Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
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United Nations Optical Disk System Access Secretary General Annan Responds to a Question on the Optical Disk System at the March 18 Briefing
Question: Something of a clarification, then a sort of housekeeping question. You mentioned the media services. A lot of the information coming out of the building most rapidly comes out of the optical disk system (ODS). There have apparently been a lot of complaints from non- governmental organizations that access to them is going to be provided at a cost of something like $1,000 a month. I do not know whether that stuff is available to the press, but can you give us some idea. The problem with this is that, down the line there is some concern that information that is made available on the Internet for free will not be accessible, or that certain agencies will not put information on the Internet, but they will put it on the optical disk. The basic question is, are we all going to start having to pay for information we get from the United Nations in a timely manner?Secretary-General: I do not think our intention is to make things even a bit more difficult or a bit more expensive for you. I think everybody is excited: every time I turn around, they say, "We got 2 million hits this week. We got 3 million hits on the Internet!" I think the intention is very much to go that route: to simplify your lives and to simplify and enhance our capacity to get the news out. So I am not sure that the intention will be to go via optical disk and create more financial costs or difficulties for you. But as I have indicated on this -- and I think that Mr. Strong will be talking to you further -- we are going to have further consultations, and everybody in the group will be set up to implement the transformation of the Department of Public Information (DPI).
More Information on NGO Access at the UN
More Information on NGOs and the Official Documents System
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