There is an amazing statistic about the World Wide Web: USA Today estimated earlier this year that there are more than 2 billion Web sites on the Internet and this number is growing at more than 7 million per day. These numbers are so large that understanding, let alone exploiting, all useable Web sites is clearly beyond the capacity of any individual. Suppose, however, you had a service that scans the entire Internet to retrieve information resources and organizes them so that customers across the Asia Pacific area can get and share information at one Web site?

Enter the Asia Pacific Area Network (APAN), a Web portal to the universe of information, courses, exercises, conferences, people and agencies available in the Asia Pacific region. Although funded by the U.S. Commander-in-Chief Pacific, this Internet service site belongs to all the people of this region. What APAN does and how it operates will evolve as customers' imaginations discover new possibilities.

Mission

The APAN mission is to communicate and share information electronically, facilitate regional understanding, build confidence among Asia Pacific neighbors, and enhance security cooperation. This mission is different from that of APAN's sister organization, the Virtual Information Center* (VIC). VIC furnishes its customers with situational awareness by focusing on timely identification, retrieval, integration and analysis of open source information by using advanced technology and information.

Mission success for APAN requires a two-part end state. First, it requires a customer base that regularly uses the site as a portal to information they need, and second, the site must assist that customer base in collaborating to solve mutual problems. Since there is no approved solution on how to accomplish this mission, the APAN development concept is a scientific guess: start as a Web portal that is available to all, is easy to access, and is easy to use.

There are fourteen APAN staff members including six information analysts, and eight information technology experts who have systems analysis, network and Web development skills. The staff is collocated with the Virtual Resource Center at Camp H.M. Smith in Honolulu, Hawai'i. As the site expands, an almost limitless virtual staff from across the Asia Pacific region will find and recommend new resources and links.

APAN is an Inclusive Activity

Initially, APAN was designed to welcome anyone wishing to access it but in order to build an operating concept that approach had to be refined. The APAN team brainstormed ideas as to what APAN is and who its customers should be.

APAN had a number of customers, and the most promising topics for the Web portal with collaborative tools appeared to be humanitarian assistance, disaster response, and peacekeeping operations, so the APAN team began with that audience in mind. If, however, it was going to provide both information and collaboration resources to help that audience, it needed the subject matter expertise from the wide array of national and international emergency managers and aid providers.

As of November 2000, APAN had more than 700 registered users from 30 different countries. The goal is to build membership to at least 50 nations from around the Asia-Pacific region. Currently, about half of the registered users are U.S. customers.

All users must register for the site, but as soon as the registration is completed, users can access the public pages. Anyone can become a user but access to certain pages requires additional permissions. This allows APAN to balance inclusiveness with the desire to restrict some information and discussions to selected individuals or to selected jobs and functions such as exercise planners, law enforcement, etc.

There are several important assumptions about APAN's customers that are guiding its development. First, its users are individuals, not governments or agencies, so that their discussions on issues and activities will remain unofficial and unclassified. Next, the difficulty in getting or paying for Internet access from many locations is understood. Thus, the APAN site is designed for quick downloads to save the user time through their Internet service provider. Finally, the computer skills of these customers will run from novice to expert with fewer experts and more novices. An additional complication is that many users will approach this English language site with English as a second language. Initially, APAN will remain English language for two reasons: cost and the predominance of World Wide Web sites in English. Currently, 84 percent of the two billion plus Web sites are located in the United States, and this percentage does not include the English language sites in non-English speaking countries that appeal to tourists, businessmen, and aviation and information technology customers.

Customers Deserve an Easy-to-Use Site

The development concept moved forward with a collaborating team. The question was how to tame the information avalanche and still provide quick, user-friendly access. APAN's information analysts and technical developers threw different combinations back and forth as they struggled to provide this goal to thousands of resources that could be accessed and then cross-walked with a minimum of mouse clicks. The design standard was to reach most items in four mouse clicks or less.

The APAN Web page design that resulted from this process has four major pages and three information functions to serve its members. The home page provides selected daily news articles, special focus areas and highlights to alert customers to topical issues. In addition, the home page has quick links to country pages, top topics, and forums. The resource page functions as an entry to a variety of information and research sources. This page has sections for top topics, news sources, research sites, international organizations and many other useful categories for research. The exercise page organizes exercises and games and seminars for planners as well as participants. The United Nations/Center of Excellence peacekeeping seminar games are just one example of the training events available through these links, which can provide reference materials and guide participants through pre-game functions from the comfort of their office or home. The final functional page is devoted to conferences. This page contains a list of conferences, access to conference papers, links to active conference Web sites and a conference management section for conference project officers and on-line registration and updates for attendees.

Information Exchange Partners enjoy a Win-Win Relationship

APAN already has some information exchange partners whose presence and contributions add great value for the customer. Just as the Virtual Resource Center relies on its partners who comprise the Virtual Information Center and other secondary collaborative partners, so does APAN. Yet the nature of APAN's relationship is different, because its respective missions are different. APAN does not compete with any of its partners, but expands their visibility and creates new linkages. APAN provides a one-source connection of information resources to many types of organizations and a variety of events in ways never done before on a routine basis. While the VIC process relies upon the integration of unique expertise from its partners to produce information products, APAN's functional relationship with partners is to widen their customer base with new users who want to access their expertise. The second element of the partnership is to provide its partners with new capabilities and venues for communication, training and exercises. For the Center of Excellence, as already mentioned, APAN provides an easy-to-access link for peacekeeping operations game reference materials. In addition, APAN provides the ability to post conference and game results linked to several other entries within the Web site as well as links to Center courses without having to drill down into the Center's Web page, then into the UN Web site or Relief Web, with all of the additional steps required.

For the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies (APCSS), APAN provides not only a new research resource, but also a venue for APCSS alumni to continue their personal relationships and multilateral review of regional issues that will expand their personal networks. APAN will soon be "publishing" papers for APCSS students and alumni to create a wide-ranging linkage of previously unavailable documents on the Internet.

The Future of APAN

Future partnerships will most likely entail consortiums of like or related institutions. The peacekeeping and emergency management areas are likely avenues for growth, but APAN also hopes to expand linkages to regional security institutes and staff colleges. The Bangladesh Institute for International Strategic Studies, for example, has agreed to become a partner. In combination with APCSS, this type of consortium could produce not only a wealth of easily accessible studies but also a very deep bench of talented security scholars to stimulate regional dialogue.

For the Pacific Disaster Center and Global Disaster Information Network - International, APAN provides the promise not only of links, but also for the potential to create a consortium of players from around the region at little cost but great payoff. For example, the Armed Forces of the Philippines expanded their annual SAGIP (meaning "to provide a lending hand" in Tagalog) game to about a dozen countries in the region as well as PDC, potentially GDIN-I and numerous other disaster response and emergency management agencies and institutes. The potential exists to host a Web page inside of APAN for the Armed Forces of the Philippines, link that page to multiple resources, offer links to related courses and even to distribute portions of that game over the Internet.

A concept like APAN will evolve with the ideas of its users and grow into new possibilities. The regional profit from the interaction APAN promises is considerable, but profit first requires investment. APAN needs users and partners who will invest some time, their good ideas and thoughtful discussion to achieve that profit. These temporal and intellectual payments are the only cost to our individual users and our information exchange partners.

Please register as a user and submit your ideas and feedback.
http://www.apan-info.net