5 steps for information management in your organization

Gathering and maintaining the proper information within your organization and organizing its
upload on the GFP website is a demanding task from the very beginning (when you will have to
learn the tool and upload all pre-identified contents), and after the initial upload when
maintenance and keeping in touch with the users will be the main challenges.

This guide aims at helping you cope with these challenges. It is an adaptation of the main
principles of 5S (named by the Japanese words Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu and Shitsuke that
describe the single steps), as formulated in the Japanese Lean Production rules.

1. Identify the best organization of the contents. Periodically make a content inventory
and remove or downgrade contents that is oblivious – so the users easily find the best the
site can offer.

This step might also include:

o In the initial upload phase:
 locating of relevant information on your website (in collaboration with
your colleagues who author it);
 finding out together with your website administrator whether it has a
stable address that doesn't change frequently, and
 establishing an internal notification mechanism so you would know if he
has changed the address of the content, so you can re-point links from the
GFP website, as required.
 In case your organization maintains a download center requiring sign up,
or some other reason prevents you from exact linking towards the content,
the description of the content has also to state clearly how the user can
reach it.
 If the content requires payment (not recommended), prices should also be
stated on the GFP website.
o In the maintenance phase: periodical review of the compliance of the content
with the communication strategy adopted by your organization (and the evolution
of such strategy).
2. Put in place the optimum organization of data. To do so, you may:
o rely on your experience during expert review, or
o track the paths users undertake (e.g., by using the logs of tracking software, or
following forum entries and publications about your content as found on the GFP
website)

No matter which option you choose, the bottomline is following user behaviours
when looking for data on the site, and trying to optimize them.
3. Cleanliness. The content review should be turned in a continuous process – best done by
involving the user community and other Core partners and following their feedback, so
the information will be readily available and "polished" by such steady peer review
process. An analogy: in production, clean equipment is always ready to use immediately
without waste of time for preparing it when needed. On the GFPTT website, this means
 making the content update as continuous as possible, and not a matter of periodic
reviews. Any suggestions on software tools to do so are welcome (some already exist -
such as the authomated notifications on topics with little content, or topics where no
content was added in the last months).
4. Standardized clean-up. Create review schedules (a rigorous formal system depending
on your organizational structure) so the contents you manage is maintained steadily and
not only when demand arises.
5. Discipline. Create motivation in the web team on your side for performing above tasks
continuously and in the same high quality. This is best achieved when the people
involved in the site's operation feel the site as a tool to perform important tasks and enjoy
collaborating with the GFP community.

Beside those guidelines, we also have concrete tips on what type of contents to enter in the
different parts of the website for each type of data. Further, general guidance on style and writing
for the web are available in the Language, style and formatting part of the Tutorial's General
notes and conventions section, and in the Policy questions part of the FAQ section.

Last but not least - when in doubt, contact us. For policy questions write to
admin@gfptt.org, and for technical matters - to support@gfptt.org. Your questions will help
improve this site and enchance the tutorial with a better guidance for all users.