The Eternal Website?
After March 2001, WCD becomes a virtual reality

The Report is out. The Commission has been "decommissioned." The Secretariat has begun to go its separate ways. By April 2001, nothing will remain of the institution that is the World Commission on Dams.

Except its website.

The WCD home page and all its many links is for thousands the most, if not only, visible, transparent and accessible evidence of what the WCD is, does and writes. The Internet has let the WCD communicate its agenda and findings faster, less expensively, and more transparently than before the World Wide Web was born.

And that's just Internet communications. Email traffic has been an estimated 250,000 missives over two years.

One subtle distinction that separates the WCD from previous Commissions is that the WCD, unfolding at the end of the 20th century, was able to exploit the online world more than ever. Its works could be accessed by the public directly, for free, rather than creating the need for others to interpret it for them indirectly.

So at 2 p.m. on November 16, thousands of people took part in the launch not at Cabot Hall, London but at their desks on www.dams.org where they clicked on to find out exactly what more than two years had produced.

Within hours of the embargo, downloaded and printed-out versions of Dams and Development: A New Framework for Decision-Making began to surface everywhere from The Hague, to Ankara, to New Delhi and Washington, DC.

Roughly seven hundred attempted to download the document on the first day. Hits on the website escalated into the thousands.

A fast server in North America (www.damsreport.org) met the demand for the downloadable version of the report, as our own server was running at maximum capacity for most of the five days following the report's release.

An advantage beyond price, and paper saving, is that on the internet no one knows or cares if you are pro-dam or anti-dam. It is an equal opportunity, blind forum for understanding, for feedback, for voicing your opinions.

Which is why, at a bare minimum, the website will live on for two years after March 2001. It will also be issued as a CD-ROM, thus allowing the WCD web site to become a global library and reference point for dams..

With more funds and support, it may live on indefinitely.

But the question revolves around how - and not whether - to develop what is a valuable public library in the internet era.