Participant's guide to E-conference on Transparency

The E-conference ‘Transparency and honesty in the water and sanitation sector’ from 9-27 May 2005 is organised by: IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre based in Delft, Netherlands. The E-conference facilitators are Kathleen Shordt, Laurent Stravato, Marielle Snel, Ewen Le Borgne and Cor Dietvorst of IRC.

You can view the E-conference web page on the IRC website.

You can also go directly to the discussion forum of the first week.

Registration

To contribute to the e-conference you must first register online.

Once you have registered you will receive a login name and password. Those who have participated in earlier e-conferences on the IRC web site, can use same login name and password. If you have forgotten your password you can get a new one at: http://www.irc.nl/user/forgotpassword

Contributing

You will be notified about new contributions to the discussion. Please do not reply to the notifications you will receive by e-mail. If you want to participate by e-mail, send your messages to: transparency@forum.watsan.net.

E-Conference Overview

How can transparency be improved and honesty ensured? How can corruption be eliminated? These are the questions this e-conference attempts to answer. The focus is on finding and mainstreaming solutions.

The E-conference is divided into 3 parts:

• Week 1: general discussion about the issues. This should help clarify what we are talking about.
• Week 2: focusing on positive experiences and tools that have improved transparency, increased honesty and/or reduced corruption in the water sector. Sanitation programming could also be included.
• Week 3: looking at the way forward - activities, strategies, coalitions and thematic groupings for which there might be interest.

E-Conference Etiquette

Like in any conference, if we all follow certain basic rules, your participation will be more enjoyable and productive. Here are some suggestions:

1. Respect the objectives and topics of the conference

In this E-Conference, we expect to read messages and documents about the very specific issue of honesty and transparency in the water and sanitation sector. But we welcome experiences with Honesty and transparency from other sectors.

2. Positive criticism not destructive

Please avoid using this E-conference to disseminate information or opinions about other topics or even worse blaming institutions or actors from the water and sanitation sector. This E-conference aims to be critically constructive and not destructive.

3. Introduce yourself

In your first message, please introduce yourself so that we "know" each other and we understand the context of your contribution.

4. Avoid sending personal messages to the list

If you are in a “real world” conference and you see a friend across the room, you will not shout her/his name in the middle of someone else’s speech. The same applies in an E-conference: Do not send personal messages to the electronic conference, since they will be received not only by your friend, but by the other 160 or more participants as well. The rule is to send to the list only messages that in principle can be of interest to all the participants.

5. Need help? Send us a private message

If at any time you need some help, or want to unsubscribe from the conference, or want to change your registered e-mail address, please do not send your message to the conference. Send it to us, privately.