An Online Al-Anon Email Meeting
An Online Al-Anon Email Meeting
In the early days of the Internet as more and more people began to connect, members of Al-Anon naturally began to find each other and gather together for mutual support. Using the communication tools available to them at the time, Al-Anon members began to support one another on BBS bulletin boards, forums, early text-based chat rooms, and email lists.
Before the advent of instant messaging, social media and video conferencing, Al-Anon members who used those early technologies to communicate with and support each other, became the technical pioneers who developed the formation and early growth of online Al-Anon.
By the mid 1990s, several online Al-Anon email and chat meetings were established and growing. Members of one of those meetings, A Serenity Place, on July 19, 1997, spun off to establish a new, self-supported meeting on a listserv paid for by voluntary donations of its members.
They named the meeting "Key to Harmony" after Al-Anon Concept Four: Participation is the key to harmony.
On August 27, 1997, Key to Harmony registered a domain name, published a website, and listed it with the available search engines at the time (Google wasn't launched until September 1998).
As a result of that website outreach, Key to Harmony grew from 40 members to 290 members within nine months. Today, Key has more than 400 registered members.
After learning of the growth of Key to Harmony via it's website outreach, in January 1998, several existing Al-Anon email and chat meetings joined together as the Online Al-Anon Outreach Committee to launch a website.
That website featured all known online Al-Anon meetings that were listed with WSO, but not linked to or mentioned on the Al-Alanon/Alateen official website, which was launched in October 1996.