Working Party on the Application of New Technology to Population Data
Third Meeting
7-9 January 1999
Bali

• Recommendations regarding the work underway
• Recommendations arising from technical papers presented in the meeting
• Recommendations regarding the future programme of work

The Working Party welcomed Mr Koki Toida as a new member to replace outgoing Mr Akihito Yamauchi, who also attended and who had already been reassigned to the Personnel Bureau of the Management and Coordination Agency, Japan.

The major recommendations adopted by the Working Party in its third meeting are listed below.

1. In view of the recommendation of the mid-term review of the project that a workshop be convened in October 1999, the Working Party stressed the importance of producing outputs well ahead of the Workshop.
2. In reviewing and revising the outlines of the three guidelines in the light of its previous discussions on their scope and the pressing time constraint, the Working Party recommended that:
   1. the titles of the three guidelines be as follows:
      1. "Guidelines on the application of new information technology to population data dissemination"
      2. "Guidelines on the application of modern mapping and GIS technologies in census operations"
      3. "Guidelines on the application of new technology to population data collection and capture"
   2. the guidelines should be restricted to new technology, have a sharp focus, and generally not go beyond the point where a particular technology ceases to have an impact.
   3. the guidelines should have a preambular section that specifies their scope, context and intended audience, underlying philosophy and principles, and provide the minimum necessary background information
   4. editors be appointed to collate, harmonize and edit the guidelines.  The editors may be experts engaged as consultants under the project, members of the working party or staff members of NSOs represented in the Working Party.
   5. he editors should be allowed to exercise flexibility in interpreting the revised outlines, in determining the final structure, and in adjusting the titles of the guidelines.
   6. for each guideline, contributions were required from its members.
   7. the guidelines should draw from best practices found useful in applying information technology in NSOs.
   8. the guidelines should help NSOs particularly in developing countries to apply the latest feasible information technology rather than be driven by the information technology per se
   9. all guidelines should contain a glossary of technical terms and acronyms, and a disclaimer on the scope (e.g. intended/selected comprehensiveness).
3. The Working Party decided on the tentative outlines for the guidelines as follows:

• Singapore (responsible for obtaining and compiling section inputs)
• Australia

• Indonesia  (responsible for obtaining and compiling section inputs, and for drafting a section on OCR)
• Japan (section on OMR)
• New Zealand (section on work flow issues related to imaging)
• Australia (section on combining imaging and autocoding)

1. Introduction
2. Statistical information systems for dissemination
3. GIS
4. Internet for dissemination
5. Other modes of dissemination through electronic media, Diskettes, CD-ROM, etc.

4. The Working Party agreed that technology sections of all three guidelines should deal with the following issues, for which the material presented in the Working Party meetings offered a good starting point:
   1. Explain concepts necessary to understand the technology and the objectives of applying it
   2. Cover requirements for planning and training to put the technology in place and maintain it; cover also issues related to daily operation and management
   3. Contain advice for estimating total costs involved in applying the technology
   4. Contain consolidated good country practices in introducing and applying the technology
5. The Working Party took note of the offers by the contributors to provide the coordinators with the section inputs by 5 April 1999, and urged other members of the Working Party to provide inputs and suggest useful references to the contributors.
6. It also noted that the overall coordinators of the guidelines had the possibility to approach the secretariat with proposals to engage technical editors to assist them in compiling various inputs and editing the guidelines.  It further took note of the offer of New Zealand to undertake the coordination work of the preparation of the guidelines on the application of new technology to population data dissemination data dissemination under a consultancy and the offer of Singapore to backup on the same basis, should the arrangement with New Zealand fall through.
7. The Working Party emphasized the need to have the complete versions of the three guidelines as well as the reports of the case studies of the three pilot projects as soon as possible.  Those documents should be circulated to the members of the Working Party by the first week of June 1999 so that they could be reviewed efficiently in the next meeting of the Working Party.
8. In reviewing the results of the survey conducted by the secretariat on application of IT to population data, the Working Party noted that it provided valuable information and an useful analysis of the state of IT application in the region.   The secretariat document revealed a wide gap between developed and developing countries in applying information technology, and again confirmed the importance of achieving the project objectives.   The Working Party recommended that the three guidelines to be prepared under the project should take into account the survey results and focus on the apparent needs of the developing countries.  Nevertheless, the considerable progress made by NSOs in applying IT in their latest censuses and surveys allowed the Working Party to take an optimistic view that developing countries were able to seize many opportunities offered by new IT.

9. The Working Party praised the quality of the contributed papers made available to the meeting and noted that they formed a significant repository of applied technology information that should be made available in formats required by the developing countries.

10. The Working Party recommended that an item be introduced on the agenda of the November Working Group of Statistical Experts to discuss the outcome of the activities of the Working Party.
11. In view of the delays occurred in delivering several project outputs and the need to close the project account by the end of the current UNFPA project cycle (1999), the Working Party emphasized the importance of expediting the delivery of all project outputs.  It nevertheless noted that the activities of the Working Party had already started to generate multiplier effects in helping countries to make technology choices and successfully securing resources.  The Working Party felt that the target was still achievable, although it had been made more challenging by added project activities by the Mid-Term Review (MTR) conducted by the donor in July 1998.
12. Noting that no newsletters had been released and that the project Web site had been established only very recently, the Working Party urged the secretariat, despite its resource constraints, to give a high priority to making progress in that regard.
13. In drafting the planned guidelines, the Working Party noted the MTR suggestion to prepare the planned guidelines in a manner of manuals.  However, it noted that writing fully-fledged manuals in the field of information technology was very challenging and carried a high probability of their becoming obsolete shortly after their release.   In that connection, it further noted that the rapid evolution of the information technologies and the availability of related information through the Internet had reduced their demand and supply.
14. The Working Party welcomed the introduction by the MTR of a training workshop, tentatively  in October 1999, as a channel to make the project outputs available to a wider audience, and recommended that 
    1. The broad objective of the Workshop would be to sensitize participants to the opportunities that modern information technology provided in population data operations and to improve the guidelines produced under the project.
    2. It should be targeted at IT and statistical managers who had influence on the selection of technologies for census and survey operations
    3. apart from conventional lectures, the participants should be given hands-on opportunities and time to test and study new applications
    4. Working Party members should act as resource persons in the workshop and would be responsible for organizing vendor demonstrations in areas they worked on
    5. the guidelines and pilot applications be used among the training material for the Workshop
    6. the workshop should be held in a venue where participants had new technology readily accessible
    7. the secretariat use its own knowledge about the countries and the results of the survey to choose participating countries
    8. the resource persons of the workshop to take into account the survey results in preparing their inputs and presentations
15. The Working Party agreed that the participants of the workshop would benefit from product demonstrations by representatives of hardware and software providers, but noted that such opportunities should not be restricted to particular organizations.
16. The Working Party noted the observation that the issue of developing an awareness/training package (project activity 3.2) for promoting effective and efficient utilization of IT in population censuses and surveys needed reconsideration.  It proposed that SIAP should reorient the aim of the package for the purposes of training NSOs in new technology applications.  The material developed would be based on the outputs of the project, among others, and be used in current and future regional and national training courses.  The Working Party noted that SIAP would report on the progress in the next meeting.
17. The Working Party recommended that the project outputs should also be made available to a wider audience by disseminating them on CD-ROM, and be used in national as well as SIAP's institutional and outreach training programmes.
18. The Working Party confirmed that its next meeting would be held in Manila with the application of  mapping and related technologies as a theme.  The dates were tentatively set from 22 to 25 June 1999.   Apart from contributed papers on the theme by the Working Party members,  their organizations and other invited agencies, the agenda would include the review of the three draft guidelines and the outcomes from the three pilot applications for which the respective coordinators would prepare documents well in advance of the meeting.

1. 30 persons from developing countries including the member developing countries on the Working Party
2. the coordinator of each guidelines
3. Two resource persons/ consultants

Day 1 - 2: Introduction of IT in general (Consultant and secretariat)
On the second day the participant will be divided into three groups where each guidelines will be introduced. The groups will be formed based on information from the survey and/or their interest.

Day 3 - 6: Each group will be exposed to a specific guideline,  and will be asked to discuss various issues involved based on their experiences and comment on the content of the guidelines.  Each  group will produce its report.  The coordinator of each guideline will introduce their guideline and lead the discussion .

ay 7: Three groups will get together in the plenary to discuss each group report and hold a general discussion.  The final output will be recommendations for revising the guidelines and an overall report of the Workshop.