[WSIS CS-Plenary] UN Official Document System is online

[Bill McIver]

All,

We should approach the issues separately.

I think the first two could be done quickly and
put into a report and a request.

The first is simply documenting a technical assessment of the problem.
What is the situation from a technical point of view?
There are a few sub issues here, including (but not limited to): 
accessibility, documenting browser/OS compatibility,
identifying the specific underlying markup and scripting language issues.

The second and more interesting issue is addressing the engineering and 
management processes
that allowed or resulted in this problem. We can jump to well-educated
conclusions around this, but this deserves a proper
investigation.  The standards perspective, for example, actually has
several dimensions. At least two deserve our attention:
one is the issue actually determining what policies, standards and processes
exist within the organizations that produced this system (and the UN as 
a whole).

*** Is it the case that they don't exist at all; they are incomplete;
     or they are being ignored?

The second dimension is the one of defacto or official standards
outside of the organization. Which ones are relevant here? Are they 
being used?
Of course, it's possible to have linkages between the two dimensions of 
standards.

The third issue would be one of addressing the political dimension, 
which relates more closely to
second issue above.
IMHO, this should be done separately and in context of WSIS.
This is part of what the community informatics language in
CS declaration attempted to address. That is, it relates to
engineering, policy and political dimensions simulatenously.
The first has all but been ignored in WSIS.

More importantly, this *type* of problem should be covered by the results of
the WGIG. This is the broader perspective of what IG means that some 
people where arguing
for in the first phase.



WJM


Robert Guerra wrote:

> trying to be productive...
>
> Any way we can communicate the results of our "tests" to the relevant
> UN Officials so that they can perhaps try to fix it ASAP.    
>
> If they can not, then i would suggest that we start the process of
> formulating a formal press release to inform the world about the lack
> of standards..
>
> regards
>
> Robert
>
> At 3:41 PM +0100 1/6/05, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
> >Georg C. F. Greve ha scritto:
> >>  rp> Regards to all and Happy Transparent and Accessible New Year.
> >>
> >>I just tried this and had problems actually getting to the documents,
> >>others have reported similar problems with non-IE browsers on Windows
> >>and Macintosh. It appears the site is running on Microsoft and is
> >>using Microsoft-only functions for Javascript.
>
> -- 
> ###
> Robert Guerra <rguerra at privaterra.org>
> Privaterra - <http://www.privaterra.org>
> _______________________________________________
> Plenary mailing list
> Plenary at wsis-cs.org
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>


-- 
Bill McIver, Ph.D                     
==
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e-Government/e-Citizen Group          | Groupe de gouvernement ?lectronique/citoyen ?lectronique
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