Someone has gone and stolen my idea. Some folks have created a website called “Voices of the UN” for workers at the United Nations to express themselves anonymously on how the organization is doing. While I am intrigued by the idea, I have to wonder if there are real dangers in creating a central repository…
Category: Web/Tech
Googling the UN Document Server
The United Nations has added another search function to their two existing “simple search” and “advanced search” functions already on their Official Document System, and you get one guess where they bought it. For those who haven’t been following the news, earlier this year the UN publicly released their online archive of documents — including…
Podcasting: ok, I get it
I have started downloading podcasts to my iPod mini to try out this new wave of broad-based internet radio. Getting stuck waiting for subway trains at 11pm at night, surfing through the podcasts on my iPod, I suddenly got the appeal of this weird technology. Before I thought, why is podcasting qualitatively different from existing…
The ODS and UN capacity
The ODS exemplifies how UN staff are often caught between idealistic expectations and meager resources. A couple of days ago I got a very informative and frank email from someone in the United Nations’ IT department regarding the UN’s Official Document System. On the practical front, he informed me that the IT staff had modified…
First reactions to the public ODS
The UN Official Document System went online publically recently. Here are my initial reactions to the new public interface. Back in the mid-1990s, when the web was in its infancy, I was working with WFM to try and get “publically released” UN documents out on the internet. UN officials were stubbornly resistant to the idea,…