1998: Creating a showcase...
The Virtual Festival is envisaged as a public showcase - an event for everyone in the community, not just the techies and nerds. So it was great that in 1998 we became an official part of the Brighton Festival, giving us an opportunity to reach a wide audience and really raise our profile.

The world's first Virtual Festival took place over five days in May in the Corn Exchange in central Brighton and included a series of talks, exhibition stands and presentations from a range of people. Pavilion Internet provided a free cybercafe, Lighthouse showed its students' work and students from Lewes Tertiary College produced news which went into our online Festival magazine.

We had talks about how to build a web site, the net in schools, internet radio and careers online. We also had about 2000 visitors over th five days, so we knew we might be onto something. Very little exists on the web of that first effort but the first magazine is still there - and has now grown into the Virtual Brighton Magazine.

1999: Bigger and better
The next year we ran an even bigger event in the Corn Exchange. Although only over three days it included over 60 exhibitors and almost as many presentations and workshops. We had experts and beginners, technophobes and committed nerds, big business and small, as well as Government representatives and people of all ages. The core themes covered:

• Business
• Community
• Education

Check out that year's site for more details.

Virtual Festival 2000: Get Active - Hitting the road
Running a large scale public event in one of Brighton's most prestigious venues really wasn't enough for us... so in 2000 we notched up another impressive first - the worlds' first outdoor Virtual Festival!

SCIP used the Virtual Festival to promote the launch of major new community initiative in Brighton and Hove. Get Active! gets people involved in their own communities by raising the profile of community organistaions and promoting volunteering opportunities to individuals and businesses. It is funded through the Home Office's Active Communities Unit and Brighton was one of the first schemes to be launched in the country.

Take a look at the Get Active Home Page for more details of what happened - look under 'Past Events'.

But even a major public event on a historic Grade One Listed Lawn (no really) wasn't enough - we also managed to fit in a trip to Rottingdean Beach for Low Tide.

Virtual Festival 2002
In 2002 the web awards were again popular, but we also helped to people recycle their computer safely (and legally), as well as visiting the community for multimedia days.

Mark Walker, March 2002