In response to Peter Armstrong's call for feedback and in response to the critique from Warren Feek (in quotes)
"1. Local content creation: I am not sure you need to incentivise this - support it and commincate it, yes, but not incentivise. " Why not incentivise local content creation? Just because we are dealing with something as abstract as knowledge, does not mean we should treat it only as "free" and not invest in it. I really don't think there is an excess of local level voice on development issues relative to what you see when you survey the huge mass of comment coming from high level sources. "2. The desirability of spending this amount of human and financial resources on this plan at this time: " See above. I do not agree that a project by project approach is necessarily the best, when we are talking about a very long term problem that requires both planning and infrastructure, and for that matter the setting of standards. "3. The wrapping of information [your containers analogy]: Maybe I just do not understand this concept but it seems to be redundant and inadvisable. Standards I understand - but those are being created across the internet as this is an issue much broader than just the development field and it is those broad standards we will all need to adopt; just as we would not think of a special high definition TV standard just for international development. It is the container analogy that has me struggling. As I understand the key to effective positoning of information on the internet it is to develop, and place as separate items, small pieces of information. " Again this is an interesting point. I think the issue is more about integrating a new standard with existing standards. The Reports provided on the OKN site make it clear that specialised techniques are required to make time efficient use of connectivity. It is not unreasonable to want to include a set of standards with such a new set of techniques. The container analogy exists within standard HTML and internet useage, in the form of Meta Tag information. I disagree with Warren in that this infomation is not sufficient to produce a classification. It actually takes human editors to compare information and produce a classification, as a classification is a set of relationships between things, and not something based purely and absolutely on the nature of the "building blocks" it is made up of. This problem has been encountered already with standard internet technologies, and one response has been collective categorisation projects such as the Open Directory Project (ODP). <www.dmoz.org> Perhaps Oneworld should contact the ODP staff with two objectives in mind. Firstly to look at the way they have organised a collective voluntary classification process. Secondly to see if they can produce an approach to classification that will allow easy integration of their data into the general collection already amassed by the ODP. Since the ODP provides source data for most of the major search engines, this would be a means of publicising the ins and outs of our field to a more general audience. After all, the fact that very few people understand what we are up to is a major problem, wouldn't you agree? Best regards, Daniel Taghioff permanent email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] homepage: http://www.geocities.com/danieltaghioff/homepage.htm ------------ ***GKD is solely supported by EDC, an NGO that is a GKP member*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.edc.org/GLG/gkd/>
