Fun with firewalls

Established in early 2005 in Kunming, the user-generated website had been attracting more than 30,000 registered users: mostly volunteers, students and people interested in volunteer work.

After organizers moved the server to Hong Kong, the domain name was "immediately blocked."

Lu worries it will hamper users' experience.

"They may know how to bypass the Great Firewall, but I'm frightened of being listed as one of the so-called 'subversive websites," he said.

His website has next to nothing to do with politics or religion, Lu asserts.

Nowadays he resorts to e-mail subscription and Sina's microblogging service to try and connect up his community of users.

Contrary to what many might expect, financing actually isn't the biggest problem facing NGOs, said Chen Jianghua, director of the Institute of Civil Society from Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

"NGO workers have their ways of raising money, but the problem is their work is not recognized by authorities," he said.

In the field of public services, with the rise of a civil society and development of social governance, the NGO is now known as the third sector alongside the government and companies, according to Catastrophe and NGO: Challenges and Responses in Global Perspectives,a book published by Peking University Press,

"Grass-roots forces are not supported or legitimized by the government," he said.

"The government wants to incorporate them as functional departments. It's supervision, not governance."

The real grass-roots NGOs most in need of Internet communication technology (ICT) were not invited to the workshop, he said.

Such NGOs, mostly rising organically out of communities or among human rights advocates, are short of funds and human resources in using technologies.

In this sense, they stand at the opposite end of the spectrum to Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations (GONGOs) or foundations.

"Information technology is essential to us," said Han Jierong, secretary-general of Saving Minqin, a website protecting the environment of Minqin, a county in Gansu Province of northwest China that is gradually being swallowed by desert sandstorms.

Resisting pressure from his local government, Han, a Minqin local, initiated an online tree-planting program.

Han is hopeful his Web 2.0 platform under construction will attract users to plant 6,000 mu of trees in 30 villages, benefiting 15,000 residents in three years.

On the Chinese mainland, people have little sense of can-do charity, said Fan Jingwei, co-founder of 1kgbooks.org, an online donation system serving rural libraries.