Census of Regionally Important Web documents.

Historical Significance.
The importance of these two census is laregly historical - but also in so far as it has contributed to our understanding of the internet. This is just one step towards our current understanding of how information emerges, migrates and becomes visible on the Internet.

The Initial Census.
Between May 21and 23rd 1996, during early days of the emergence of regional content here in Western Australia, David of the Spire Project undertook a census of documents of regional importance.

in 1996, Western Australia was significantly involved in the Internet, more involved than most of the US save California and other hotspots. Several times more involved than Singapore (a relative latecomer in the region).

the census was redistributed to local government agencies then involved in establishing electronic publishing policies. This census and other efforts worked towards publishing more documents of substance and against a trend of publishing brochureware.

from this census, we began to think about who is publishing, government transparency and the difficulty of working at a grassroots level.

The Second Census.
The census was repeated in August 1996, and compiled into a directory of regionally significant documents that we maintained for a time. As expected, there were many more significant regional documents - and more scope to search to find more.

The collected files are found in a file called hoohah.zip but a good sample would be a page describing resources on the Western Australian economy.