Internship: week1

An internship journal; placement United Nations Information Services Division
May 15-16, 2008

I spent most of the time of these two days on the orientation and introduction with other staff within the division. Since the United Nations is the large organization, all working process is run through the formal channel.

I spent the whole morning of my first day of internship with the Training Division on reporting, checking all relevant official documents for the security issues, touring around the UN buildings, and get introduced to the UNIS and all other officers.
After introduction, they set one temporary table for me, then I started to explore their system—their technological infrastructure. In addition, I met a web master of UNESCAP whom would supervise me regarding the web site revision and assessment. We briefly discussed about the job I could possiblywork on, and finally concluded with the accessibility checkup as well as other relevant issues.

On the following day, I was moved to the UN Library and get introduced with the officers there. I attended a small meeting, getting to know more about the library activities and was interested with the work of Electronic Information Product (EIP).
www.unsystem.org/es
Then part of my assignments is to harvest news to support this project. I think such activities is an effective way to develop the UN officers/staff’s knowledge; the information is waiting right at their fingers’ click! Nonetheless, there is no guarantee in term of ROI—how much people would benefit from the service, and if it is worth funding? This would be such a challenge for any information service providers and if possible, I would like to investigate more in term of implementation/real practice.

On Friday’s afternoon, I attended the meeting concerning the web site accessibility. There was an outsourcing expert to give lecture. As the first-hand experienced user, I participated in the session and had chance to demonstrate the web access with screen reader application. In the meeting, there were officers from disability divisions joining as well. Therefore, it was a good opportunity to discussed weaknesses of the UN Web site and find solution for mutual implementation in the future.

Internship: week2

An internship journal; placement United Nations Information Services Division
May 20-23, 2008

On 20th May, I attended the conference organized by the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology and Chulalongkorn University at the Mercure Hotel. The seminar was about the Promotion of the Thai Web Accessibility guidelines and its implementation. There were about a hundred participants, most of them came from the government agencies. Apart from gaining more knowledge about global trends of accessibility, it was a good chance to build a network among people who are not in the disability field.

For the rest of the week, I have been preparing an outline of the report which might be presented to the managerial team for consideration of the long-term project and future funding. I started by surfing the UN and ESCAP web sites, trying to understand its structures and its content. This took my time for a while to get used to the interface since there are lots of information with poor organization and complicated page layout.

The report begins with the introduction of the web accessibility followed by its simple guidelines/principles. Moreover, some web pages (both belong to UN and ouside the UN) will be given as good and bad examples for better understanding. In the last section of the report, some improvements that would enhance the accessibility of the UNESCAP web site will be discussed for further development along with possible implementation.

At lunch time, I get to know more staff; this is very good social networking. They discussed about internal issues so that I could learn more about the working process of UN administration in general.