Dear Colleagues My Name is Taraneh and I am working as Portal admin of Agricultural Research, Education and Extension Organization(AREEO)in Iran(www.areo.ir). 1.I think that first of all we should know and trace our users very well; by recognizing their needs, we can evaluate the quality of our portals and we can improve it. Our AREEO Portal has about 100 sub-portals which includes its affiliated research institutes and training centers. It's really difficult to evaluate the quality of all these sub-portals ; so we decided to write a standard or a guideline which through it , our sub-portals' admin can follow the rules and evaluate their sub-portals themselves. Each sub-portal has its own admin who is responsible for the content management and quality control. Based on this Standard guideline we indicate some "must issues" which should be available easily on the sub-portals as soon as a user reach to them; some of these issues are: *About us *Mission & Vision *Departments *Achievements *Research Projects *Staff *Library anf Information Center *Databases *Contact us These are some immediate issues which each user in the first step may look for them. none of them should be empty link. all links should be controlled by admins to have the necessery data with high quality. Each year we evaluate all these 100 sub-portals based on the above mentioned standards(which is developed by AREEO as a guideline for sub-portal admins). each item has a point(1 or 2 ) and then we calculate the total points for each sub-portal. our highest score is 20 and the lowest is 5. of course all our sub-portal admins try to be the best and this kind of competition to control the content quality leads them to manage their data more carefully and based on the needs of their users. I try to talk about the other mentioned questions later on this discussion group. Thanks to all and bye for now! :-)

Hi everyone My name is Taraneh Ebrahimi. I am working for the Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in the Near East & North Africa(AARINENA) as AARINENA Web Manager. ICT is one of the main issues which we are working on its development in the Region. It's a pleaseure to participate in this forum to know about lesson learned and your success stories in this regard[url=]www.aarinena.org[/url]

Greetings from Iran My name is Taraneh Ebrahimi. I am working as the Webmaster of the Association of Agricultural Research Institutions in the Near East & North Africa(AARINENA:http://www.aarinena.org .I am working as the webmaster of Agricultural Scientific Information & Documentation Center as well(http://www.agrisis.org). Therefore I have the chance to work at the national and regional level together. The main issue which I have found during my job, is the strong relationship which should be developed between national and regional levels. I have found that without a strong National Information System, you couldn't have a strong RAIS. Weak communication and Knowledge sharing systems is a big problem which you can see at the NAIS and RAIS . Maybe other colleagues in other regions have this problem as well. In AARINENA region we are working now on inviting Agricultural Information Centers in the member countries to act their role in AARINENA as the National Focal Points/Units. I hope we can invite people or encourage them to share their experiences and knowledge. Maybe we can also find together better solutions for that during this forum. Anyway, my colleagues and I do our best to facilitate exchanging information in the AARINENA region. Last year we have developed the database of Agricultural researchers in Western Asia(http://www.aarinena.org/database/index.htm). This Sub-Region consists of three countries which are Iran, Turkey and Pakistan .This database could be so useful to exchange information between researchers in the Sub-region. Sub-Regional Agricultural Researchers could lead and manage common projects with each other. We received about 500 records from Agricultural researchers in the sub-region, through the electronic form(http://www.aarinena.org/database/form.htm), but I am sure that we have more researchers in the region who didn't fill out the form. It returns to the problem which I have mentioned above: weak communication and sharing! We have two other information system in the way for AARINENA: There are NARIMS and NERAKIN. National Agricultural Research Information Management System (NARIMS) is another important Project in the Region, which has developed by CLAES in Egypt; The objective of the project is to strengthen the capacity of the ARC to develop, manage and apply a relevant and effective national agricultural information management system in support of agricultural development and food security policies. It enables Researchers and scientists to carry out research more effectively by creating access to research and intuitional information from the region and as well as by providing modern tools for the managing researchers information, agricultural research project, plans, and other activities. NARIMS has four modules namely: • Agricultural Research Personnel • Agricultural Research Institutes • Agricultural Research Projects • Agricultural Research Results and Publication NARIMS is in final testing and training material would be delivered to AARINENA very soon. Near East and North Africa Rural and Agricultural Knowledge and Information Network (NERAKIN) is another information system for the region;it has been developed by FAO/RNE in Egypt and it will act as a platform for knowledge sharing and collaboration for development in NENA region. I am working now on the developing of the new website of AARINENA which will be available in next two months. I think maybe ,during this forum,we can discuss on the issues related to the unique formats and programming language for all Regional fora websites ;in this case we can exchange more information through our websites or through a search system with ability to search all data on all regional fora websites. Best regards Taraneh