Project Heart

Bringing the ISOC Chapters together - An inter-chapter project proposal

Marcin Cieślak
Paris, 25 June 2008

Exchange of information in a global organization like the Internet Society poses numerous challenges. The purpose of this project is to address the following issues:

• The ISOC membership base is multilingual and spread among different cultures
• There is a need to monitor important developments around the whole globe
• There is a need to collect and present expertise on many subjects quickly

The local structures are sometimes unable to deal with those issues alone due to limited resources to translate the local content and present it to a wider ISOC audience.

This project aims at setting up a small core group composed of the ISOC members that would act as the internal communicator between the various ISOC entities around the world. The group should be consisted of the people involved in the Internet issues, not merely a hired staff to deal with the communications.

The core group:

1. monitors and receives communications from the field in the original language (press reports, RSS feeds, government proposals, etc.)
2. perform translation of the messages and the background material (summarized if necessary) into English;
3. categorization of the content (for example, via “tagging”);
4. identification of the recipients (internal experts, external stakeholders) – who should receive this particular information;
5. translation of the material into the target language if necessary;
6. collected information may be published in the form of alerts or call for action;
7. summary the categorized information quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly and publishing the information in form of the short report.

In this way the core group manages the in-flow of information (points 1-3 above) and the out-flow of information (points 4-7).

The list of issues and categories within the scope of the project can evolve as the project grows.

It is important to differentiate itself from the generic media sources (slashdot, etc.) by:

• maintaining a list of issues to focus on
• providing unique ISOC expertise on the subject
• deliver a concise form (ca. 3-4 pages) as the output

The core group should be selected from people actively working on the subject matter with diverse language skills to facilitate multi-language cooperation within the team.

As the information becomes available, the inter-chapter working groups may be set up to deal with the issues requiring special or more focused attention.