Netherlands Institute for Multiparty Democracy

More than just a website

More than just a new website with a fresh ‘look and feel’, NIMD has in fact launched a complete online knowledge centre, with a whole new set of tools to document, share and exchange information about our work with partners and others. With the new tools, partners can easily – and at very low costs - set up and manage their own websites. And when, say, our Kenyan partner sets out to upload and publish information – be it a news article about a multiparty conference, a legal document or a video – it becomes immediately available to other NIMD partners and the public at large through the NIMD knowledge centre. The first partners who will participate in the knowledge centre are from East and Southern Africa, where a designated ESARP website will be set up and managed from Malawi in support of an exchange programme for politicians within that region.


New features

Above all, we have tried to make it easier for you to find information that matters to you. Thus when you read an article or consult a programme information page, related news articles and other resources are suggested for further reading. You can search resources by keyword, language, country, theme or date of publication in our knowledge centre. On the front page, there is a ‘tag cloud’, which displays the most frequently occurring ‘tags’ or keywords that we have attached to articles, documents, videos and other resources. When you click on a tag in the cloud, you get a list of all related resources. Alternately, you can use our resource map, which displays the latest information about our work in a particular country on a world map. Other new features include a page where you can subscribe to e-mail updates of NIMD news, a new Young NIMD website, and NIMD Blogs, with a ‘maiden blog’ by NIMD Director Roel von Meijenfeldt.


Open source

The new NIMD website and knowledge centre make use of open source software. Such software is not only cheaper (NIMD doesn’t pay expensive licensing fees to run it) but also, and more importantly; it tends to be more user-friendly, more flexible and up-to-date than proprietary software. Why? Because open source software applications are continuously developed, tested and adapted to the demands of users by a whole host of independent software developers who share their work. Thus, the NIMD website benefits, for example, from Pivot, a freely available, continuously updated program to run a Blog developed by a Dutch software engineer, which is used by thousands of Bloggers. And as this piece of software has now been updated and adapted to the demands of NIMD Blogs, these updates and adaptations become immediately available to others.


Open content

Sharing knowledge and exchanging experiences is at the core of NIMD’s work. Therefore, NIMD does not just support open source technology but also promotes open content sharing. However, since ownership and, by implication, authorship are principles we hold in high esteem as well, NIMD supports Creative Commons, an approach to copyrights that empowers authors to decide on which terms they would like to share their work and with whom. As a base line, we publish information under a Creative Commons Licence, which allows you to freely use, copy and redistribute it on the conditions that

(1) you do so for non-commercial purposes;
(2) you accredit the original author, and;
(3) you do not alter the content.

Most of the information available through the NIMD website and resource centre are freely available on these conditions, unless stated otherwise.

Credits

The NIMD website and knowledge centre is a production of NIMD's Knowledge & Communication department in cooperation with TwoKings web developers and graphic designers Carrie Zwarts & Stephan Csikos.

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