Remembering Kevin M. our first ca.org Webmaster

Note: Kevin M., (sober since April 1, 1988 to November 5, 2025), left a large foot-print in Cocaine Anonymous. Kevin, as a World Service Delegate (1992-1995)  served on Public Information (1992-1997 and was elected Chair in 1994) and the Internet  CA World Service Standing Committees.  He also served as Secretary and as a Director on the WS Office Board (1998 – 2003) and was the WS Conference Vice-Chair Parliamentarian (2008) and the Conference Chair (2009-2010) and WS Office Trustee (2017-2021).

Kevin M. was our first ca.org Webmaster and was recorded at the 19th World Convention: Miracle Mile: Friday, May 23, 2003, Chicago, IL to speak about C.A. & the Internet.

Audio transcribed by A.I. and edited by Cameron F., Archivist

The topic of this workshop is the World Service Conference Internet Committee. I am Ivan L. And I am the World Service Conference Internet Committee Chair. We were asked a couple of weeks ago to present something at the convention and Kevin was gladly enough to step up. I’m going to go ahead and introduce him. He’ll do mostly the facilitating of this meeting, so if you have any questions. And I’ll turn it over to Kevin.

My name is Kevin. I’m an addict. And when we got here, there was some communication difficulties and we noticed that these workshops were basically organized around the World Service Committees. And what we had planned was something a little different, which is the uses of the Internet in recovery in general, rather than just what the Internet service committee of the World Service Conference does. That will be part of it. But there’s lots of other topics that I want to cover. And there will be at least one more person joining us who’s an area webmaster. We’ll talk about that part of service. Let me qualify first.

I was, in 1994, I was serving on the World Service Public Information Committee when two of the members thought that we might be able to do something with this newfangled thing called the Internet, which most people in the room had not quite heard of. I was aware of it. I’d been online since 1980, but not on the Internet per se, on this other commercial service called CompuServe, which was kind of like AOL for the technically inclined. I had a lot of experience with that, and I thought this was a great idea, but I wasn’t quite sure whether or not we could actually reach out to anybody with the Internet, because very few people were actually connected to it at the time.

To make a long story short, the Conference decided to go ahead. They got a web address, ca.org. You could get nearly any web address at that time. And things grew, and we eventually put up a real website, and I designed that. And that was like 1996. So I was, by lack of anybody else willing to do the job, I was the first webmaster for CA.

A few years later, lots of members were on the Internet, and there was a need for online meetings, and I started the first one of those, Hope, Faith and Courage. I’m not currently serving in any service capacity with the World Service Conference or with any of those meetings, although that may change any moment. Nobody is willing to let a person who is willing to be of service not be of service.

In any event, I want to break this down into a couple topics. And I would be interested to know what people want to hear about more than others. This is the first time I’ve really done one of these workshops. One topic I want to talk about is the history of CA Online, which I briefly touched on.

The other topics are what you can do with the various aspects of the Internet to facilitate not only your own recovery, but other people’s recovery. And further, can you use that to bring the message to people who might not otherwise hear it? And the last thing is the tools for service work. What can you use the Internet for in order to facilitate service within CA, the behind-the-scenes stuff?

I’ll start with the history of Cocaine Anonymous on the web. It started in 1994 and 1995. And the Conference really had to be dragged, kicking, and screaming to do this because none of them understood what it was. There was a lot of, I mean, there were 12 people in the room who’d ever heard of the Internet. And what we ended up doing was putting up a picture of the escape cocaine billboard on a grey background with the preamble and phone numbers for people to call in the local areas, and that was it.

By today’s standard it was a really clueless website but we were there and what happened was the world service office started which phone number and they had a brand new email link and they started getting email and they start getting phone calls up to that point the PI committee at the world service office and the PI workers at the world service office got maybe one two three letters a week regarding Cocaine Anonymous and they were starting to get three four five emails a day and it looked like a good expense because we were spending zero dollars and we were getting a return for it. And so, the next Conference came back and said, let’s put up a real website. That job went to the Public Information Committee, which already was starting to feel a little uncomfortable with that role because a lot of people with public information were not technically oriented and they felt kind of swamped by all this stuff hitting them on the Internet.

I was chair of public information at that time, and the job to do that was actually assigned to another person who ran into personal… It wasn’t happening, and his work and stuff started interfering, so I ended up doing it. And it was a really ugly site. It was bright. It was CA green, the whole thing, straight across, with embedded logos of CA all across the screen. God, it was beautiful. It had most of the texts, all of which was taken from various CA publications. I was in a really unfortunate situation because none of theTrustees were on the Internet.

Nobody at the World Service office was on the Internet. The World Service PI Committee, which I was chair, had been charged to do this, but there was really nobody to look at it. So understanding the Traditions and understanding the need for a group conscience, I felt really uncomfortable. I got a couple people in CA to look at it, and we put it up.

The only saving thing was I took everything from CA written material, which had been previously approved. For the next couple years, I was the webmaster, and I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with that, and other people were getting increasingly uncomfortable with that too. And as people got more and more into the Internet from the fellowship, I had a lot more people, thankfully, willing to help me with it.

And about that time, I rotated out. It got to the point where I realized that I had taken too much control over it. So I rotated out and gave it to somebody else. I stepped back and gave them advice when they asked for it, otherwise I stayed out of the picture. That was 1998 or 1999. There have been two or three webmasters since. They’ve done a much better job than I could ever do because that was not my profession and the people who’ve had it since have been professional webmasters.

The online meeting started because the World Service office was between 1996 and 1997 a lot of emails and a lot of people asking if there any online meetings. We hadn’t even thought of online meetings and I didn’t think they would work and I was against them.

But Katie at the World Service Office would pester me a couple times a month about starting one. So in February (1) of 1997, I started one called, Hope, Faith, and Courage (an email meeting) and the first person to sign up was from Chile. That was my clue that this might work. That meeting has been in existence continuously since then. I don’t think it’s ever had less than 200 members and a times been up to 400 at one point.

You know, it’s like any other meeting, it turns out, in many respects, you know, controversies, personalities, people stomping out of the room, newcomers taking offence at somebody for telling them maybe they shouldn’t drink. Everything that’s ever happened in any face-to-face meeting has happened online. You know, even the person who screams all the time or yells and disrupts the meeting, we’ve had some of those too—and some of them have not even been newcomers.

The meeting (HFC) is now on its third or fourth secretary and there are now six meetings of CA Online. I have some forms up here and they’ve been passed around telling you how to get hold of CA Online if you’re interested or somebody in your hometown is interested. The meetings are of various different topics. Hope, Faith, and Courage is a general discussion meeting. The Study is a book study. Keep It Simple is at one time a Step in Traditions study. I don’t know if it still is. Sisters in Sobriety is a woman’s stag. There’s a Solution is a men’s stag. And Steps Online, I’ve never been a member of that, so I really can’t comment on that. It’s a new meeting.

What do you do in an online meeting? What do you use these things for?

Well, at one point it’s just like any other meeting except for the fact that there are differences. In a face-to-face meeting, you have certain things you can’t do online. You can’t get a hug online. I’ve never seen it happen. You can’t look in somebody’s eyes and tell that they’re lying. That’s sometimes important. Often you can’t tell a single thing about somebody. They tell you they’ve got four years, and only from what they say can you tell whether that’s maybe true or maybe not true. On the other hand, those weaknesses are also strengths. There’s no racial barrier. In fact, if somebody wants to tell you they’re male or female and they aren’t, well, how are you going to figure that out? Old, young, you don’t know what they look like. There is real anonymity online and that’s a real strength. There is a part in the Big Book, where they talk about “we are people who would not mix.” Well, you don’t even know who you’re mixing with. I mean, there is just a homogeneity—a pureness to the fellowship.

We have these conventions and we usually have a get-together where we sometimes for the first time meet people who we’ve been talking to for a year or two. The other strengths, this anonymity also goes to other strengths of online meetings. The anonymity provides the newcomer with a really, really safe place to come in. They’re not worried about who might see them at a meeting. Never mind, that’s a silly worry anyway, but you do hear it. They can even sit in the back of the room and nobody knows they’re there because it’s only when you post does anybody know you’re there. So you can sit there for weeks and just lurk and see if this is what you want. And we’ve had people get sober starting that way.

It has weaknesses in that text, these are text emails, and text is a really limited form of communication. It takes quite some time before you get any good at communicating a feeling through, you know, black words on a white screen. It can be done, but it takes some talent, and it also takes talent not to type something you think is friendly, but when read by the other person isn’t quite so friendly. “Work the steps or die” may sound friendly to you, but not to the recipient. Let me tell you a couple stories about people who’ve come in on the HFC meeting.

First one is a lady who came in in the early part of, I guess it was 1998. And she’s used her name publicly, so I will. Her name is Patty. When Patty came in, she had sent an email to HFC, which bounced. For some reason and it just said “help.” My wife figured out how she was on on an online service and we looked through their directory and figured out who it must have been because she had her settings wrong and there was a character wrong in her email address and we figured it out we contacted her and she joined HFC and then she left for a little while—she had to go back there and experiment a little bit further. She later came back in and a letter she wrote, “um, it really sticks in my heart” because what I talked about, she had just come back from a rehab after being out there and she talked about coming back and how she had listened to what we had said and she had gotten the knowledge about her condition and she figured that she now knew how she could safely use.

There was a book published at the turn of the century. What a fun term that is. There was a book published a couple years ago, and it was called, Letters of the Century by Lisa Grunwald (editor) and Stephen J. Adler (editor). The editor ask CA to provide a letter to them, and her letter to HFC was what was published (pp. 670-671). And it’s the only mention of a 12-step program in that entire book. Nothing from Bill Wilson, but something from Cocaine Anonymous! Now, we haven’t heard much from Patty lately. She got two or three years last I heard, and then she, like, dropped off. She was very ill. The reason she was online and not going to regular meetings was because she had severe problems. I don’t know what’s become of her and her emails don’t return. But I do know that through HFC, (audience member says, “she’s okay”) Thank you. She’s gotten probably five or six years of sobriety now. Somebody who’s been in contact with her, I’ll have to follow up on that.

There was another lady who came in about a year later. And I’ll use the name she gave us because it’s not her name. She gave us the name of Ann.

And she didn’t want to go to a CA meeting. She was afraid that her employers were following her or some such thing, and that if she went to a CA meeting, they’d know she was a drug addict. And so she didn’t want to do that. And she also didn’t want to go to an AA meeting or an NA meeting or, frankly, any other meeting. And she came online and

We badgered her for a good couple months until she did go to a CA meeting. I think she went to an NA meeting because she was in a state where there was no CA. But here’s an example of where an online meeting has gotten somebody to go to regular meetings and most of us on these (email) meetings are really very adamant about that. Patty is probably the only person I can think of offhand who stayed sober without going to any or many face-to-face meetings. And she had a special reason. For her to get out, to get to the grocery store was a big effort. So Ann got to a CA meeting or an NA meeting, and she got sober. And I believe she recently celebrated, what, five years. We met her for the first time in Milwaukee at the Milwaukee Convention. She was a delegate from her state, the first one in a long time to show up a couple years ago at the World Service Conference. And I’m really happy—anybody who’s ever started a meeting when you see that first person, you can sit there and say, “this person recovered because of this meeting that I had a part in starting it.” You have no idea what the feeling of that is. If you’ve never started a meeting, let me urge you to do one, even if they don’t need it, even if it’s hard to do. Let’s start a meeting. It’s the most wonderful thing in the world.

Another person, we’ll call her Kay. She’s from a small New England town. There’s not much CA there. In fact, I think that there’s only one other person I know of in the same state who’s a member of CA. I probably know others, but it’s only one person I can think of offhand. And Kay came in, and she really was having a hard time staying sober, and she was bouncing in and out. She was traveling a lot, and she was getting loaded at every port of call. And every port of call was a CA member from this online meeting who was willing to go to a meeting with her, even though she was getting loaded still. And (Leon) Strange and I met her in Los Angeles when she was there, and John, I think, was a big help. And other people whose names I…forget. And eventually she got sober. At the Milwaukee Convention, she was there with a week or two sober. And she was our princess. Wouldn’t leave her alone. Esther from Chicago was kind of her Godmother there. And we all got together, and she just celebrated four years just, what, last week.

That’s what you can do with recovery with these online meetings. There are other people who have, unbeknownst to us, used the website. The website has a link to, it has a phone number for every CA area. It has a link to the website of every CA area that has a website that is also in compliance with the traditions. There are a few websites that probably aren’t linked for various reasons, but we try to help every area webmaster get in compliance if there’s a problem. I think Ivan will talk about that during his pitch.

You never know when somebody comes in through the website, but when you get calls on your hotline, it’d be nice to know if they came in through getting the phone number through that page or through your website. You know, back when it was free for us to put up the website, it was, you know, any call was a plus. These days, I think it’d be nice to know if our money is well spent. I suspect it is.

World Service Office a couple years ago got a letter, an email from a monsignor at the Vatican asking for a book, a copy of Hope, Faith, and Courage because he saw something about it on our website. So I guess that means that at least as a public information service it’s doing a good job. Those are the kinds of things you can do with the Internet for recovery. It’s been a great experience for me. I have at times wanted to get away from it all and unsubscribe to HFC, but I haven’t done it yet. There’s always another newcomer to help. There’s always another controversy to get into. There’s always ego to be stroked. And the thing that really gets me is it’s something that I didn’t want to do. I kind of think that it’s the way it is for service for me and probably for a lot of other people. The things that are most rewarding are the things that you didn’t want to do, that you’re doing only because you’re asked. And turn out, you know, one of those doors that’s open and you’ve walked through before you even know it.

The other things that have come up with the Internet have to do with service work, which is a little bit less entertaining, a little bit less rewarding as far as service working committees is concerned, but has enabled CA to, especially at the world service level where people are scattered all over the place, to communicate and to get things done, or at least to have arguments at great distances and rapidly.

We have a Trustee from Atlantic North who lives in England. That probably wouldn’t have been possible five years ago because even the phone costs would have been ridiculous. Even though England is part of the Atlantic North region, so is New England and New York and places like that.

We’re finally able to ignore geography a little bit with the service work, and she can conduct about half her business through email. Service committees: The Internet Committee was probably the first one to do this, but the Internet Committee has had an email loop among its members and was really important when all, during the period of somewhere around 1999 to 2000, when a lot of areas were putting up their first websites, because they had to be looked at for traditions reasons before CA.org could hook up to them and had to be able to talk to people had to have a group conscience rather than King Kevin telling them this or that and email, in three days you could have 30 people look at a website and you could find everything, all the misspellings. Even that, we want CA online, every website is global, even though you might think that the Florida website is a local Florida website, that might be the first contact that somebody in Bangladesh has with CA. So we want it all to be as good as possible. Now, we’re not going to say we won’t hook it up because you’ve spelt, you know, independent wrong. But we do want to make sure that there aren’t any links to the Drug Enforcement Agency, that there aren’t scantily clad pictures on there.

Other things, you know, that are either against your traditions or would bring CA into disrepute. And all of those things have happened, by the way. You know, Eric Clapton music. I could go on and on. Other committees have also done this. The Trustees conduct a great deal of their business by email today. The World Service Office Board conducts business by email. Members, individual members, I think that more members of CA who are in service have email than don’t. And I know for a fact that they send each other email about service issues all the time. And that kind of thing just never would happen. I can converse with somebody in England over email without worrying about what the time zone is, without worrying about whether they’re home, without worrying about a lot of things that I have to worry about with a telephone. And certainly I couldn’t afford to go there very often.

Other things at the World Service and at service level, those are some of the things you can do. Also, the Internet has a use at the local level. As I said before, every area has a website, or almost every area has a website now. I think that’s probably 60 or 70 percent of the areas have a website of some sort. And all of these list the local meetings. There was a time when I came in that people were complaining that there was no CA worldwide directory and if you were traveling you couldn’t find a CA meeting. And several attempts were tried to create such a directory. Neil B. did one in 91 or 92 and it was obsolete before it was printed. And the problem was that he would get directories from areas that were two or three years old, and he’d say, that’s all I have, I’ll put it in. And meetings change, and people don’t always notify the World Service Office when they move their meeting. And so we never had the ability to do that. But now we do. We could actually print a world directory and be pretty accurate about most of the areas, because the areas are keeping them up. Somebody who’s new, even somebody who only calls up may get a service worker on a beeper who looks at the website, and he’s got the current listing. There’s always been that thing about the newcomer and online and how many addicts haven’t sold their computer and their mother’s computer and their next-door neighbour’s computer. But even then, if you really want to, you can get online. We have members of the Hope, Faith, and Courage meeting who do not own computers. We have members in just about any economic stratum you want to talk about. In my hometown, we have a couple members from Watts, California, not known for a high per capita income. There’s also a lot of sober people there, too. A lot.

That’s kind of a survey of what you can do online. I’m going to let Ivan L. talk a bit about it, and then I’m going to let Michael C. in the back talk about an area website, which he’s webmaster of, and then I’m going to open this up to questions. Thank you. Thanks, Kevin.

I’m Ivan L, cocaine addict. And now I know why Kevin was asked to facilitate the meeting, because I wasn’t really aware of all the growth that this Internet has gone through in Cocaine Anonymous. Very glad you shared that with us today.

I’ve been the Internet Committee Chair and this will be my last year serving the committee at the world level. I attended my first Conference in 99 and I think the committee had been formed a year previously in 98.

I think it was about a year old and I was attending a Conference as an observer and I didn’t know what committee I was going to go to. And Leon (Strange) was sitting behind me and he had a laptop and he said, what committee are you going to? And I said, I don’t know. He said, why don’t you come to the Internet? So I went. And I’ve been in that committee since up to date.

Some guidelines were created and there was a lot of misunderstanding on some of those guidelines and preceding years after that. Some de-linking, some linking, and some people got mad and some people didn’t. And, you know, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned that the Internet is a great tool, if you use it correctly.

This committee has no laws to enforce. It was hard for me to understand that when I sat in this committee because we’re just there to help facilitate the Trustees and to give them another set of eyes so that they can keep within the traditions. Some of the Trustees don’t have time to look at all the websites.

Our main job pretty much is that when something comes up that wants to be linked to CA.org, they send it to the committee and the committee looks at it and they present some suggestions, some guidance back to the trustee and then they contact that person. Most of the websites have been linked. There are some really good websites out there.

You know, I think the year after I left the first Conference, Texas put up their website. You know, the experience that I’ve gotten from our website in Austin, well, in Texas, is that we have a hotline number, that it’s a live phone, and we get calls from all over the United States. And that’s pretty amazing that they call a number in Austin because they can’t get a hold of anybody on the phone. And, you know, it’s always good to get a call because then you’ve got to go back to the Internet and find out who to get them in contact with. You know, where are you calling from? But pretty much, those of you that do attend the Conference, if you’re a delegate, and if you haven’t decided what committee you’re going to, you can try Internet. But if not, if you want to get into the committee, and you don’t attend the Conference, anybody is welcome to attend this committee. I know a bunch of people that are in the Internet Committee do not attend the Conference. And they sit at home and they look at websites and they send suggestions. I’m not aware of what is the problem with our email. I was asked that question, and nobody’s been able to give me an answer of how come there hasn’t been any postings on the Internet Committee post, email list. But, you know, pretty much, I just wanted to share something that the fourth edition Big Book wrote about, and I’m very grateful that they did, because…

It says, taking advantage of technological advances. For example, “AA members with computers can participate in meetings online, sharing with the fellow alcoholics across the country and around the world, fundamentally through the difference between an electronic meeting and the home group around the corner is only a format. In a meeting anywhere, AA share experience, strength, and hope with each other either in order to stay sober and help other alcoholics, modem to modem, face to face. AA speaks the language of the heart in all its power and simplicity.”

I remember sitting in a Conference one year and trying to get the delegates to understand what this committee can do. And I’m very grateful for the online meetings that are there for the people that don’t have a face-to-face meeting. I personally know of one person that has gotten sobriety from an online meeting.

I think that’s pretty much all I’m going to share. You know, I think we have another Internet Committee meeting tomorrow or Sunday. And this was pretty much to try to explain what the Internet has done for Cocaine Anonymous. You know, and I know I’m pretty sure that some of you here are attending it for the first time from the online meetings, and that’s awesome.

However it is that you find a relationship with God is your business. And if Cocaine Anonymous helped you to achieve that on an online meeting, then it served its purpose for at least one person. So you said Michael C. Was going to come up here and talk about the online area meeting? No?

Thanks, Ivan. Thank you.

Next will be Michael C. from Phoenix talking about area websites and what they do and being a webmaster and what that’s all about.

Hey, everybody. My name is Michael C. I’m an addict from Phoenix. Michael. I kind of really don’t know what to say because I kind of suckered into doing this a few minutes ago. But seriously, I’m the webmaster for ca-online.org, and I’m also the webmaster for the Arizona area.

I can tell you that when I first began doing that I don’t really know a lot about like how to make a web page and all that stuff, basically i was willing to make a lot of mistakes and look stupid and that’s kind of how I learned. And I know some people might be hesitant to get involved in doing something like that, that kind of service work, because they feel like they don’t necessarily have the skills. And really, you don’t need a lot of skills. If you have basic computer knowledge, all it just takes is a little bit of work. I mean, it’s no different putting a web page together than, like, making a flyer or something. There’s a lot of people in the fellowship across the country who have a lot of skill and knowledge about how all that stuff works, so there’s a lot of resources and people to talk to. You know, the way I view it, I mean, let’s face it, today, a lot of people are on the Internet. And it might be that, you know, someone might type in like cocaine, you know, to do a web search. And then it pops up like all these Cocaine Anonymous related websites. That might be the very first experience that that person may have to our fellowship. And so I view it as extremely important. And it’s a very serious thing. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve been involved in doing some of that stuff for me personally. I mean, I’m really not sure what to say. I know that for like the online area, our website we keep it real simple. We have some literature up there. We have some contact information. We have directions on how to get to our different online meetings. And then we talk a little bit about our area and how it’s structured. My experience with the Arizona area, our website’s a lot more in-depth because there’s a lot more stuff going on in Arizona. But I think it’s really important to keep all the information up to date. I think there’s one thing that’s I personally think it’s kind of bad as you go to like a you know local site and like it’s got information there from two years ago so i think you know I guess with that what I really mean is that being a webmaster or being involved in an Internet committee uh… you know it does take work you know you gotta keep you know like stay on top of things. It’s been very rewarding for me another great thing about and getting involved on an Internet Committee or being a webmasters that you get to kind of know everything that’s going on in your area because you know people are calling you or you’re fishing around to find out what’s going on and it’s very important to spread that message and spread what’s going on in your area as far as events and service work and all that kind of stuff.

Kevin, was there anything in particular you wanted me to speak to? I think you’ve covered the ones I was thinking about. Yeah, I mean, mainly, like, don’t be afraid just to get involved and start doing it, you know? And there’s plenty of resources in Cocaine Anonymous across the country to help you out with any questions, like our Internet Committee at the World Service level, probably lots of people in your own district or area who know a lot. There’s a lot of webmasters in CA, you know, who’d be glad to help. It’s just a great way to help carry our message of hope. It’s been really good for me and very blessed and very lucky to be a part of it. If you have any questions about website stuff or anything, please feel free to speak to me after this is over and I’ll help however I can. Thanks.

Thanks, Michael. Just to follow up on that, Kevin M. again.

One of the things the World Service Office requires of every area of websites is that there be an email link to the webmaster on the front page of the site. That’s so we can contact the webmaster in case there’s anything that needs to be resolved. If you want to set up a website and you see a page you like, you might try contacting that webmaster and asking them for some assistance or guidance. It’s just an email click away. Having said that, are there any questions?

(Phil P.) First off, I believe that the Internet is an excellent source to help people around the world. It saved me one night a few years back.

I have an allegiance to recovery online like no other. Because when the meetings were over, my mind sometimes would tell me, I need a meeting. One second.

My name is Phil P. and I’m an addict. Hi, Phil. Some of you may or may not have chatted with me on the Internet. And for the past few years, I have looked and searched and looked to connect with cocaine addicts. See, cocaine is what brought me here. And there’s a beast, there’s a monster inside of me that tells me I need to connect with cocaine addicts because they understand what I’m dealing with.

I did have some questions in regards to these six meetings. Is there any real-time meetings?

The question is, are there any real-time or chat meetings of Coke and Anonymous? And the answer to that is no, at least not any sanctioned meetings. There may be some meetings on some of the online services dealing with recovery, but those would never be sanctioned by CA because they’re closed to members of those commercial online services. People have tried to set up more generic chat meetings. About once a year, somebody makes a good try to do it. And the issue that we have is that; A) many of the chat sites that are free to set these things up are rife with advertisements. And this is an issue for Cocaine Anonymous. The second thing is, even if you avoid that, chat meetings are set for particular times and nobody has yet, I hope they succeed, but nobody has yet managed to get enough people sitting down at the same time consistently to get one of those things to survive. They’ve lasted for, I think the last one I heard of lasted for a couple of weeks and then it just dribbled off because there just wasn’t the demand for that, or there at least wasn’t the demand at the time it was presented. I believe somebody else is trying again, and I wish them the best of luck. It’s just a, you know, there’s lots of things with chat. You need to have, everybody has to have the same software, or near enough. You have to have a server to put it on. And then you have to get everybody to sit down on Sunday night at 7 o’clock or whenever it is. The beauty of email is that I can post something at 4 in the morning and somebody else can read it at 2 in the morning in England. Okay? And there’s no phone tag.

We haven’t managed to get critical mass yet on chat meetings. Again, World Service doesn’t start meetings. It’s the fellowship that starts meetings, the fellowship that supports meetings. Until the fellowship is able to start and support such a meeting, there probably won’t be one.

Okay, one last question then. Okay, I’m the type of person that sometimes travels. I’m here on this weekend. I get home, I open my email box, and it’s telling me, warning, your email’s about to overload. So now I’m missing some, sometimes I might be missing some true business, because I do have an e-business, and I’m missing some business as a result of short two-sentence types emails asking questions about online meetings. And it becomes a point where, you know, that I that it would be it would be easier to have a direct real-time type chat but I don’t wanna I don’t want to disconnect myself I may have made a connection with somebody somebody might be out there lurking in and hearing what what you know what I might present to that and and I guess that’s a part of that concern I guess that’s a part of the growing the growing pain, but I’m just voicing myself so I’m I really don’t belong asking questions the only other thing is I guess with any meeting that you start, and like you mentioned earlier, Kevin, you know, you have the opportunity to start a meeting and watch somebody recover from that and feel that sense of accomplishment knowing that you’ve taken a part of that. I believe that also, too, would start with kind of a real-time type chat. Not necessarily that it has to be a meeting, but just a place where us cocaine addicts can gather and so forth. But thanks for letting me share.

(Kevin) And again, I’ll point out that there are a couple chat, drug recovery-based chat meetings on commercial servers. If that’s what you really need to do, seek them out. But Cocaine Anonymous, as such, cannot actually endorse such. Thank you.

My name is George. I’m a cocaine addict and alcoholic. I’m a webmaster for AA and for a district site. And like Mike was saying, I didn’t know nothing about it. I just started doing it and made a lot of mistakes. It was a lot of fun. I can remember 10 years ago, sitting in my basement, smoking crack cocaine, and I was on my computer just doing nothing, thought I was learning something. You know, but today it’s a little bit different.

You talked about the online meetings, and I attend online meetings and other fellowships. You don’t know who’s on there first, so you can’t limit it, and you get some real nuts, and people that don’t belong there, and all I do is disrupt the meetings, so I refuse to attend them anymore. In fact, I stay out of chat rooms completely. But you don’t know who’s there, and like I said, it gets very disruptive, and it’s just hard to monitor. But I like about the email, and I joined a big book email club like that. And he talked about getting a lot of email. I had to get out of it because I was getting so much email. It was just too hard to keep up with. I’m grateful for this Conference. It’s the first one I attended. I’m pretty active in the other fellowship. I like to change things around. I’m interested in computers and the Internet. I think that’s just a great way to go. There’s so much opportunity there. We post our minutes there. We do a lot of business on the Internet like that there. Events going on. I like to get more people more active, but it’s like everything. It’s hard to get people active in service work and whatever you do. I’m glad I’m here. Thanks.

Are there any other questions?

Hi, everybody. My name’s Jim S. I’m an addict. Hey, Jim. Howdy. Kevin, in 1994, I don’t think we had an idea this would be as big as it is, but I have a question. What’s your feeling on adding to the verbiage of the 11th tradition to include the Internet with our Anonymity Statement?

(Kevin) I don’t think I would directly. The 11th Tradition, we added television to it (Television was added to our 11th Tradition when they were ratified at the March 1987 World Conference). I don’t believe the AA has a television in theirs. And rather than start adding listing things, I would be afraid that it would start getting to be a bit of a laundry list. And I might rephrase it to say, you know, press, radio, and mass media, or something of that sort. Although the cadence of the thing is really, I think AA decided they really didn’t have to say it. That it was, you know, once you said film, that TV was kind of probably in there too, and everybody realized that. And I would think that the press or film, one of those two things would cover the Internet. I note that when the Literature Committee was asked to change a section of who is a cocaine addict to add something about other different drugs, just points to alcohol or pills, it used to say, and somebody said, well, what about marijuana and what about alcohol? And they changed it to read cocaine and other drugs rather than make a laundry list. And I really would prefer to see it go that way. And that’s probably more from an English perspective than anything. It’s just I don’t like laundry lists. The point is well taken. I would think that anonymity on the Internet, people posting personal sites talking about how they’re members of Cocaine Anonymous is just as much a problem as it would be if they were telling the local newspaper the same thing.

I should point out that Jim S. here is the person who brought this to the Conference in 1994 to get us on the Internet and I will always be thankful to Jim for doing that.

Are there any other questions? It’s his fault. He cost me an awful lot of work. Not to mention

Yes. Come on up. Are you still giving them free laptops to all members of the Internet Committee? Jeez.

Hi, my name’s David and I’m an addict. This isn’t really a question, just what came to mind when I was sitting listening to the ongoing history of the Internet and the online meetings is I discovered that there’s just so much tremendous potential with websites. It’s quite incredible. I’ve been involved at the World Service Conference and the Internet Committee. I’ve been involved in my local area. I have no technical expertise whatsoever, which is, I think, why they elected me chair when I was serving there.

If I can understand it, then anyone can understand it. Our local area website, as Kevin suggested, when we first put a website up, it basically consisted of copying all the CA literature that was already available on the World Service site and posting a meeting list. The reason we didn’t just post a meeting list is because it would have been kind of too plain, too simple for a good group of cocaine addicts, a one-page site.

But our site has grown over a period of time. So not only do we have the various literature, CA literature available, sorry, CA approved literature available, and meeting list pages, but we also have some kind of interesting stuff on our site. Not that we’re unique by any means. We have a page that we call Being of Service.

Which describes all of the area website are sorry all of the area subcommittees and has an email link each of the Committee Chairs if you have questions about public information you can contact our Public Information Chair if you have questions about the website you can contact the Website Chair.

We have an events page which lists any and all events that are taking place within our fellowship. We put on a local convention. There’s downloadable registration forms. And it’s been really a great experience over time to see the number of people, even in our local area, that find out about Cocaine Anonymous by doing web searches and finding our website meeting lists and come out to a meeting. Also, as Kevin was talking about earlier, reaching out to people that can’t get to meetings, whether that’s in geographical locations or people that are ill and can’t get out of their houses. I know here’s some controversy about this, but when somebody calls our local helpline, and we get some calls from people I wonder why they’re calling us when they live 1,500 miles away, but they got our site.

And they call us and say, well, where’s the nearest meeting? And I check on the Internet and say, well, it’s quite a ways from here. But I check on the site and find that there are no CA meetings. Or we’re contacted by somebody that lives 100 miles outside of the city, which is not terribly far. But for most of us, that’s a little too far to go to a meeting on a Wednesday night.

What we suggest, and this isn’t universal by any means, what we suggest on our helpline and through our email is that people go to ca-online.org and join an online meeting. There’s no reason for anyone on this planet to not be able to access Cocaine Anonymous. And that’s just so amazing.

(Kevin) Yeah, I should point out a number of HFC members and other online members do not have any local CA meetings, attend another fellowship, and maintain their connection to Cocaine Anonymous only through the online meetings. A number of these have gotten tired of the fact they had no local CA meetings, and after a while of sobriety, they have actually started one. I know of two areas, I guess it is now, that started by people who got their first contact with CA through the online meetings.

My name is John. I’m from Los Angeles. I’m an addict. I wanted to find out, number one, somebody had told me, and I was looking on the CA website, that there was a template for a website that the Internet Committee had come up with that would make it easy for anyone in their Areas to create one is that a possibility or is that done?

(Kevin) There is available from the world service office and possibly from other people a template website it’s very basic it’s like got a CA logo insert your name here use this copyright statement and put your list your meetings here. And usually once that’s done with a little bit of additional help for people who actually are still left, insert your name here, we get those things linked and hooked up. And I believe that that’s still available from the World Service Office. We may want to revisit that. Standards on the web have gone up, and the thing is very, very, very basic and simple. But if you’re a drug addict and you’re looking for a meeting, maybe that’s all you need.

One other thing that was touched upon I want to mention. These area websites and the world website are not just for the addict. It is just as important to reach out to the judge-sensing addicts as to reach out to the addicts. And we have gotten at the World Service Office a number of contacts with the professional community through this route. They all have web access. They know how to use online search services. And that can also be a benefit as well.

(John) I just had another question and also a comment which was San Fernando Valley Cocaine Anonymous I was the chair of PI and my first job as PI chair was to get us a website because I knew how important it was and all I did was put out an ad for three months in the meetings to get somebody and I got a guy who came up and he said he had five days and asked if he could help and I said well he asked if he could help and I said well how much time do you have just thinking you know that we needed a specific amount of time and he said well I’ve only got five days and then something inside of me said go ahead so I said you’re it you know and so we met and then he got in touch with World Service and in my personal opinion San Fernando Valley Cocaine Anonymous is one of the most beautiful sites in the world go to sfvca.org

But we also have, from what I’m familiar with, the only site in the CA.org group that has as much Spanish literature on our website as we do. All of the Spanish literature that’s available has been translated and is on our website. And I’m on our Spanish helpline 24 hours. And at four in the morning, I got a call from Spain that called me because if you’re familiar with websites, if you have a lot of a specific language, that’s going to be a benefit to you to get the hits that you need from anything—and we’ve got probably 30 pages of documentation that’s in Spanish, so I wanted to follow up with that and find out if the Internet Committee is working on any other languages, because I know that the CA site is currently in French and English, but are they working on anything beyond that?

(Kevin) The World Service site is in French and English. We have wanted to have it in Spanish, however we do not at the World Service Office is not yet prepared to pay for translations into Spanish or posting in Spanish. The french site was put up because we were handed the html code by the French in in Quebec. It was a matter of you like copying files from one from a floppy and that made it hard to argue with. I would suggest that if you have ready-made stuff to go in Spanish and it is consistent and of a high quality, we would be, the World Service Office would be quite willing to look at it. I don’t know what your communications with them have been. Since the new ca.org webmaster is from your area, I think it might be very easy for you to get his attention, and I would suggest you do that in that way.

I think that the time is up.

I want to thank you all for coming. I hope this has been informative. There’s a panel, I think it’s Sunday, on the history of CA where I’ve been asked to bring a little bit more of the history of online at the World Service level to that. So if you’re still interested in that, that may happen there. Anyway, I’m going to ask Ivan to close this meeting.

(Ivan) And then we’ll pray our way out of here. Thanks again, Kevin, and I thank all of you for attending.