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Organizations join for free. The only committment is to share our
goal
of providing knowledge to the public, and sharing knowledge and
experience with each other.
We welcome any organization to express interest in joining our project.
The role of collaborating
organizations
The goal of the CPU is aimed at providing free, reliable
information. But it is not the project itself that would provide
the
information. The public understanding project is aimed at encouraging
other organizations to make their information easy to understand, non
technical, and clear. That is, there is a ton of stuff on the
web, but
a lot of it is academic, comprehensive, technical, specialized, etc.
Not aimed at consumption by the general public. Now, a lot of
that
kind of information is necessary and useful, but on the other hand, a
lot of the information on the web is stuff that could be more useful if
it was written so that anyone without technical background could easily
understand it.
This is where the public understanding project comes in. We want
to
say, lets get together and figure out how reports and such could be
written so they are accurate and easy to understand. What might
be
some guidelines on how to make the reports accurate and easy to
read.
Lets develop these guidelines and publish them and encourage
organizations to follow them.
And this is where collaborating organizations comes in. They
could
help to develop the guidelines, and could also support and promote the
guidelines, encourage others to follow them, encourage authors to
follow these guidelines.
And then in turn the public understanding website would promote those
organizations that follow the guidelines, link to reports and materials
from those organizations that follow the guidelines, and say, "here is
a report from organizations ABC, that follows these guidelines"
However, the main purpose of the CPU is to communicate with the
public,
so organizations should provide information that the public can use to
understand the goals, background and legitimacy of the organization.
Organization
Membership Guidelines
Organizations should clearly list their goals, funding
sources, boards,
and any other relevant information.
Non university/non government organizations are encouraged
to demonstrate legitimacy by showing that their organization is listed
at govenment or education sites like these:
All organizations can also demonstrate their
reasonableness by pledging
to follow ethics or trust guidelines, or web credibility guidelines for
example, these: