Anyhow, this project gives me the rather enviable opportunity to create something from scratch without having to worry about integrating any other systems or databases. And of course, in my mind I have played the “what if”-game many times. Now is my chance to put it into practice.

The conditions

• Website must be easy to maintain
• Must have a backend
• Must have a backend in a language that can be used by the people maintaining it
• Multilingual support
• Cheap
• Site should be up as quickly as possible
• Big developer community

With all that in mind I suggested to use WordPress as a CMS to drive the website. The National Society accepted this proposal and I have been fine tuning it since then. It’s running on a dedicated virtual server. For the design we decided to modify a premium theme.

Below is the set-up that I have in place so far. Please chip in, if you have any additional suggestions. I hope others will find it useful as well. All plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

• After the deadline
  Checks spelling, style and grammar of your English language posts.
  
• Category header content
  Let’s you add HTML at the top of your category or tag-pages. In my opinion, you shouldn’t need a plugin to do that, but it’s the only way I found to add custom text to the top of category or tag-pages.
  
• Contact Form 7
  A customizable contact form. Supports many languages.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a human readable sitemap.
  
• Easily navigate pages on dashboard
  The site will have a lot of pages (as opposed to posts). This plugin makes it easier to jump to individual pages.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Adds a Google XML site map.
  
• Lightview Plus
  Improves the standard WordPress gallery and has slide show features. I have not figured out how to make this multi lingual yet. The plugin requires that you buy  the lightview script for 3 euros.
  
• Media Tags
  Allows you to assign tags to your media files which will make it easier to find them in the future.
  
• Registered Users only
  Hides the site from anonymous users while still under development.
  
• Sociable
  Adds Twitter/Facebook etc. “share” buttons to all posts and pages. I love how customizable this plugin is!
  
• WP DB backup
  Emails me a complete database backup every day. The frequency is customizable, as are the tables that are being backed up.
  
• WPML multilingual CMS
  This plugin is seriously impressive! WPML does not only create a multilingual structure for your site but also helps your editors with the translation workflow and even supports translations of widgets and text-strings (though that doesn’t always work 100%). Since my day job is to maintain a multilingual site I can tell you that I’d be much happier if we had this!   The plugin was developed by a translation company that integrates their translation services into the plugin. Very smart.
  
• WPtouch iPhone theme
  Delivers site news for mobile devices (not just iPhones). Since the site is for a disaster-prone country where mobile phone are widely used, this could be a useful feature.

I have not installed any YouTube and Flickr plugins yet because the one’s I’ve seen haven’t really convinced me.

I am still looking for a good comments-plugin that is available in multiple languages. Please leave a comment if you know one.

What would you add to this list?

Related posts:

1. A website for Haiti Red Cross
2. Major changes coming to Facebook pages
3. How SMS saved lives in Haiti – behind the scenes of Ushahidi

From the first I saw the service I really wanted to know how it works. How do they geo-tag the information, how do they work with languages etc. But unfortunately Ushahidi doesn’t explain any of that very well on their own site. Fortunately, Patrick Philippe Meier, one of the people working on Ushahidi just posted a set by step explanation on his blog.

So, for everyone who wants to know how Ushahidi manages to do what they do, check out: Ushahidi & The Unprecedented Role of SMS in Disaster Response

Related posts:

1. Haiti: behind the scenes of an earthquake relief operation
2. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response
3. Haiti – six months after the earthquake

The result is an impressive document that can be used by many non-profit organizations, NGOs, International Organizations and even government ministries and agencies to address similar problems in their own organization.

The ”Review of Management of Internet Websites in the United Nations System Organizations“ (31 pages) focuses on website governance and strategy – and I still have to meet a web manager who doesn’t feel this could be improved.

Extremely knowledgeable

I highly recommend that you read the whole document and use it as a basis for recommendations to your own senior management - but with the added authority of  this being based on broad consensus of web professionals who are working for very diverse agencies in the United Nations System with very different mandates and budgets.

To give you an idea just how good the report is, here are two of my favourite paragraphs:

“the Inspectors have observed through their interviews and discussions, the side effects of the status quo: the website becomes a ‘dumping’ site by units within the organization. Each unit wants to have its specific message and services be presented on the website, preferably on the organization’s homepage. To avoid this ‘dumping’ symptom which would easily confuse and discourage external visitors, the organization should have a website strategy, drafted, reviewed and endorsed by its key stakeholders within its governance mechanism”

and later:

“A website editorial board will provide effective guidelines on the writing style as well as improve the quality of information published on website. (…) The Inspectors are of the view that the lack of such editorial boards leads to inconsistent, and at times, conflicting web content being published.”

What I find fascinating is that these recommendations are not presented by web managers themselves but by inspectors of the Joint Inspection Unit, who are in essence auditors with no specific knowledge of the issues and no stake in the outcome.

The question of access and authority

The report also contains a very interesting table that shows that most web managers have direct access to senior management.  However, the Inspectors also state that “one wonders whether they are given sufficient authority to coordinate various organizational units involved in the website operation.”

Requirement to report on progress

Below are the Joint Inspection Unit’s eight recommendations for website management and governance. However, in my opinion it’s far more interesting to read how they come to these recommendations. A lot of them are common sense for most web professionals. But ask yourself: does your organization have this in writing and is there a requirement to report on progress? Because that makes difference.

Please also note, that responsibility for this is attributed to the “executive head”, i.e. CEO level.

Eight recommendations

1. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that clear policies and corresponding mechanisms are adopted for the good governance and management of the organization’s website.

2. The executive heads of each United Nations system organization should ensure that the website strategy be regularly updated and linked with and taking account of the other business strategies of the organization and report on the measures taken to the governing body on a regular basis.

3. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that policies and guidelines are in place that, among other things, specify requirements and standards relating to (a) web layout and design; (b) editorial control and review of web content and (c) web accessibility.

4. For relevant, timely and high quality website content, the executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure the implementation of a CMS which offers full support to Latin, non-Latin and bi-directional scripts and, as far as practicable, be compatible with CMS used by other organizations. When selecting an appropriate CMS, they should give serious consideration to adopting common information exchange standards and also consider the benefits of a common CMS across the United Nations system.

5. The executive head of each United Nations system organization should ensure that sufficient and sustained funding for staffing and training are allocated to website management. If such funding could not be provided through redeployment or other means, it should be reported to the governing body for its consideration in order to implement those recommendations contained in this report, which have financial implications, inter alia, CMS, staffing, training, language parity, adoption of common information exchange standards, etc.

6. The governing bodies of the United Nations system organizations should establish an ad hoc committee dealing with the implementation of multilingualism on their corporate websites. The governing bodies shall review the report submitted by the ad hoc committee on the measures and financial implications to achieve language parity on their websites and take appropriate action.

7. The executive heads of the United Nations system organizations should establish a mechanism reporting to the High-Level Committee on Management with the participation of all stakeholders, for coordination purposes and to establish common policies, standards and guidelines on websites.

8. The governing bodies of United Nations system organizations should request the executive heads to report to their next session on the implementation of the recommendations contained in this report addressed to the executive heads, in particular those aimed at reforming website governance, updating website strategy and policy, and implementing multilingualism.

Use it!

One of the reasons that many of us don’t have anything like this in our own organizations is that we feel that we don’t have time to care about the fundamentals. But with this report as a basis I don’t think it should take more than two days to adapt it for your own needs. And everybody can find that time. So don’t hesitate to use this report – your taxes have already paid for it.

Many organizations have excellent documents that hardly anyone knows about. Do you have any that you would like to share? Please leave a comment and a link!

Related posts:

1. Seven distance learning programmes for aid workers
2. Book review: “Yes We Did” – Obama’s social media strategy
3. Social media staff guidelines for the International Red Cross Red Crescent (IFRC)

Great chance for high level exposure

The World Log

The site is still a bit buggy (sometimes the user interface switches to Swedish so you have “Läs mer” instead of “Read more”) but if you have anything to do with aid or development, then you should definitely add your RSS feed to the World Log. The site will be presented at the “European Development Days 2009” (22 – 24 October) which is hosted by the Swedish government so this is a great chance to get some high level exposure.

You might also want to schedule some specific blog posts for those days since new blog posts get immediately highlighted on the world map.

I like the World Log but here a few things that could be done better imho:

• If you offer geo-location, include an option for the city as well as the country. My blog-posts for example show up all over Switzerland, which is a bit weird. Particularly since none of them show up in Geneva where I actually live.
• Include a filter for languages. Currently, while you can browse content by topic and country, you cannot specify which language(s) you want to see.
• There is no sense of community. The site feels like it was mainly set up as something pretty to be shown at the European Development Days – a “web 2.0 backdrop”. There is no sense of community, there is nothing you can actually do on the site except add your RSS feeds. There isn’t even a feedback-form or contact information! Considering that the European Development Days are quite high-profile, that still makes it worth my time to add my RSS feed (the complete registration process only takes two minutes) but it’s a lost opportunity.
• Monitor the submissions. Currently anyone can add any RSS feed to the catalogue. And while I’m a great fan of openness, I think it would be good if the worldlog team would at least take a look at each blog before it is being admitted to the catalogue.  I’m frankly quite worried that some very hateful people will flood the site on the launch day.

Update (24 September 2009): The Worldlog is now (finally) on Twitter as well (@theworldlog) and quite responsive to comments.

Related posts:

1. What do you want from me, Sarah Silverman?
2. Building a non-profit website with WordPress – from scratch
3. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response

If you ever wondered whom you vote for if you were German – try the “Elect-O-Meter“.

Does asking for a minimum wage make you a Leftie in Germany?

Missed chance for social media

What I find a really disappointing about this years version is that it (still) misses any kind of social media integration. There isn’t even a “share on Facebook”-option which to me means that the bpb is failing at least part of it’s mandate. I mean there’d be so many great things you could do with this tool, the easiest being:

• Tell your friends about the “Elect-O-Meter”
• Status-Update/Tweet: “I just tested my political preferences. Take the test and don’t forget to vote”
• Status-Update/Tweet: “According to the Elect-O-Meter I’m closest to <name of party>. Take the test”
• Embed-version

Especially considering that less and less young people go and vote, I think this would really have been a good chance to make people think about whom they should vote for.

Different countries, different political labels

Btw: The bpb is a highly respected, non-partisan organization and this applet is being embedded by media partners all over Germany. Personally, I have to say I always find it highly accurate. So, give it a shot and see whether, if you lived in Germany, you’d support the Greens, or the Christian Socialists (which are conservative in Germany), the Pirate Party (sic!) or The Left. I always find it interesting to see how different the political spectra’s are in different countries. What might be left in one country can be conservative in another and vice versa.

Related posts:

1. Interactive election soap helps understand political platforms
2. Social media staff guidelines are being finalized
3. A busy week

Emergency Items Catalogue

One of the things I love about my job is that I constantly find out about incredibly useful or smart things that people have come up with. Right now I’m in awe of the the new Emergency Items Catalogue (www.ifrc.org/emergency-items) that was just released by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Metric? Imperial? Who cares?

Imagine you show up at a disaster and you’ve brought a few pumps and hoses. What are the odds of you being able to connect you stuff to that of everyone else? If you used the specifications from the Emergency Items Catalogue to purchase your equipment, then the odds are quite high. Because of the size of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement it can set standards.

2,000 items you need in an emergency

Essentially a group of dedicated people with a very high threshold for boredom got together and specified the details of 2,000 items that are commonly used in an emergency. From adhesive tape to scalpels to generators to … hoses. It’s a job I wouldn’t wish on anyone, but for which I have the uttermost respect.

Standardization is you friend

Even if you don’t need to connect your stuff with that of anyone else, standardization is your friend. For one thing you can be sure what the industry standard is. But more importantly you can tell a manufacturer what you want in a way that makes sense to the manufacturer. If for example, instead of saying “I need 500 blankets” you can say “I need 500 blankets that follow these exact technical specifications” you are far more likely to get what you expect.

Google Books and DocStoc

The Emergency Items Catalogue has been available online for years. But in my opinion not enough people know about it or are using it outside the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. To change that, the logistics department has given it’s go-ahead to add the PDF-version to Google Books and Docstoc once they have been finalized (in about two weeks). It’ll be interesting to see what people do with these documents once they are out there.

Related posts:

1. “The Worldlog”: new blog catalogue for aid and development sites
2. Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response
3. Social media staff guidelines for the International Red Cross Red Crescent (IFRC)