Graphologists for Human Rights
The ingenuity of Julian’s undemocracy.com, which slices-up debates in the UN General Assembly and Security Council into a usable form, is making it ever harder to put up with some of the UN’s websites.
One particular offender is this portal set up by the Human Rights Commissioner to provide information about the sessions of the Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights (UPR), a diplomatic speed-dating process for states to assess each other’s overall record on human rights. The UPR’s novelties are the “interactive dialogue” between states, and the direct, mandated involvement of civil society organisations in the review process of individual states.
So, with all this novelty going around, might we see some innovative thinking about how to communicate the proceedings in a modern, web-savvy way? Hardly. Staffers have resorted to the double-sin of scanning in the draft statements of delegations and dumping them onto the portal as a PDF. Here’s a clip from the statement of the Bangladesh delegation in Brazil’s first review session:
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Perhaps a graphologist can help us read between the lines here, giving us unprecedented access into the minds of diplomats.
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Absolutely right. So many of the UN’s websites are a complete waste of bandwidth, one noticeable exception being the ICTY website. While it’s not exactly scoring highly on key usability principles, it certainly delivers in terms of transparency.
Paul Currion
10 Jun 08 at 9:38
[...] Here’s an excellent explanation of why we need sites like UN Democracy. Why can’t big institutions figure out how to make data easily accessible? [...]
Terrible access to UN data | James5
20 Jun 08 at 2:37
The more I think about it, the more I now want a graphologist to look at the hand-written statements.
Tom Longley
20 Jun 08 at 8:40