Welcome to Hua-Lian.Network, serving and connecting Chinese living in
the Westchester and more generally the Tri-State area. We started out
as IBMWCC, first as IBM Watson Chinese Colleagues (or Connection), and
then as IBM Westchester Chinese Community. Through this website we hope
to extend our community to friends at wider reaches.
You may ask: What makes this website unique? Why do we need another online Chinese community? How can this site be effective?
Background There are many existing online Chinese
communities, where you can discuss any societal issues, literary
merits, political agendas, etc. But every online community is really
defined by its members and their aspirations. So who are we? This
website starts out to serve a group of Chinese colleagues and our
friends in the Westchester, NY area, and commit to foster similar
communities in other areas. We share similar backgrounds: - in high education, we graduated from the top colleges and grad schools in China and the US;
- in career, we work in technical or analytical fields;
- in family, we are all struggling to raise our young children, and learning to be parents
-
in living, we try to balance the many demands of life and juggle our
overwhelmed schedule. We all have high ambitions and ideas, but too
busy now to pursue any of them.
Time to Communicate
Our busy daily schedule prevent any of us to set aside time to get
together and do anything meaningful. We may at best hold occasional
outings together, or share a vacation with other families. Some of us
work together in a large corporation, and thus able to chat during
lunch time. But the basic problem is that we find it difficult to set
aside time to interact meaningfully, for any signficant projects. Solution:
The key insight is that although we have no large chunk of time
available, we do find small chunks of a few minutes of free time
everyday. Online communication, properly done, could enable effective
collaboration, by allowing us to make use of the few minutes of our
days, and accumulate them into something significant. We have
initially used Yahoo eGroups, and then tried some bulletin boards. Now
we finalize on this practical Content Management System (Mambo). It
offers a professional look and yet very functional. Here we
can post articles on a number of everyday-life topics, write personal
blogs, discuss forums, share useful files via download, and allow the
CMS to retain an archival record that may help future users. We
encourage you to collaborate with others on some novel ideas within
Share-a-Project topic. Service to other organizations
This site gladly extend our service to faciliate the development of
other online Chinese communities, so if you wish for a subdomain with a
separate CMS system, let us know. Why communities? Most
overseas Chinese face the struggles of simply making a living, and the
challenges of establishing roots for posterity in new lands. Yet we
have a tendency to be individualistic and show the world that we can
make it on our own. While that is a lofty goal, a community which
allows members to cover for one another's weaknesses will more likely
survive the storms of life and enable each person to be successful.
The future of our children, our culture, and our heritage will depend
critically on the kind of communities that we build in our new lives,
communities that will allow cooperation and mutual strengthening of one
another. It is our aim to help these communities establish
online resources, for members to communicate, interact, and collaborate
on meaningful activities. We want technology to facilitate the
logistics of a group, so that people can focus more of their precious
time on the relationships and other important aspects of community
building. Only registered users can write comments.
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