UN Permanent Missions partner with DePaul.

• Author: Szczerba, Patricia A.

Within the past few months, more than two dozen Permanent Missions to the United Nations have posted new websites to communicate their messages to varied audiences around the world. Through these websites, officials in their home capitals are accessing General Assembly and Security Council documents, while Missions in New York are accessing more effectively each other's policy statements. Tourists are obtaining maps and visa information, students are finding reference materials for their school papers and assignments, and the general public is learning more about these countries. And this is just the start. Two dozen more Missions will be added shortly to the list.

The websites have been created as a result of a unique collaboration between DePaul University and the Permanent Missions, as well as the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the UN Information and Technology Services Division (ITSD) at UN Headquarters. The project was developed towards the end of 2003 by UNITAR Senior Fellow Ahmad Kamal, former Permanent Representative of Pakistan to the United Nations, and Associate Dean Anne Morley of DePaul's School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems (CTI). The plan called for CTI faculty and students to design the basic prototypes and show Permanent Mission personnel how to input the data themselves so they could manage their own websites. The faculty would then be able to provide needed technical support, although each Mission would control and develop full expertise to manage its own site.

Over the following months, a dedicated and enthusiastic team of six faculty members and more than forty computer technology students collaborated with the Missions' focal points in the design process. The first phase was led by Adam Steele, a CTI faculty member interested in human computer interaction, who put together a team of students to analyze and evaluate the existing Mission websites and consulted with UNITAR on other Missions' actual needs. The team established a design criteria and an information architecture that would allow the creation of a flexible template to meet the requirements of diverse Permanent Missions. Massimo DiPierro, CTI system architect, then designed the basic architecture of the system, flexible enough to be adjusted to different Missions and languages, and above all a content manager that would be easy to operate by personnel relatively unfamiliar with the complexities of website...