Page History

Intended Purpose of the Correspondence Page: 

• To serve as an outward facing, comprehensive depository of the published work of the ALAC 
• To encourage the visitors to intuitively discover the work of the ALAC 
• To link to appropriate pages in the Policy Development wiki space so that it encourages visitors to get involved in the ongoing work of the ALAC 

Issues about the Correspondence Page: 

• Misleading title of the page — the Correspondence page mainly contains Statements and only a few announcements and emails. 
• Ineffective classification for the Statements — regions and RALOs are repetitive, and there is no keyword or taxonomy to describe issue topics. 
• Poor search capability within the page and the website — this is a consequence of the ineffective classification for the Statements. 
• Inconsistent formatting for some Statements, including the numbering of translated documents.
• Tendency to loose visitors’ interests:
1. It takes multiple clicks to get to the Statement;
2. The long-winded staff introduction section takes away the attention from the readers;
3. There is no context or background about what the Statement is 'in response to’; 
4. It is not clear ‘why’ the readers should care about them. 
• No helpful links to the At-Large wiki workspace for those Statements in the Policy Development page — otherwise, interested visitors can be directed to appropriate pages and participate in the making of the ALAC Statements.

Improvement Ideas: 

• Create a taxonomy landing page that details the key issue topics which the ALAC has been working on: 
• The background materials about those issues need to be clear, interesting, and relevant to the Internet end-users; 
• It may be worthwhile to rewrite the policy chapters on the Beginner’s Guide; 
• We need to frame the issues to show the readers ‘why they should care’; 
• The taxonomy landing page can effective link to the ALAC Statements that address those topics, help readers keep track of the ongoing work of the ALAC around those topics, create pre-natal discussions and facilitate ‘call to action' (e.g. to make it easier for readers to comment on the current draft Statement on those topics). 
• Redesign the way to publish the ALAC Statements: 
• Each published ALAC Statement should be broken out into the relevant components so readers can quickly assess what they wish to learn: context summary, summary of statement (or any other supporting documents), name and affiliation of the penholder, key dates related to the making of the Statements, related Statements, etc. 
• Those components need to be arranged in a logical and effective order, with the most interesting component at the top (e.g. the ’Staff Introduction' paragraphs describing the process of the making of the ALAC Statement need to be summarized and put in a less prominent area). 
• The Policy Development process needs to be explained on the website in a clear and engaging manner: 
• We need to emphasize that anyone from the community can be the penholders and anyone can comment on the draft Statements; the policy development process should be a bottom up process initiated by RALOs. 
• We may need to build certain platform or mechanism on the website to help community members to participate in policy development easily. Wiki is a good platform for working on the actual Statement, but the wiki isn’t helpful in facilitating discussion around whether the ALAC should have a Statement in response to Public Comment request. 
• Upgrade the search functions within the Page
• We may need to include issue topic keywords and drill down filtering (faceted search?). 
• The search capability needs to be complex enough for seasoned members to find documents. 
• Although the mission Statement for the ALAC is very broad and the community members have few common denominators, we need to clearly state the ALAC mission statement, emphasize and frame the ‘end-user’ key point, and display it in an obvious place on the website. In that way, we can show how the work of the ALAC (e.g. ALAC Statement) ties to its mission.  

Other Requirements: 

• At-Large Staff need to have the capability to manage content on the website without going through web-admin. 
• Translation requirement — it may be a future requirement to translate important static content on the website, but at a minimum, all ALAC Statements must be translated and properly archived on the site.