Association for Progressive Communications

The Association for Progressive Communications (APC) is an international network of organizations that was founded in 1990 to provide communication infrastructure, including Internet-based applications, to groups and individuals who work for peace, human rights, protection of the environment, and sustainability. Pioneering the use of ICTs for civil society, especially in developing countries, APC were often the first providers of Internet in their member countries.

APC is a worldwide network of social activists who use the internet to make the world a better place. APC is both a network and an organisation. APC members are groups working in their own countries to advance the same mission as APC. APC has more than 47 members from five continents. This is a challenge and a strength, because members are at the two extremes of internet development (members in South Korea with incredible connectivity and members in rural Nigeria where they have to power computers using car batteries and solar power) and in between.

APC was founded in 1990 by:

The activists working with United Nations–sponsored data management NGO (IDOC) create a network of like-minded organisations working with information and alternative media. At this point they communicated mainly using fax and regular mail. People physically travelled around transporting and sharing databases of information and software on disks.

In 1988, on the verge of APC creation, Mitra Ardron describes the central characteristic of the future APC user, present operations and the history of APC precedents: PeaceNet, EcoNet and GreenNet. She also expresses a common commitment to global communication available to everyone.

Collaboration between APC and the United Nations began in 1992, in preparation for the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), more popularly known as the Earth Summit. As APC had the only international, civil society communications network in existence at that time, the UNCED secretariat published their information in APC conferences. They had no other way of distributing information so economically and so effectively. (The UN itself began distributing information by electronic means many years later). Email links are set up between Cuba and APC networks. They call the Cuban servers three times a day to deliver and collect email.

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Wikipedia