The producer

You want to prepare and disseminate information on your subject to an audience. How do you plan to be a producer? Follow these steps and use the downloaded worksheet to write your answers.

What does planning involve?

Why are you doing this?

The first step is to be very clear about the reason you are presenting the information. You need to define the connection between the information and the larger objective you are pursuing. For example, if you are involved in disability advocacy, the larger objective might be to enlist support of a wider public for political and legislative changes.

Know who you want to reach.

Who makes up your target audience?

Know what they need.

What information will be helpful for them.

Know what their limitations are.

Different segments of the audience have different technological capabilities. This can be defined in terms of the computers they have, the modems, the bandwidth or the software. It can also be defined in terms of the disabilities they may have.

Know what you can provide.

What is your added value for the target audience? This means deciding what is your niche, what you can provide better than others. In economic terms, it means defining your comparative advantage vis a vis other producers in your area of interest.

Decide how you can provide the information

Once you have decided what you can provide, you have to plan how to do it. In any field there is much information that could be provided. But you want to make only the most important available. The more information you present, the harder it will be for your audience to use. You will have to make some key decisions at this point.

Quantity

Your first decision is how much information to provide. This means making at least an estimate of the types of data sets that you will make available. [The third online seminar will deal with how to structure data sets.]

You will also have to decide on the size and complexity of your web site.

Quality

Quality of information can only be measured in terms of the outcomes that it produces in the target audience. This means selecting information based on what you anticipate to be its effect. More precisely, as a producer you have to imagine the intended results and test all information that you are considering according to that standard.

Exercise 7: Describe the main intended results of the data sets.

Timeliness (updating)

Information on the Internet is not timeless. To be effective, it has to updated frequently. The more frequent the update, the higher the cost, so part of planning is to build into the process a regular, but feasible schedule for updating.

How often a web site needs to be updated depends on the type of information on it and its intended results.

Exercise 8: Describe how you plan to schedule updates of the information.

Questions to answer: How often will you get to information to add? How often does your target audience need new information?

Form

The form in which you provide information determines both how accessible it will be and how much it costs. Simple text-based web sites with only a few pages are the easiest and lowest cost. They are the cyberspace equivalent of putting up a wall poster. More complex web sites allow for more information to be stored. Interactive sites, including sites that permit searches, are more flexible, but cost more. You will have to make an early decision on what your site is going to look like, taking into account the kinds of considerations presented by Leo Valdes in the introductory seminar.

Exercise 9: Describe the type of site you think would be most appropriate, given the kinds of information you want to present, the target audience and your resources (financial and technical).

Questions: Can you develop this site by yourself? Or will you need outside assistance? What kind of server will you use? How fast is it? How much will the site cost?

Publicizing your site

There are now over 4 million registered domains in the world. Your information is only accessible if your target audience can find you. You have to decide how to reach your audience.

Some of the means are:

• Links from other sites

• Search engines

• Contacting through organized lists

If you have an e-mail list for your target audience (including discussion lists), you can send requests for evaluations to them.

How do you implement

Once you have planned the site, your next step is to implement it. This will be discussed in the next two sessions.

Organize a database

Design a site

How do you know you are reaching your audience?

Good planning involves deciding, before you begin to implement, how you are going to monitor and evaluate. Monitoring means keeping track of whether you are reaching your audience. Evaluating means finding out whether you are getting the intended results from providing the information.

How you will answer these questions needs to be built into the design of your site.

Monitoring

The simplest means of monitoring is to count the number of times people visit the site. This can be done automatically through the use of a "hit counter". Bear in mind that this is a blunt instrument. Every time you visit your own site, you register a hit. You do not know if the person visiting the site stayed long enough to obtain your information. You do not know if they had accessibility problems.

One method is to include an e-mail address and the commands necessary to send automatically in the site so that persons can quickly post questions or comments. You might ask them to report any problems they had accessing the site, or to request additional information.

Evaluating

Evaluation starts with an idea of what you would expect to see if your information were conveyed. It is based on the objectives you set and the expected results you have defined.

The question is how you will obtain that information.

Exercise 11: Describe briefly how you think you will monitor and evaluate your site.