Cyberspace Expands Reach of Women’s Forum : China: Debates and documents are instantly available by computer to those unable to attend.

While thousands of participants picked their way through puddles and mud Friday to attend workshops at what may be the largest women’s conference in history, thousands more followed the conference from cyberspace without having to get their feet wet.

Armed with a bank of donated Apple and Hewlett-Packard terminals, computer-savvy women here are creating, in effect, a “virtual” women’s conference, turning e-mail into “fe-mail” and allowing instant access to documents and debates to those who could not attend the forum in person.

“Anyone can log on and join discussion groups, see pictures of the conference, or give their input on the Platform for Action,” said Susan Mooney, creator of the WomensNet home page on the Internet. “It’s a great way to broaden the impact.”

Topics on the page--whose address is “https://www.igc.apc.org”--range from disagreements over abortion to how to keep First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton’s appearance at the official U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women, starting Monday, from overshadowing the tandem meeting of non-governmental groups here.

The electronic exchanges mirror the fervent discussions taking place at the forum but also document what the official Chinese press will not, making virtual reality, in some ways, more real than actually being here.

While the forum-goers in Huairou won’t see articles about a dramatic protest Friday morning by nine Tibetan women, who stood gagged with scarves to symbolize censorship by Chinese leaders in Tibet, a description is on the Net.

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And for those who missed what Amnesty International leader Pierre Sane had to say at a tribunal on women’s human rights because the simultaneous interpreter suddenly fell silent when he began to speak, they can find it through the home page.

“It’s a way for women to control their message and talk about what they want to talk about,” said Mooney.

Mooney, whose San Francisco-based Assn. for Progressive Communications has helped put U.N. conferences on-line since 1992, said that electronic mini-conferences began well before the actual meeting in China.

She looked up from her computer Friday to gaze around the room and observed: “Look at the people here. They speak 18 different languages, from 20 different countries. We organized this whole project on-line, and when we got here, it was the first time most of us had ever met face to face.”

To lure more women into what has been a male-dominated realm, her group is providing free e-mail accounts and training at the forum to anyone who walks by. Apple volunteers attract browsers with sophisticated multimedia programs playing clips from movies or showing interactive tours of the White House.

The movie clips attract people who would shy away from a computer. But while President John F. Kennedy’s face may be familiar globally, a computer mouse is not familiar to all the participants here from around the world. One woman held the device upside down and moved the roller ball with her fingers; another put it on the ground and tried to work it with her feet like a sewing machine treadle.

“It’s alien at first, but most people catch on really quickly,” said Tammy Button, an Apple team member from Menlo Park, Calif.

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Button urged one tentative woman from Chad, who had never used a computer before, to give it a try. She smoothed her bright blue and yellow dress, sat in front of the keyboard and pecked out a poem titled “Orphans of the World,” then scanned in a graphic of a globe.

A few terminals away, Leila Borujerdi, a lawyer from Iran, peered from beneath her black burka as she designed a colorful mosque. At home in Tehran, she said, she has the Koran on disc and uses Arabic software to search for relevant phrases. She admits to an addiction to the game Tetris.

But not all women are as comfortable with a computer as she is.

“Techno-phobia can be a real problem,” said Sarah Hirshman, a junior at Brown University who has put a free program on the Internet to teach women grass-roots technology for development. “But it’s such a powerful tool that women can’t afford to be left behind.”

For many, the problems are even more basic.

“The ladies in our local communities are curious about computers,” said Haymee Perez Congle, who operates a computer network in Angola. “But they have no electricity.”

She worries about a widening gap between the “info-rich” and “info-poor” but said it’s hard to draw attention to the need for information technology in a country like hers that is just recovering from a war and focused on basic issues like sanitation and water.

Meantime, she said, the villages receive a trickle-down benefit. Congle can apply for grants via the Internet or ask for help from experts around the world on health projects.

“My work was very different before,” she said with a lilting Portuguese accent. “I was totally isolated. But now I just e-mail my contacts in the U.S. or Europe or Zimbabwe, and I can find a lot more funding.”

Although people like Congle are busy making new contacts, the problem in the past has been how to maintain the networks and momentum created at the once-a-decade women’s conferences.

“Nonprofit groups tend to be less organized, and women’s nonprofits tend to fall even farther behind,” said APC’s Mooney.

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To prevent that, the group plans a “Beyond Beijing” bulletin board, with a follow-up score card tracking governments’ commitments to conference resolutions and a cyberspace place for women to continue to meet, lobby and strategize. Technology “can be a great equalizer,” Mooney said.

Forum organizer Claire Felcher, who kept the attendance charts for the first conference in 1975 by hand with graph paper and a pencil, may be the only one to admit that the Internet has made her job harder.

“Now people send everything two or three times,” she said, “and expect an answer instantly.”