Background

Users in developing countries are often extremely short of bandwidth. They don't want their browsers requesting pages that should already be cached. The HTTP protocol has excellent support for pages to declare expiry and last-modified dates, and for the server and client to decide whether to send a file accross the network or use one already cached.

Last week the British Civil Service was revealed to have mislaid a disk in the internal post with personal information (regarding Child Benefit) belonging to 15 million British subjects.

Fortunately, they were able to send another copy and all was well, until the lost disk was widely reported which has been very embarrassing for a government which is racking up an impressive array of IT national disasters.

I've always been a little perplexed at the popularity of pdf format, which is requires a separate application to read it, cannot be edited, and is binary rather than text. The only thing pdf is good for, my view, is preserving the layout of a document, for printing aesthetic documents without the size overhead of bitmapping the text. Jacob Neilson agrees with me. There seems to be a perception that printing to pdf is somehow equivalent to printing to paper - it fixes a finished document, for publication.

2001 Information Management Priority / Planned Activity:

Establish an Information Management Thematic Network (IMTN) within OCHA as an advisory board on information management strategy and systems development. The Network will provide strategic direction to the OCHA information management system, identify requirements and problems, and facilitate the implementation of solutions, including
information management policies and standards.

This is elaborated:

As the organisation with the mandate to coordinate information in humanitarian response, OCHA might be expected to show a capacity for organising and presenting information through their web site. As a large, very disparate and complex organisation, which employing many tens of information managers, they should be the best in the UN. But a comparison with organisations of similar sizes / budgets, is not favourable.

• UN/OCHA uses asp, but I don't see signs of real content management going on.

RedHum is a Latin American regional disaster information service in Spanish, comparable to and supported by ReliefWeb.

Lead by the OCHA Regional office in Panama, this project is spread between six country offices, making it Regional and National in scope.

The front page shows off its geotagged situation reports using google maps, but this is perhaps not the most useful information on the site.