team introduction

[Hannah Birkenkötter]

Hey everyone, 

I just joined this mailinglist and would like to take the opportunity to quickly introduce myself and our team that is working on UN-informed.org. First of all, I am very grateful that all of you have decided to commit some time to the development of this database. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate your efforts!

My name is Hannah, and I have been coordinating UN Agreements Research since the inception of MCM. UN Agreements Research is focused on researching documents that will ultimately figure in the UN-informed.org<http://un-informed.org/>  database. We have developed lots of connections between documents and clauses etc, and have discussed all of this during our international meeting in Helsinki. The outcome of this discussion has already been posted by Lukas on http://code.google.com/p/uninformed/wiki/Introduction.

In the past, we have gathered lots of feedback on the database. State actors and NGOs in various countries have all been very excited by the prospects of such a database - your work for MCM will thus directly contribute to bringing the UN and its agreements closer to the people that work in the field at the national level. The database has a direct impact on the role of the UN amongst those actors. All your work will be publicly available on the internet, and will be presented in a formal release conference at the UN Palais des Nations in Geneva in May 2010.  You all of course will be invited to take part in what will prove to be a very exciting conference! 

The board of MCM is currently composed of Marian, who is our President, Astrid, our Vice-President (and one of the co-founders of MCM), Merja, who works on PR from Hanoi and myself. In addition, Derek will be working from the United Nations in Geneva to organise our conference that will take place there in May 2010. At the conference, we want to present the database UN-informed.org, as well as our second project, UN-i.org. Astrid, Marian and myself are all working from Berlin. Additionally, we have country teams in various countries ranging from Romania to Finland, who are all working from their respective countries. In UN Agreements Research, we have currently around 20 active researchers, all working on providing a basis of data for the database. Please find attached a picture of our Initiative :)

I will be following your discussions in order to provide input on the content of UN-informed.org whenever it is needed. If you have any questions on UN-informed.org, or any other aspect related to MCM, please feel free to shoot me an email or chat me up on skype (hannah1012).

Once again, I am thrilled to meet all of you, and am looking forward to working with you in the future!

Best regards from Berlin, 

Hannah

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Hannah Birkenkötter

Director of UN Agreements Research

Making Commitments Matter Initiative

birken...@un-informed.org

www.un-informed.org

Niederbarnimstr. 12

10247 Berlin

Germany

+49 174 263 9335