If you are looking to establish or research relationships with other vendors, industries or regional activities, researching the home pages for the level of Y2k awareness your interest groups have openly advocated is one way of understanding who may and may not be taking care of their businesses or their resources appropriately.

This is the thread to post either the URLs for these pages, or links to ideas (or even just ideas!) for these connections.

-- Cynthia Beal (cabeal@efn.org), January 03, 1999

Answers

The Pacific North West Economic Region (PNWER) has a page for Y2k links. Starting here, and then heading out through their home page, you can explore PNWER's chains of awareness (or otherwise) about Y2k.

Are their members worried about their electricity, telecom, currency or fuel supplies? Are they pursuing options and alternatives, and making open contingency plans? Are they making efforts to ensure that working infrastructural components are there, not only for their businesses, but for the whole region that they're in?

Are they engaging in dialogue with the community, making open triage arrangements should there be an electricity shortage of one week or longer? Are they actively raising awareness about Y2k, spending their own dollars to ensure that others around them - even their competitors - are prepared?

Are these companies taking the leadership role in being good neighbors, using their community power - earned over the years through their consistent economic and cultural presence in their roles as employer and benefactor - to ensure that the citizens around them retain access to essential services?

While these are not formal requirements of business, they chart the high ground that a private corporation is called to when a challenge that has the scope of Y2k unfolds.

Businesses that stand beside their communities, protecting the community's resources and the citizens' ability to be both self-reliant and vibrant, even in the face of uncertainties like federal or infrastructure interruptions - or even failures - are not only businesses that model improved relationships for the future, but these are the businesses that will most likely survive the choppy waters of Y2k.

Perhaps they are businesses and organizations that you should work with?

-- Cynthia Beal (cabeal@efn.org), January 03, 1999.