Ljubljana, 4 March 2010 Improvements to PeaR TF-CPR meeting

PeaR Community News The news service by and for the Research and Education Networking Community in Europe Users of 45 differents institutions (NRENs, universities, research centers….), where 50% of recipients is an NREN employee. People in more than 60 countries signed up for PeaR. Roughly 1 new person/week signs up and gets removed A newsletter with a new look

Contains more information, such as Upcoming Community Events In this section you can read about events of all NRENs. If you want your NREN event listed, we encourage you to send an with the information to (it will appear on and in the PeaR ). The events included in the PeaR are events starting in one month from now (giving readers time to sign up for the event). Has a new design, more atractive: new clearer format, with different sections and news with images) New PeaR e-newsletter What has changed? Is multipart: means that users can receive it as an html document (as displayed here) or a text format, depending on their and server settings. Note that the header does not load automatically! Users must ‘load images’ in the itself.

NRENs who published in PeaR Community News in the last four years

PeaR Community News published by NRENs in 2009 We could be more collaborative

Why don’t we send news to PeaR? It´s important to know we can publish news in the CMS in 5 minutes It´s possible to publish news without working with a translator because we can post very short news, and you have skills for it The local information about any NREN is interesting for the Community It´s very easy to publish news in and, if you have doubts, you can send an to or Carrie or Laura. The CMS has simple guidelines to help us to post the news We must write the headline, the abstract and we have to put the URL where more information can be found about the news we want to post in the TERENA website and PeaR e-newsletter.

PeaR Community NewsExternal newsletter These newsletters are not the same. Main differences: Objective: PCRs of the NRENs inform the staff of the other European NRENs and they work together, giving information about their activities, services, projects… Frequency: you can post news anytime. Sent weekly. Target: 50% internal audiences (staff of the European NRENs) and 50% external (members of the affiliated institution of the NRENs, user projects) Objective: To support the GEANT project and NA2 objectives in a way that integrates with other NA2 activities, and therefore contributes to the project- wide communications strategy Frequency: no less than twice a year Target: Above all, external audiences (end users, user projects, user organizations, general public, media….) PeaR vs GÉANT e-newsletter are they the same?

PeaR Community News can we make even it better? Distribution Content Functionality

How to improve the distribution? Some ideas: We can send an (with a sample mailer) with information about the newsletter to the staff of our NREN, to convince them to subscribe to it. We can send an with information about the newsletter to the staff of our affiliated institutions and other professional contacts. mailing design To include a pdf with information about the new design of the newsletter in the PeaR Community News microsite To change the colour of the direct access in the homepage at

How to improve the functionality? Some ideas: Add photos to non-TERENA stories (currently only logos) Ability to add different logo (for example, product logo) Change webpage on TERENA site to look more like PeaR (header, photos, colours, etc) Calendar on Upcoming Community Events to include events in different time period (currently shows events one month away only).

How to improve the content of PeaR? services best practices events courses activities All these topics are interesting for the NRENs The local information about services, activities, events is also interesting because, to know that, could help developing ideas for our work and also could help to establish collaboration between NRENs Could include non-Community News but news that is interesting to Community (for example, project news) projects

How to improve PeaR? Working together: Give ideas about how the newsletter could have more users (increase distribution) Jeroen (BELNET), Natasa (AMRES), Paul H. (DANTE), Robert (JISC), Goran (CARNet), Tiina (CSC-IT Center for Science), Peter (ARNES), Carrie (TERENA) Team 1 Give ideas about improving the functionality of the newsletter and its presentation in Domen (ARNES), Elke (BELNET), Gitte (UNI-C), Lars (UNINETT), Laura (TERENA), Lonneke (SURFnet), Paul M.(DANTE), Gabriela (CESNET) Team 2 Give ideas about the most interesting topics/content Christine (ACOnet), Russell (JANET), Melanie (DANTE), Roland (SWITCH), Tomi (ARNES), Virginie (RENATER), Cristina (RedIRIS) Team 3

Thank you very much!