APAPA Online

The Asia Pacific Alcohol Policy Alliance is a network of NGOs committed to the development of effective alcohol policy in the Asia Pacific region. Its members are distributed widely around the Asia Pacific region, and yet need to constantly share information on alcohol issues and collaborate to advocated for best practice, evidence-based alcohol policies.

The Centre for Social and Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation (SHORE) works with APAPA to facilitate and coordinate the network. SHORE wanted to set up a Website for APAPA and engaged Transformer Design to do information architecture and graphical design for the site. SHORE also wanted to provide some way to facilitate conversations on the site. SHORE were already working on the Community and Public Health (CAPH) Online Groups project and they decided to use OnlineGroups.Net for the APAPA site, too.

OnlineGroups.Net then worked with Transformer to help them implement their design on a custom online groups site and the APAPA website was launched. The site has one online group, APAPA Talk. APAPA Talk was launched in August 2006 with 45 members and usually receives around three posts per day. It is a private group, so non-members can not see the messages or files.

Sally Liggins from SHORE says "APAPA TALK has really been a great step forward for our network as the ease of communication across a large part of the region has given us all a strong sense of connection despite the geographic remoteness from each other. It has enabled us to do some important strategic work and be highly responsive to each others needs for information and advice."