Syndicate: Re: Request for comment: Message Board

[Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@v2.nl>]

Date: Tue, 04 May 1999 02:32:39 -0400
To: International Justice Watch Discussion List
<JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU>,
        kit blake <kitblake@v2.nl>, syndicate@aec.at
From: Peacenet Balkans Desk <pnbalkans@igc.apc.org>


Here's some reaction to the Message-Board proposal. While it's directed to
Kit Blake and the proposing group, I may as well fill in JWATCH participants
on work in this area - some of the missing-persons information posted has
been a little out of date and requires context to be useful.

>Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1999 08:20:11 +0200
>From: kit blake <kitblake@v2.nl>
>To: syndicate@aec.at
>Subject: Syndicate: Media strategy - Message Board
>
>The Message Board is a means for people to find and contact each other
>after displacement.
>
>The Message Board is a vertical solution to a horizontal communication
>gap.  The idea [...] it requires the participation of people working in
>the field.

This is a two-thirds of the problem, as was found during the Bosnian part of
the war, when a small group tried to set up similar systems.

During the war in Bosnia, we found that effective people-finding and
message-carrying work required lots of manual labor at the input and output
terminals, not to mention the ultimate work of carrying printouts to
recipients. It was hard to keep volunteers interested, and a high level of
organization is IMO essential.

The labor-intensive work of inputting the written messages shouldn't be left
to general camp workers, who, as you say, have enough to do. If some money
could be raised, I'd propose training/equipping special "internet mail"
cadres whose only job would be to go around camps with laptops and scanners
to input the material. Hand input is out of the question; but with the
proper equipment and training, a few people should be able to manage a great
deal of inputting.

There should also be a group to decide upon internet-distribution and
followup policy. This is important to prevent chaos and wasted motion.

>From my first reading of the Message Board proposal, I don't think that you
need a formal db. Rather, the Message Board need only to include a good
internal search engine.

However, it would be advantageous to coordinate the Message Board with one
or more of the existing dbs. The owners of the Albanian Refugee & Relative
Location Project (US) and/or the Refugee Help Net (Netherlands) are amenable
to accepting bulk input.

You can review the existing active dbs at

        http://www.igc.org/balkans/MF-draft/people.htm

(Those interested in ancient history can also go to from there to the to
history pages of "War Zone", and thence to the Balkans gopher, which
together contain a review of the past M.P. and message-carrying efforts.)

The final third of the general problem is to make the internet friendly to
those refugees/emigres/relatives/friends who finally manage to get online,
only to find the internet littered with dead ends and slow and hard-to-use
web sites and other discouraging online venues. I've tried to make a start
at this on the /people.htm pages.

I'm hoping to soon propose a systematic way to re-involve mailing lists in
this people-finding and message-carrying work.

These are my preliminary reactions. I'd be interested to hear how the
Message Board idea works out. If you'd like to be on the distribution list
of those interested in the /people.htm site, please let me know.  --  ed

----
Ed Agro, Peacenet Balkans Desk, Boston (pnbalkans@igc.apc.org)
http://lists.igc.org/archives/zamir-chat-l.html


------Syndicate mailinglist--------------------
 Syndicate network for media culture and media art
 information and archive: http://www.v2.nl/east/
 to unsubscribe, write to <syndicate-request@aec.at>
 in the body of the msg: unsubscribe your@email.adress