The "digital divide" is often referred to as the gap between the haves of technology and the have-nots. The struggle for poor communities to establish technology resources of their own, and provide training for their residents to use them, contrasted with the wealth of resources available in affluent areas. This problem is of paramount importance for the United Nations, where some countries lack the financial and technical resources to create an effective presence on the Internet.

However, a group of more than 40 students, faculty and staff from DePaul's School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems (CTI) has set out to change that. The CTI group helped to establish a system for development, deployment and management of the Web sites of more than 25 countries with Permanent Missions to the United Nations, as part of the Assistance for Permanent Missions Web sites project (APMW).

The first group of 11 Web sites went live in August, and earlier this month, a team from DePaul CTI visited the U.N. for an information technology seminar presentation to the governing body's Institute for Training and Research. Permanent Mission Web sites contain critical information about each nation, including general facts and figures about the country, their latest activities at the U.N., official diplomatic position statements, contact information for embassies and mission staff, and visa and travel information.

The project began in January 2004, when a team of volunteers from CTI began to create an information architecture and common look and feel for all the Permanent Mission Web sites. This was used to build the content management system that both students and mission personnel used to create the Web sites. They also visited each one of the U.N. missions involved in the project for a detailed training session, to meet with mission and technical staff and to discuss future directions for the project.

The system is currently hosted at DePaul University. Many of the Web sites have already been posted, including Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Kenya, Marshall Islands, Mauritania, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zimbabwe. During system deployment, CTI student Emmett John Finneran has been working at the U.N. to help with the transition and training of the U.N. Mission personnel.

The CTI system is based on fundamental Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) principles, which has made the system easy to use, and has been developed exclusively using open-source software, which makes a cheap and non-proprietary alternative to expensive commercial systems. The CTI system enables the U.N. Missions' personnel to edit their Web pages, post documents and pictures on the Web site without any technical expertise and minimal training. The team also compiled a 50-page instructional manual for each mission's use.

The project is now entering a second phase where an additional 20 delegations at the United Nations will have their mission sites developed by DePaul students and faculty.

Making sure that the project will be available to all countries regardless of their level of technical sophistication was a key emphasis, CTI team leaders said.

"We saw an opportunity to bring accessible Web development technology to some countries that may not be able to afford it otherwise," said Anne Morley, assistant dean of CTI and one of the project's coordinators. "Some of the computer resources that industrialized nations take for granted could not be found at some of the mission offices. You didn't see many modern terminals or T-1 lines, so we needed to develop a platform that would be compatible with the technology available."

DePaul is a registered NGO (non-governmental organization) at the United Nations, and as part of the relationship, the university will be placing three graduate students into technology internships at the U.N. during the next two years.

The six DePaul CTI faculty members who volunteered to establish the project are system architect Massimo Di Pierro, information architect Adam Steele, and team leaders Gian Mario Besana, Laura McFall, Daniela Raicu and Raffaella Settimi. The project was coordinated locally by Morley and Ambassador Ahmad Kamal at the U.N.

DePaul CTI is one of the largest computer science programs in the country. The undergraduate program enrolls nearly 1,300 students and offers 11 different degrees. More than 2,200 students are enrolled in the graduate program. DePaul CTI also features a doctoral degree program in computer science. For more information on DePaul CTI, visit www.cs.depaul.edu.

DePaul is the largest Catholic university in the nation and seventh-largest private university in the United States. A richly diverse population of 23,610 students attends classes on two city and five suburban campuses. The university’s mission has emphasized the benefits of service learning, and was recently honored by U.S. News and World Report for their efforts in introducing students to the benefits of serving the community.

NOTE TO EDITORS: To see some of the Web sites created by the DePaul CTI team, please visit http://www.un.int/index-en/webs.html and scroll down to the name of the country whose site you wish to view.