New USAID South Africa Mission Director (3)
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Dear Mr./Ms. Nayak,
I appreciate your comments and will do my best to put more "Direct"
health titles in for you. Hopefully in the next 4-6 months we will have
fully moved to a Notes-based System which will allow individuals and
mailing lists to receive information from categories they choose while
filtering out information they do not need or desire.
But let me tell you why that title was in there and not removed (but
understandably truncated) by the list moderator before he sent it to
the list. There are members of this list who do find that type of in-
formation useful and have told me so. Some use it as information to
make contacts to further their efforts and/or research in the Health
Area. Others would follow this information to link to the USAID/South
Africa web site to find health information. You should keep in mind
that there are members of this list who do contract or co-operative
work for USAID (or DFID, CIDA, etc.), so the information may or may not
be relevant to them (for example I have seen messages to this list from
employees of Management Sciences for Health or Family Health Interna-
tional, both of which I know from my own past experience as a USAID
Procurement professional do a great deal of work for USAID in Africa).
What I also did was try to help the list moderator by editing out parts
of the message not relevant to Health Topics or the Region. This is
something the moderator had been doing in the past and I appreciate the
efforts. I did it to take some of the load off the tremendous work
he already does.
I do not feel it is any one individual's place to say what does or does
not belong on a mailing list (except for the list moderator, who de-
cides whether or not to forward these messages). And it does not matter
if news and information is about a bilateral or multilateral organisa-
tion or a local NGO. To use some of my native New Yorker language: Ma-
laria or AIDS or other Health matters 'don't know from' bilateral or
multilateral agencies or NGOs.
The IDN strives to provide as much relevant information as possible and
it is safe to say that there is no other central point which has made
this breadth and depth of information available at great personal and
professional sacrifice in terms of time and energy.
If you do not want to read a message, you always have the option of de-
leting it without reading it or setting an e-mail filter to auto-delete
messages from a particular address.
There is a tremendous amount of material that comes from this list
which we try to pass on to people outside this list (for example to-
day's announcement of the "MIM African Malaria Conference"), so please
think about this before you choose to criticise and I also ask you to
look at the other 99% of a message which contains material directly
relevant to health and health research.
Also, it is better to reply directly to the originating address than to
everybody on a list.
Best regards,
Christopher
P.S. This message is the personal view of myself and does not represent
the views of members of the IDN.
Christopher L. Byrne
International Development Network
mailto:info@idn.org
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