Cafe

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Cafe - about us!

friendly florian + his chaotic computer!

The story of how the site came to be!

In a way it was really strange: 21 youth workers from countries allover Europe came to a small German village called Oer-Erkeschwick near Marl Sinsen to have a seminar on the www from the 11th to the 16th of March.
Most of us did not have a big idea as to what this triple w means and for the speakers of another language, other than English, it was hard enough to pronounce these three magic letters. Normally (especially during the classes) we spoke English, but it was nice, particularly on crazy Cathy's birthday to hear all the different mother-tongues when we sang "Happy Birthday" in every language. It also took us a long time to remember the names of all the participants. Finally, at the end of the week, due to a wonderful game brought up by simply Stephan, we managed to remember the names of amazing Ana Maria, perfect Patricia, silly Sigi and all the other pleasant persons.

The first day started rather quiet, apart from friendly Florian's computer, which was kind of noisy, with general information about the application of the www. This was a useful start for those of us who had little knowledge on the www. But for the persons who already had an advanced knowledge, this was rather boring so ambitious Andrea could so use her time to care about friendly Florian's chaotic computer. Anyway we always tried to help one another.

On the second and third day, we started to build our own homepage with FrontPage, a html editor. Some persons used this opportunity to make a private homepage, whereas others started to make a homepage for their youth organisation. At the beginning we all rather depended on the help of our three instructors: Jumpy Jon was jumping all over our classroom teaching terrible Tiina, working with wonderful Wolfgang, and helping hilarious Henna, along with Ben and of course, clever CharlyŠ which goes without saying. We were all very pleased with the patience, advice and support of our instructors who introduced us to the possibilities of the www.

The topic of the last two days was this site you are visiting now. We collected our thoughts on developing a site for youth workers, which would demonstrate how to construct a homepage. We started to do this by remembering our own process throughout the week: first we hardly knew what www meant and then we almost became experts! How was this process possible? What is the most important information to facilitate this? Which points did we get frustrated with? Then we started to think of specific concepts for the site and finally we chose joyful Jackie as the person to go on co-ordinating our ideas after the seminar finished in the setting up of this site.

This site is the result of the effort of all the participants, the three instructors and especially joyful Jackie and simply Stephan. Simply Stephan himself is a good example of what is possible: although suspicious of technical achievements in general and afraid of cameras in particular (because they make steal his soul!), he is conscious of the power of new media technology to make volunteer work even more popular and so invested a lot of time to make this seminar come true. [ back to top of page]