SUMMARY
1. General
1.1 What is the European Broadband Portal project all about?
1.2 How can we get into contact with the European Broadband Portal?
2. Classification and marking system
2.1 How does the users’ evaluation of the portal for good practice identification work?
2.2 How does the classification of different categories work?
2.3 What is being evaluated within the “Strategic Planning” category?
2.4 What is being evaluated within the “Project Management” category?
2.5 What is being evaluated within the “Technology” category?
2.6 What is being evaluated within the “Procurement and Financial Engineering” category?
2.7 What is being evaluated within the “Wider Impact on socio-economic Development?
3. Security
3.1 Why registration for the portal is required?
3.2 Why is it not possible to change my e-mail address?
3.3 Will my user’s profile be visible to other users of the portal?
3.4 During the registration I’ve encountered the following question: “Do you want to share information about your profile with other users?” What does it mean?
4. How does the website work?
4.1 Why are you asking me about my prime interests?
4.2 Why do I have to fill the majority of the fields in all the forms of the databases?
4.3 How can I reduce the size of documents while uploading them to the portal?
4.4 How can I write longer answers in a thread?
4.5 Why did I receive an e-mail indicating that I should update the status of the content introduced by me?
4.6 Why is the home page of the portal not showing the event/URL I’ve introduced?
4.7 What does the information shown on the home page of different data bases mean?
4.8 I’ve just introduced new content and cannot find it using the searching tool.
4.9 What purpose do the links to the content displayed on the screen serve?
4.10 Who has translated my form into English?
4.11 Can I participate actively in the life of the virtual community (fora, commentaries, etc.) using a language different than English?
4.12 How can I translate a text using the Internet?
5. Technical questions
5.1 Which browsers can be used to for the portal?
5.2 What does it mean that the portal is partly accessible?
5.3 Which contents are available in 6 languages?
5.4 What’s the maximum space available for attachments in the EBP?
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1. General
1.1 What is the European Broadband Portal project all about?
The European Broadband Portal (EBP) is a follow up action of the European Commission resulting from the "Bridging the Broadband Gap Conference" (14-15 May 2007, Brussels) which concluded that there was a need to support public authorities in areas under-served by broadband to improve supply and conditions of supply.
The development of the EBP has been initiated by the European Commission (DG Information Society & Media) following an open Call for Tender for the supply of a “Web Portal for Exchange of Good Practice for Broadband Deployment”. The project commenced in January 2008 and will last for a period of 30 months.
The project seeks to create a coherent on-line community of relevant stakeholders, providing them with the tools for effective sharing of experiences and good practices and a participatory environment for seeking common and shared solutions.
1.2 How can we get into contact with the European Broadband Portal?
The European Broadband Portal
eris@ Office
24, Boulevard de l’Empereur
B-1000 Brussels
Tel: +32 (0) 2 230 03 25
Fax: +32 (0) 2 230 92 01
E-mail: info@erisa.be
2. Classification and marking system
2.1 How does the users’ evaluation of the portal for good practice identification work?
The registered users of the portal can evaluate (can be done once only) the projects included in the data base, assigning an appropriate mark (from 1 to 5) to different, previously pre-defined, categories according to the following description:
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Interesting
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Helpful
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Useful
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Very useful
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Excellent
Projects cannot be evaluated by the person who has introduced data concerning the said projects into the website (i.e. usually the project manager), just as normal users can do.
The final evaluation is calculated by the average mean of all the marks assigned by the user to each of the categories.
2.2 How does the classification of different categories work?
The managers of all the projects can catalogue them into five different categories, indicating for each and every a grade of relevance, based on their experience in project’s implementation.
2.3 What is being evaluated within the “Strategic Planning” category?
Within this category users submitting a project give a general evaluation of the planning process they have followed for it. What they should explain here is if their project strategic planning could be used as an example of good practice for other people and why.
2.4 What is being evaluated within the “Project Management” category?
Within this category project owners should describe the management system used for the project. They are invited to give details on the management system they have put into place, highlighting any particular feature of this.
2.5 What is being evaluated within the “Technology” category?
Within this category project managers should report on the technology used in their broadband project. In particular they are invited to comment any innovative approach that they might have considered.
2.6 What is being evaluated within the “Procurement and Financial Engineering” category?
Within this category project owners evaulate and describe the way the project was funded, the type of funds used and, if applicable, any future sustainability plan.
2.7 What is being evaluated within the “Wider Impact on socio-economic Development?
Within this category the project owner should describe what the impact of the project in terms of socio-economic benefits in the area covered by the project itself is.
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3. Security
3.1 Why registration for the portal is required?
The non-registered users will have a limited access to the portal and it will not be possible for them to make any contribution. At the same time, the registration to the portal is free and open to everyone willing to register.
3.2 Why is it not possible to change my e-mail address?
Your e-mail address is a data used by the EBP to identify the user. Therefore it cannot be modified.
If your email address has changed, you need to register again. There will be no problem if the rest of the data stay the same.
Remember also to update the contact details in the project / document / strategy / procurement / industry / details that you have contributed to the portal!
3.3 Will my user’s profile be visible to other users of the portal?
For an answer have a look on the next question.
3.4 During the registration I’ve encountered the following question: “Do you want to share information about your profile with other users?”. What does it mean?
If a user chooses that s/he does not want to share information about their profile with other users of the portal, their profile will not be accessible by the “users’ search tool”, neither will the data introduced to the profile be shown. Of course, you will be able to participate in all the virtual community activities and will have access to all the content provided in the databases.
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4 How does the website work?
4.1 Why are you asking me about my prime interests?
According to the user’s interests, s/he will be being sent, with their permission, information about new content introduced to the website within the scope of interests of the user.
4.2 Why do I have to fill the majority of the fields in all the forms of the databases?
In all the forms there is a certain number of obligatory fields (marked with *), which allows to dynamise the process of uploading and allow the user to complete the form later on.
By filling all the possible fields of the forms at the very beginning, you will add more visibility the content you provide, allowing the searching tools to localise it using various categories. What’s more, it will help other users to find the most of the available information, and, henceforth enjoy fully knowledge and experience described by you.
4.3 How can I reduce the size of documents while uploading them to the portal?
There are various ways in which you can reduce the size of various documents, but what always works, regardless of the type of the file uploaded, is to use a compression method. Although there are several ways to do so, popular among various users, the most well-known and being already included in some versions of Windows, is ZIP. It can also be downloaded from http://www.winzip.com.
4.4 How can I write longer answers in a thread?
The open fields of the portal only allow a limited number of characters, and it is not possible to exceed. Nevertheless, if you think that some points need clarifications, you can always provide such information on a separate document (Word, Power Point, etc.) that you can name accordingly to the topic covered and attach it on the "Attachment" last section, where you can upload all the files you want.
4.5 Why did I receive an e-mail indicating that I should update the status of the content introduced by me?
EBP tries to keep all its content up-to-date, therefore we send the reminders periodically (every 6 months) to the users who have introduced data to the website, with an assumption that they may be willing to update the content.
4.6 Why is the home page of the portal not showing the event/URL I’ve introduced?
The events and useful links provided by users of the site must be approved by a system administrator to validate the content and make sure it is parallel to the EBP expectations.
4.7 What does the information shown on the home page of different data bases mean?
At the data bases’ home page you can find the following information (it is possible that not all the following information will be shown in all the data bases):
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Searching tools (with a possibility of advance search) to find various content (of each of the databases) using various criteria. There is a possibility of using the “keyword” field to search for any word introduced to any of the forms as well as the attached files.
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Last content added: area where data added is listed in order, where those most recently added are listed first.
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Adding new content: it lets us to enter new data into the corresponding database. In general, it is possible to indicate the language in which you want to introduce the form in.
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My content: an area where the content introduced by the users are listed
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Content classification: an area where the content is shown according to the classification assigned, taking into account user’s preferences.
4.8 I’ve just introduced new content and cannot find it using the searching tool.
The search engine deepens on the indexing process that runs regularly. A recently added item/content will not be accessible by the searching tool until it has been indexed by the said process.
The full indexing process runs once in a week (on Sundays) - changes in the databases will be shown only after the next indexing process is completed.
To be more specific, there are two kind of indexing processes:
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The full crawl, which reads all the contents at once and creates a new index
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The incremental crawl, which detects the changes from the last incremental crawl and reads only the modified contents and then updates the index.
The full index process is configured once a week (on Sundays) and the incremental crawling process every three hours.
4.9 What purpose do the links to the content displayed on the screen serve?
In the link area you can see content of other databases related to the content displayed on the screen.
4.10 Who has translated my form into English?
EBP uses an automatic translation system which translates all the forms introduced in a language other than English. However, EBP recommends introducing all the information in English directly. Likewise, it is recommended to attach an English version of any document attached to a database that is not originally written in English.
4.11 Can I participate actively in the life of the virtual community (fora, commentaries, etc.) using a language different than English?
The portal users are welcome to participate in any activity of the portal, though, in order to facilitate communication between all the users, it is strongly recommended to use English as a language of communication. For more information have a look on the next question.
4.12 How can I translate a text using the Internet?
There are various pages which you can use to translate texts from various languages into English. These translations are automatic, therefore not entirely reliable, taking into account the fact that texts depend on both context and interpretation.
These are some of the best known pages with automatic translation tools:
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5. Technical questions
5.1 Which browsers can be used to for the portal?
The browsers we recommend are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, in their most recent versions.
5.2 What does it mean that the portal is partly accessible?
The portal is in the accessibility grade A for all the pages including content. Notwithstanding, it’s not the case with the collaborative pages.
5.3 Which contents are available in 6 languages?
The content is available in 6 languages only in the following sections:
- About us
- FAQs
- News
- Data entry forms: projects, strategies, industries, etc.
5.4 What’s the maximum space available for attachments in the EBP?
The maximum space available for attachments in all databases is about 4Mb.
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