Editorial Policy of the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse

The Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse is a mechanism to share information and knowledge about the use of Information and Communications Technologies for the development of the Caribbean. The Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse will manage the following types of content

• Projects

• Documents/Resources

• Events

• People

• Case Studies

and provides a “Marketplace” for proposals of ideas, job vacancies, and other activities which relate to the use of ICT4D.

The Documents/Resources category is used for links to websites, documents, strategies, articles which related to ICT4D in the Caribbean.

The Content Management of this site is vested in a Content Management Team.

This team consists of Vidyaratha Kissoon – DevNet, Guyana and Valerie Gordon – Jamaica until the end of November 2006. I

The main criteria of the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse is that its content must be useful for the beneficiaries which are intended to be all the persons who are interested in the use of ICTs in the development of the Caribbean.

Content Review

The Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse will use a deferred publishing approach in which all content which is submitted (or edited) will be reviewed by the Content Management team. The Content Manager will apply this policy when determining whether the content is suitable for the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse.

Any content will be rejected if it is deemed offensive by the CMT. Offensive content will be content which is deemed racist, pornographic, advocating violence or is prejudicial to any section of the society.

The decision of the CMT to reject offensive content could be reviewed by CIVIC members if the person who submits the content wishes to challenge the decision.

Submission of Content

All registered users of the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse could submit content to the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse. The CMT will use this policy to review the classification of the content if necessary.

All copyright arrangements and statements of ownership must be clearly resolved in the source of the content or in the case of documents, within the documents themselves.

Content Links

Content which is linked to from the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse must be available online, free of charge and could be viewed by a public audience. It is possible that links to materials such as books and other material available at cost can be added. If possible, users would be encouraged to submit full text for content which might be short lived and not archived , eg News content. with references to the main website as source.

File Size and Type

The files which are uploaded to the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse should not be larger than 1MB. Files larger than 1MB should be compressed or broken down into smaller parts. This is to accommodate the many users in the Caribbean who are using low bandwidth. The preferred document type is .pdf (Portable Document Format).

Correction of Errors

The Content Manager will quickly correct any errors of fact or interpretation that stem from decisions or actions of the CMT.

Disclaimer

The Content Manager will rely on feedback from users about the validity, accuracy and currency of content (eg if the links are no longer available, or version upgrades to documents are available). The users of the Caribbean ICT4D Clearinghouse are encouraged to report any changes in the validity of submissions so that the appropriate changes could be made.

Changes to this policy

This policy will be reviewed every six months. This version is submitted January 06^st , 2007.