Project 'Plain Language Plain Text Tutorials' (PuLPiT).
A Proposal by Mark Wood of the Disaster Relief Communications Foundation
Latest; FEB 4th 1997. The Contents manager of the Reliefweb project has agreed in principle to creating a home for the HTML version of the files.
The project is in prestudy phase. On July 12th 1996 Mark Wood visited the UNDHA in Geneva and made the suggestion to Hans Zimmermann. There was broad agreement that the project was needed and could make a positive contribution. The proposal will be announced on the emergency-telecoms newsgroup and input will be invited. In particular I need to know what subjects will need to be covered. No start has been made in finding SMEs yet. There is a preliminary suggestion that the best server should be the ITU server in Geneva. The HTML server will be linked to the relief web pages. The Relief Web project of the UNDHA will oversee the html server.
A wise old saying goes.. an 'expert' spends his life learning more and more about less and less. In the end he knows everything about nothing.
This was never truer than today. Changes in technology are not going to slow down. Your complete knowledge will be obsolescent every five years. And you don't have time to spend three hours of every day with your nose in the technical journals anyway. In any case, most of the really interesting and important stuff is unreadable to anyone but the experts, who don't need it as they probably know it already.
What is needed is a set of articles which explain current technology that is relevant to us in disaster communications, and which is readable to one of us. We are generally very well educated and intelligent, but most of us are without the investment of years of education in telecommunications technology that seem to be needed to understand the technology of today and tomorrow.
The Disaster Relief Communications Foundation (DRCF) aims to change all that, with the active help of the whole humanitarian aid community.
The aim of project PuLPiTT, (pronounced 'pulpit') is to continually edit a set of essays on current technologies, relevant to humanitarian telecommunications needs. The essays will be short enough to be readable in about 10 minutes, but long enough to point out the main issues regarding the USE of the technology. The essays will be written in plain language, that is avoiding the use of jargon. I will edit the articles in order to avoid the use of acronyms unless they are explained, and words having special context meaning of which the reader may not be aware. A bibliography will direct the reader to deeper material if desired. The target group for the articles will be, non-technical humanitarian assistance management personnel.
In order to make the information available to the widest possible audience. The information will be available by e-mail Simple Mail Transfer Protocol(SMPT), File Transfer Protocol(FTP), FAX, and as Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) on the World wide web (read by Netscape or Mosaic). In each case the file will be strictly in plain American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)text, in order that readers can read the file without special software.
The files will also form the data base for future editions of the book 'Disaster Communications', which can be purchased from the DRCF and other agents, to be announced on the DRCF home page.
The critical factor is the finding of suitable SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS(SMEs). DRCF will approach SMEs and ask them to contribute to articles written by DRCF writers, or written directly by the SMEs. I would not release an article (except as a draft) if less than 2 SME's have vetted the article. The SMEs will be credited on the article so that you can see who says that the information is true. DRCF does not have the resources to provide funding for the work so SME's would have to provide the information voluntarily.
Users will be asked to write to me nominating subjects that they would like to have covered. I hope to build a large library of articles covering every facet of interest to us.
The proofed article (by SME's) will then be placed on a server at the ITU in Geneva. Here it will be available for FTP or e-mail retrieval by FTP robot. The UNDHA will then convert the articles into HTML format and place them on the Relief Web server. The same files can then be read by anyone with Netscape or Mosaic readers.
Every year or so, The files will be used to update the book, Disaster Communications, so that hard copy of the complete knowledge of the SMEs will be available to those without internet access.
FAX access will be available by requesting me to do it over a fax number that will be supplied. This will be done manually.
DRCF feel uniquely privileged to be in the position of neutrality, being neither a user NGO or a technology provider gives us the mandate to be neutral. We have nothing to sell and no axe to grind. We shall inform you of the strengths, future potentials and applications of technology and also mercilessly expose the weaknesses of each technology that we research. We will never have an opinion as to which system is better, we leave the decisions up to you.
There will be no copyright on the material, which will be public domain, so that you can use it an any way that you decide. However you should know that DRCF is a very small NGO with very limited resources. We are not consultants, and are not insured for liability in case of dissatisfaction with our material. Therefore we disclaim responsibility for the information in the articles.
Before deciding on purchasing any system, you should ask expert consultants to examine your particular case. No two cases are exactly the same and so an investigation is always needed. However these articles can be used to steer your negotiations with your consultants and suppliers.
Please participate by providing your expertise to keep the material up to date, and by volunteering to SME a subject which you feel particularly close to.
Regards Mark Wood DRCF.