General Guidelines for Invited Proposals:
- Reflect the stated goals of the online community and the overall mission of OCHRC
- Focus on providing a starting point that will yield success using the critical functionality and reasonable cost.
- Success in this case means, adequate value to researchers and other users to attract and sustain participation in the online community
- Describe a plan for evolving the online community. While we want to start small in this case, we do not want the original technology decision to limit the future functionality. The choice of technology as compared to other possibilities should be mentioned.
- Provide a detailed budget that includes software and online community management services for 12 months.
- Provide comments and recommendations on the maintenance and marketing of the system
- Suggestions for changes to the online community staff organization are encouraged; however personnel resources within OCHRC will be used whenever possible. See the organization chart at the end of this document.
- Hosting location preferably will be with the partner or at a service recommended by the partner.
Online community detailed requirements
The community will enable participation by the following Child Health and Nutrition community member types
- Researchers
- Research institutions
- Local government organizations especially policy making institutions
- Funding agencies
- Regional Coordinators (country) and Topical Coordinators (nutrition, malaria)
- Content authors (primarily internal at beginning)
The online community will have the following basic features and functions:
- Registration forms appropriate for each community member type (to be provided by OCHRC)
- Search capabilities for all community member types
- Ability for each community member type to maintain up-to-date profile
- Researchers will have the ability to maintain a list of research projects
- Ability to email members directly from site
- A member who is logged on can email another member through the web based interface with the return address being their registered address
- Content management for educational materials
- Maintenance of events calendar
- Self policing functionality for all user generated content
- Ability to contact OCHRC online community project staff with concerns or suggestions
The success of the online community will be measured, thus information for the following indicators needs to be provided to the OCHRC project management team. The response should describe how the raw data and/or calculated results/graphics will be made available to OCHRC.
- Registration figures by month for all community member types including all registration information
- Registrants by country and topic areas and community member types should be available in a general area on the web site
- Percentage of members who log on per month
- Web trends for content areas of site
- Number and nature of complaints
The online community system should support the managerial roles for the project. A prospective organizational chart is show in Figure 1. The structure is only tentative and suggestions for change are welcome and will be considered by the OCHRC Board. It should be noted that in the figure most of the "boxes" indicate roles-not necessarily full time positions. There is reliable internet access at the Secretariat office in Dhaka, Bangladesh, however there is a 1-2 second delay as a VSAT is the mode of internet access; however, this system may be replaced by a system with less delay over the next year. Nonetheless, this limitation should be kept in mind in specifying system administrative functions.
- The online community should provide content that reflects the progress of the project for the OCHRC board members and Secretariat. This content is largely reflected in the indicators.
- The online community system should enable the Project Manager to monitor the project indicators and respond appropriately
- A strategy for system administration should be specified. This may include tasks performed by the host, but also by a system administrator based in Bangladesh.
- A strategy for content management should be described for the content manager. Offline mechanism for content creation should be considered.
- The data analyst should have access to essentially all data generated by the web site. ODBC access in addition to access to back-up copies of the web site would be one way to provide complete access to the data. Other strategies may be recommended.
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