Welcome to the newly-refurbished IRAIA website.
My wife and I first set up IRAIA in 1997 as a small mom-and-pop email service for friends and contacts in the NGO world, at a time when it was somewhat difficult to get full Internet access outside Manila. We both had earlier experience as tech support for my brother Obet's EMail Center Philippines from 1994 onwards; I was running my own BBS, while my wife acquired more experience with APC Women who serviced the Beijing conference's tech support needs.
The name "iraia" was a takeoff from the term "iraya," a common word in various Philippine languages (var. ilaya, idaya, iranun) that meant "[people] from upriver" or, in other words, upland or indigenous people. I had spent much of the previous years working with indigenous peoples, and so I wanted to help in creating online space specifically for them. IRAIA also stood for Iraia Research and Indigenous Archives--a recursive acronym that defined itself. You know, like GNU is Not Unix.
Initially, IRAIA relied on EMC for its mail feed via UUCP. Later returning to Baguio in 1998, I set up Iraia's own direct Internet email link, still via UUCP invoked from my shell account at Saint Louis University, and still using EMC's program. So, in more ways than one, IRAIA owed a lot of its technological birth to EMC and excellent advice from my brother. But its politics and network of users were mostly defined by me and my wife.
In 2002, IRAIA obtained its own domain name and set up its own website. Its recursive acronym turned into the Iraia Research and Information Archives. From that effort arose two other websites--that of the Northern Dispatch Weekly (www.nordis.net) and that of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (www.cpaphils.org). The CPA website was immediately turned over to the CPA regional office, while that of Nordis passed to the direct management by other colleagues at the Northern Media and Infornation Network.
The IRAIA site itself hibernated from 2004 onwards. There were several false starts in 2006 and 2009, during which I could not find enough time and energy to keep it alive and talking, not to mention kicking.
Now that I'm rejuvenating it--and still struggling with time constraints--I realize that the old acronym sounded too glorified, too stuck-up. Thus, I am now renaming it as the Iraia River Archives Is Alright. No need for further explanation, except that I intend to develop it as mainly an archive site. The river is evoked as symbol for people, for social life, for history, and for environment.
The main IRAIA site, which is powered by Joomla, will be principally a news and archives site, but with an added twist. What that added twist will be, will be explained in subsequent posts. The main site also branches off to two other sites--my personal blog, Pathless Travels (www.iraia.net/blog) powered by WordPress, and a wiki site on history and geography (www.iraia.net/mwiki).
