Summary:

Portal lets academics, researchers and others around the world share information on governance issues

Dan Latendre lives and works in an igloo, but he doesn’t wear a winter coat and gloves.

That’s because this igloo is located right in Waterloo and transmitted worldwide via the Internet and your computer screen.

Latendre is program director of an Internetbased resource centre where researchers from around the world can gather electronically and share information on the key issues facing governments today.

This web-based portal is officially called IGLOO, which stands for International Governance Leadership Organizations Online.

IGLOO is based at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, where Latendre is the chief technology officer.

Why did the creators of this unusual project pick the name IGLOO? Latendre says they were looking for something that symbolized a gathering place, but also said something about Canada and its chilly weather.

In a sense, IGLOO fits beautifully with the mandate the centre took on when it was created three years ago to bring together academics and experts to offer solutions and options to improve governance across the globe.

With IGLOO, the academics and researchers won’t have to journey thousands of kilometres to Waterloo to do their work. Answers are just a click of the mouse away.

Working with the idea that the “research must be global,” Latendre says one of the aims of the portal is to “break down geographical boundaries” because academics and policy practitioners can’t travel to every conference. The solution was to “leverage the web and work together online.”

IGLOO, which will be officially unveiled at a conference at the governance centre later this month, is being put together by a working group using an operating system called Livelink, which was provided by Waterloo-based software company Open Text.

Latendre is well-suited to lead this cuttingedge technology, having worked at Open Text for more than 10 years. When the travel of that job wore him out, he quit to form a consulting firm.

But he soon he got a call from Tom Jenkins, his old boss at Open Text, asking him to spearhead the web-portal project.

The idea is not entirely new. Latendre had set up something similar in the mid-1990s to connect the thousands of employees of Motorola who work around the globe. The plan was to take the same idea and apply it to not-for-profit organizations involved in governance issues and collaborative work with the United Nations.

The model, in essence, is a “repurposing of what Open Text has been doing for the past decade,” he says.

Why wasn’t it been done sooner? This kind of stuff is expensive, he says, and wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without the contributions of the governance centre, Open Text and the province of Ontario.

The governance centre is providing the headquarters for IGLOO, while the Livelink software supplied by Open Text is worth $500,000 to $750,000 US.

The province is providing $7 million in startup funding over the next five years in the hope of attracting experts in online international governance research and boosting Ontario’s profile in this area.

IGLOO will be a “hosted” operation, meaning it will supply and run the web-based portal and its components at a secure and centralized data facility at the governance centre. No need for participating organizations and users to run their own websites.They just tap into IGLOO.

As well, the portal will be connected to “one of the world’s fastest, most expansive and scalable global IP (Internet protocol) networks,” according to an IGLOO brochure.

Anchoring the content of this groundbreaking portal will be two types of research communities, explains Latendre. The first is called an “instant community,” where smaller research groups can set up their own home page and site to contribute and share information.

The second is called a “customized community,” where larger and more specialized organizations would pay IGLOO to set up and run their site.

An example would be the Academic Council on the United Nations System, an international institution of nearly 1,000 scholars, teachers and practitioners who study the UN and other international organizations. Using its customized community, members all over the world could post research papers, participate in workshops and collaborate with peers.

IGLOO will also have a top-notch research library of governance-related materials, academic databases and news feeds, and a number of expert web logs or “blogs” where members can discuss topics and ask questions.

Governance centre chair and founder Jim Balsillie says the beauty of IGLOO is that it finally brings high technology to the international government sector.

In the past, “far more technology was going into the development of the car door than global institutions,” says Balsillie, who is also the co-chief executive of BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion Ltd.

One person who doesn’t have to be sold on the value of the IGLOO project is Katherine Sage Hayes.

A community support specialist at the governance centre, Hayes is also working with the Academic Council on the United Nations System, which will have its own online community on IGLOO.

The academic council holds annual meetings which can be very expensive for its members to get to, she says. IGLOO will save its members “thousands of dollars” in travel expenses and allow more up-to-date dialogue, research and communication. “In the world of international relations, helping people to get immediate feedback is huge,” Hayes says.

IGLOO, which will have almost any type of media link including video connections, will be like a chat room and more, Hayes points out, because it will offer research papers and library resources of considerable depth.

“Dan (Latendre) calls it Google squared for governance,” says Balsillie. “It’s a much richer and deeper thing” than what has been available in the past.

Latendre says IGLOO will have about 30 employees when it is launched and about 150 after five years, when it hopes to be self-sustaining financially.

While IGLOO will be free to most users, it plans to hold fundraising campaigns, seek contributions from partners and sell technology licensing and subscriptions to major users.

When he started working on the project a year ago, Latendre says the goal was to have five or six large online communities.

Now, they have more than 15 lined up. Others include the North-South Institute, which conducts research on Canada’s relationship with developing countries; BRICSAM, a group of countries such as Brazil, Russia, China and Mexico just below the G8; and AfghanConnect, a site being built to continue dialogue over Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan.

Latendre says IGLOO initially will be offered in English, but the goal is to make it multilingual to assist users who speak other languages.

The project will also dovetail with the other work being done by the governance centre. Every research project at the centre will have an IGLOO component, he says.

chowitt@therecord.com