A brief history
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"Everyone has the right to ... seek, receive and impart information and ideas ... regardless of frontiers."
Article 19, UN Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 Origins OneWorld Online (OWO), as it was first called, was launched on 24 January 1995, founded by Peter Armstrong and Anuradha Vittachi, under the aegis of the OneWorld Broadcasting Trust - a UK charity working with conventional media to encourage coverage of global development issues. It arose from the founders’ concern at the failure of conventional media to offer a fair voice to people who cared about poverty, human rights and sustainable development. They believed that the internet was the first medium genuinely able to redress the global public agenda - and to link citizens together, from both the global North and the South. The OneWorld partnership OneWorld began as an experiment - and continues to be one. As recently as April 2003, it was described as a "giant petrie dish", experimenting with partners in many parts of the world. But back in 1994-5 OWO had the more modest aim of focusing on helping UK development NGOs to bring their material into the new internet world. From this period dates OneWorld’s reputation for software engineering services to the civil society sector.
But OneWorld’s real appeal lay elsewhere: · The founders had extensive broadcasting, editorial and multimedia experience. As pioneers of interactive media, they had been creating high quality and popularly accessible products in the development and human rights field for many years. This immediately made oneworld.net very different from most socially concerned websites of the day, which were worthy but very dull. Many early UN sites, for example, lacked any audience appeal. · Most sites at the time were little more than advertising devices for their organisations. But the founders of OWO had made an intuitive decision not to focus on self-promotion but to serve civil society by creating a collaborative multi-media platform: www.oneworld.org - later renamed www.oneworld.net. OneWorld's promotional outlay was restricted in 1995 to a simple but popular postcard with a cheery one-liner: "The good guys gang up" - and a great deal of enthusiastic word-of-mouth online publicity. It spent its tiny resources on creating fully autonomous websites for each of its fast-growing number of partners - i.e. individual sites over whose content and design each partner had 100% editorial control. The original websites for Oxfam and Christian Aid, among dozens of other organisations, were built by OneWorld as early as 1994-6. In return, the partners agreed to share their material with the rest of the partnership and the global audience at large - at no charge. Then OneWorld created a clearly signposted communal gateway - which led the audience straight through to the partners' websites. In this way, OneWorld supported partners by raising their profile and extending their outreach. OneWorld.net rapidly gained audience, a host of awards and recognition by civil society for disseminating its messages to a global audience for minimal trouble and cost. OneWorld neither colonised others' material nor even linked integrally to it without consent. This philosophy was entirely in keeping with the freedom-loving, power-sharing culture of the early web community, with its paradoxically twinned ideals of independence and connectedness. Oneworld.net and core technology The flagship English-language portal rapidly extended into a richer user experience, developing through national and regional editions in a range of languages, specialist theme channels, and interactive opportunities such as the Jobs section.
The OneWorld.net site now receives over five million page views per month (est. over 40 million hits), and highlights news, opinion and campaigns from over 1,500 text partners (many of them large networks in their own right). In addition it works with over 2,000 video contributors and some 800 radio station members, all sharing their multi-media materials free, supported by OneWorld's software platforms and looked after by teams from 10 OneWorld centres. This complex information-sharing structure depends on sophisticated software to "spider" partner sites for content, classify the material for the search engine and enable editors to build pages into the portal. The range of spider, search and authoring software tools represents the core technology platform at the heart of OneWorld’s output. A new generation of these content managing system (CMS) tools was launched in March 2003. The international dimension OneWorld Online's unprecedented success, coupled with the enormous growth of the internet, meant that its expansion was rapid. The OneWorld model was attracting a great deal of interest outside the UK - including funding to establish small operations in Zambia, India and Costa Rica. OWBT's Board, however, was composed entirely of British residents - and under UK law, the majority of its members had to remain so. Further, many of OWBT's trustees were uncomfortable with the prospect of serving on a board with an increasingly global remit, and also of overseeing internet broadcasting when their expertise was limited to television and radio. It was clear to OWO's Chair (one of the founders) that the governance structure required urgent and radical revision. The Chair of the Trust instructed her to make studying this her priority - and out of this process of exploration came the first International Governance Group (IGG), established in February 1999 with delegates from prospective OneWorld centres around the world. By late 1999 the OWBT Trustees unanimously agreed the IGG's findings and prepared to make an amicable separation. OneWorld remains grateful to the Trustees of OWBT for incubating the original OneWorld till it turned into the OneWorld Network, and for the exemplary manner in which the relationship between these sister organisations has always been conducted at the highest levels, both during the separation period and ever since. IGG1, IGG2 and GG The first International Governance Group (IGG1) reported in November 1999 to the Boards of OWBT, OWO and OneWorld Europe. Based on its recommendations, on 10 December 1999 a new OneWorld International Foundation (OWIF) was constituted in the UK as the governing body with an international board of trustees. OWIF drew together the emerging global enterprise in the shape of "OneWorld centres" – each an autonomous organisation responsible for supporting partners within a defined geographical area and publishing local and editions. The original OneWorld company (OWO) was sold by OWBT to the new OWIF for a nominal sum and renamed OneWorld International Ltd (OWIL). Its governance would be by a board of UK-based non-executive directors, while the parent OWIF would govern the network as a whole through its international board. This remains the governance structure of the network today. In December 2001 OneWorld began a further network-wide review of its governance structures and processes to ensure that its internal decision-making remains transparent and accountable. This process was led by the second International Governance Group (IGG2). Involving dialogue with all internal stakeholders, the review has encouraged greater awareness of governance issues ("who decides what and for whom?") right across the OneWorld Network. Indeed, since 2001 the Network as a whole (as represented both by Centre Directors and by Trustees) has repeatedly given governance pride of place in list of network-wide needs. At the May 2003 Board Meeting, therefore, IGG2 was upgraded into a permanent watchdog panel known as the Governance Group. It is expected to bring its findings to the Board every time the Trustees meet. OneWorld is deeply appreciative of the wholehearted support it has received from the Ford Foundation. Without this we could not have undertaken the restructuring of OneWorld from a British-based NGO to a global network. Nor could we have committed resources to a governance review. But this mutual commitment to good governance has already borne fruit - not only in terms of the excellent changes it has brought about, but in the reassurance it has engendered both in other donors and in OneWorld's own teams. |
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