WEB BASED SUPPORT FOR CITIZENS’ GROUPS

In recent years, the using of the information and communication technology is expected in citizens’ groups (NPOs, voluntary organizations). But the usage of the tools that can promote online communications in citizens’ groups has not been accepted widely, compared with enterprises or educational institutions. In this paper, we aim to clarify the current utilization of online communication tools, and discuss how can promote online communication among members of citizens’ group. At first, we analyze some important factors of why those tools are not used widely. Some factors we analyzed are: existing tools have a lot of unnecessary function, and lack of opportunity to obtain skill that is necessary to use the tools. Then based on the analysis results, we propose some actual solutions to promote the use of online communication tools for citizens’ groups. The first one is to provide education course for citizens’ groups, which was verified through a trial education experiment we conducted. The second is to develop easy to use community environment named “e-Citizen square” to provide functions for citizens’ group to easily construct and manage simple Web community sites. The community environment we developed based on the open source contents management system.