IPGRI Online Communication Strategy

Prioritizing the priorities (report of 2nd meeting)

We need to rework the IPGRI Web home page NOW (and maybe the regional home pages too) – this was one of the strongest reactions coming out of the second consultation workshop. But more of that later. Read on....

After a few false starts, we managed to get the video link with INIBAP headquarters up on the screen and get the show on the road – thanks to Dario, Warren and Carlo for their efforts (which Paul then promptly managed to mess up!). And thanks to Claudine, Hélène, Thomas and Elizabeth for joining us by video link.

Luigi opened with an outline of the process: a recap of the previous week’s meeting, the Web questionnaire and the Web forum to discuss the issues highlighted. “We had received 27 responses to the questionnaire by yesterday afternoon,” he noted, “with hundreds of comments and suggestions.” This feedback clearly separated the issues into ones that people feel are most important, and those that are less important. Details of the Web questionnaire responses are posted on the Web forum.

Luigi and Massimo (Curatella) started with the issues that respondents gave the lowest priority to: Comparative analysis, Other distribution channels (nice to be able to do, but not an immediate need) and Community building (important but not urgent) – no real surprises or argument there.

But then came “Managing a decentralized Web publishing system”, ranked only 15th. Several people in the meeting expressed surprise at this lowly ranking. Ruth said she felt that this is one of our most important problems, but that it is intimately linked with the publishing workflow (which ranked at number 5). Massimo C said that he felt that adopting a common set of tools, together with a clear workflow, would largely take care of this issue. Ruth stressed that this is an issue of coordination, not control. The Web “team” needs to market the services it can provide to encourage content providers to work with the team on the core Web site.

“Customer support”, ranked 14, also caused some surprises – many of the group felt it should have ranked higher. Massimo Buonaiuto pointed out that some sub-Web sites provide support to the users, but there is room for a lot of improvement. “User participation” came in at number 13, with a lot of comments on the Web survey. Ruth raised concerns about the stated goal of making the IPGRI Web site a portal to genetic resources information generally, questioning whether IPGRI really has the capacity or mandate to do this.

For some of us, the biggest surprise was that “Understanding, monitoring and evaluating end-user needs” was ranked 11th – “Fundamental,” said one Web survey respondent.

“Updating the audience” (9) raised many comments, especially on different audiences and their needs, but Luigi summed it up by saying, “Users expect to be able to “pull” information from the Web – our job is to help them pull what they want.”

There was general consensus that “Separating content from design” is a “must do”. Maria raised the need for an inventory and analysis of what we already have on the Web site, to help decide what should go into the new system. Much of the material there is out of date or needs to be revised before being put on a new Web site, she said.

But of all the issues discussed, the one that provoked the strongest, most urgent response was “Institutional identity” – Ruth stated that she had not realized how much of a problem our graphical home page was for users with poor Internet connections (Luigi’s figures show up to 90 second load times). “We need to change the home page TODAY,” she said, a suggestion that most people agreed with.

Putting the priorities in order

The last part of the meeting focused on putting the 11 “high priority” issues in a logical sequence to address them (and the addition of one priority issue that we had overlooked – the Project Brief, with mission statement etc to guide the process).

This sequence goes something like this: Project brief; User needs assessment (with Comparative analysis), Content organization and inventory, Separating content from design (considering Language and Compatibility issues), followed by a whole bunch of related areas – Luigi and Massimo took photographs of “plan” or “map” as they called it, which I hope they will put on the Web Forum – it made some sense there!

Luigi and colleagues will be translating this into another questionnaire, to verify the work we all did today – and I look forward to everyone’s participation in the next phase.