies from an electronic web-based catalogue come easily to mind. These don’t have to replace entirely the paper forms, but should rather be seen as easier alternatives for those who can and want to use them. (For instance I have often heard the saying that the Lions HQ doesn’t want to use electronic forms, because not every club in the less developed countries can use them. This seems to be in a ridiculous contradiction with an e-mail letter which I recently received from Zimbabwe, asking me to “do something” so that they would finally get an Internet based alternative to the manual monthly report forms, because the Internet is working, whereas the local postal service loses approximately 50% of all written letters !)

2. Increasing the public knowledge about the Lions and our activities
Even as it is small today the LionNet can be regarded as the “biggest ever coordinated PR activity” - in quotes - of the Lions movement. As you know, there are something between 50 and 100 million users on the Internet. Even though just a very limited number of them actively try to find Lions information, our pages come up in generic searches from the WWW search engines. This was nicely demonstrated by for instance the letter I received recently from a medical doctor in Malesia. He was planning to set up a brand new eye clinic in his country and had found my page “Finnish Lions help to diagnose early glaucoma” and was thanking me wholeheartedly. My short story that I published together with the lions in Oulu, northern Finland, who had conducted the activity, helped him prove to the officials in his country that his idea of the new eye clinic was medically valid and useful. This is the kind of activity we wanted to promote more when we coined our slogan “On the Net We Serve”.

Please support us

I’m writing this long story to you, not because I’d want to boast about what we have done, but to ask for your kind and continued support. I believe that you have both the knowledge and the perfect position to help us generate a truly world wide Lion Net. Although the number of Lions clubs on the Internet has increased dramatically during the last year, our “LionNet” still seems to be the only coordinated attempt of international cooperation, which I still think is more than crucial for the Lions movement to gain all the benefits that this new media can offer. There are nice looking and quite large Lions services already on the net, like the one run by the Brockville Lions club in Canada or the “www.lions.org” run by the Palmdale Lions in California. But now that the Oak Brook headquarters is planning to enter the net and with no information about what their plans are I think the Lions community would really need some guidance in this matter.

Especially I would dare to ask you if you could in any way help us so that the Oak Brook headquarters would somehow recognize the existence of the LionNet cooperation. Now that we are building this network of areal and country-specific nodes the HQ could have their chance and role as becoming the “LionNet International”, or super-node above all our existing and forthcoming areal and country-wide services. I have a fear that if the HQ do not join the international cooperation they might build yet another isolated “island” on the Internet, not contributing to the global Lions network village in the way that now would be possible for them. The speed with which the Lions’ webspace keeps expanding makes some kind of hierarchy on the net imperative. And I sincerely hope that the people at the HQ realize their unique chance in establishing this hierarchy now, because later it will be extremely difficult to build. Also, it would be an honour to us if they could display the name and maybe the slogan of our network somewhere on their pages. And I can also promise that all the LionNet webmasters will be more than willing to help Oak Brook in any way in joining the net if they just can tell us what kind of help they might need.

Secondly, I dare to ask your help so that if you please could communicate in your future contacts with the international directors and district governors the importance of not only coming to the Internet and being visible there but also the utter importance of cooperation and coordination, both within districts and multiple districts but also internationally. We would be much oblidged if you could recommend the idea of joining the international network we have started and we welcome new sites to the LionNet.

Thirdly, we all at the LionNet would be extremely glad to publish on the net and on the mailing list any material you may personally have, be it a homepage, speeches, stories of achievements, notices to clubs, an “International President’s column” etc. To keep the network alive and changing for the interest of our readers we welcome all Lions related material.

I believe with your support the Lion Net might have a bright future before it.

Yours sincerely,

Ilkka Siissalo
LionNet Finland webmaster
Lions Club Espoo/Meri, district 107 B 1’st vice president

siissalo@funet.fi fax: + 358 0 457 2302

LionNet Finland: http://www.funet.fi/pub/org/charity/lions/

“LionNet - On the Net We Serve”

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siissalo@funet.fi