Message Forms / D1

Specially printed message forms or cards highlight the messaging facility and encourage use. They can also be used to regulate message length and use (see Identity / E2).

Some guidelines should be given on message length - long messages exceeding 4 sentences reduce the readability of the Bulletin(s): or there could be a policy accepting only single sentence messages. Conventions such as this can also be managed by design of special message forms (below), or text reduction during the editing phase of the Bulletins (Priorities and Pre-Processing / E10 and Editing / E11)

Message forms can also be used to guide the user and complement verbal instructions. A sample message form is shown on the following page. This example shows that most necessary instructions to the user can be encoded, in a self-explanatory fashion, on the form itself.

For international conferences, instructions and messaging forms need to be rendered into all official conference languages (see Multiple Languages and Translation / E5).

The design of message forms should take account of any additional information the Bulletin editors would find useful to receive (in addition to the message itself). By providing a prompt, field or box for such information, the frequency with which it is supplied by the user is greatly increased.

Some points to consider are:

Author: Those feeding in messages should be encouraged, or at least free, to indicate their name. Alternatives include: "anon", pseudonym, a working group name (where the conference has such groups, whether formal or informal), name with a pigeonhole, (or hotel room) number, or address to which replies and requested information can be sent.
Message cross-referencing: Part of the problem in a large conference is to counter fragmentation and build coherence; to do this it is necessary to get some sense of context and to follow the evolution of positions. Therefore it is helpful for messages to cite preceding messages (at least by number) (see also Priorities and Pre-Processing / E10).

In a computer-aided environment, cross-referencing of messages could be handled as a relational database in which cited messages gradually accumulate references to those citing them (see Database Software / I8). Old messages may thus have added information if they are subsequently selected and printed out for some special purpose (Database Products / C2).

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Written by Nadia McLaren, Union of International Associations, with revisions and HTML layout by Robert Pollard, Information Habitat: Where Information Lives.