Policy
 

Open Access Policy
My M&E is open to everyone. Whether you are a student, a professional working in an international governmental organisation or in a non-governmental organisation, in a think tank, in a research institute or a statistical office, you can access all resources provided on this website and use its contents for your own needs.


In order to improve the information on this site, we invite your active participation: either by providing comments and suggestions, or by contributing new articles.


If you decide to contribute to this project, we kindly ask you to follow a set of policies and conventions. Please do not infringe on copyright. My M&E uses the GNU Free Documentation License. Everything you contribute must be compatible with that license.

 

Content Guidelines
The following steps outline the content checking process to guide all contributors:
1. Contributions should refer to M&E-related issues.
2. Contributions should be different to other articles on the site, or directly related to other articles on the site (and should be linked).
3. Basic grammar and spelling should be checked.
4. Quotes, data etc. should be referenced.
5. Jargon should be limited or directly linked to a definition or article explaining the terms (preferably on My M&E).
6. Links embedded in the article should be checked.
7. Where contributions fail to meet these standards, the contribution will be flagged for general edit (to invite visitors to update references for instance).
8. Contributions should not include offensive material, advertising or links to external offensive or commercial websites.

 

Partners
My M&E is open to collaborate in the maintenance of the site with other organisations and initiatives. We look forward to welcoming new partners seeking to join this project. Our aim is to build an active community that uses and regularly updates this website. Invited partners include other international organisations, NGOs and research institutes. We particularly look forward to welcoming partners from the developing world. For additional information or expression of interest, please contact Marco Segone, UNICEF Evaluation Office, at Contact Us


Access the list of current partners

 

Quality Control
Websites based on “wiki” technology invite the public to modify the content displayed on the pages. It is therefore important to have mechanisms in place that ensure high quality of information. My M&E has implemented several of these mechanisms and created an effective quality control system.

 
Protection from automated spam
Only registered users can post content on My M&E. During the registration process, My M&E filters out automatically generated registrations (e.g. robots; spiders) with a so called “captcha”. A captcha is a test used in computing to make sure that the user is not run by a computer. By requiring a user to decipher distorted letters, anybody entering a correct solution is presumed to be human as computers are unable to read the text. Captchas are also required if users want to add external links to their articles, preventing My M&E from being abused as a platform for automatically generated hyperlinks.

 
User name regulation
Not all user names can be chosen when registering for My M&E. In particular, we prevent people from using offensive or inappropriate user names as well as names that might give the incorrect impression that a user represents one of the official partners of My M&E. For example, user names containing a sequence of letter such as “UNICEF”, or “My M&E” are blocked.

 
My M&E Policies and Conventions
My M&E does not impose any official structure to control articles. It is therefore paramount that the My M&E community follows a set of rules, procedures and values, which continue to evolve as the platform develops further. At the centre of these policies and conventions is the plea for “mutual respect”, the use of a “neutral point of view” when drafting articles and the “verification of each contribution” with reliable references. The policies and conventions of My M&E are posted on the web.

 

User management
My M&E has three types of users: those who are not registered can only access content and post comments; those who are registered can access content and upload documents and videos; and finally those who have administrative rights can moderate and approve documents uploaded by registered users. Administrative rights are restricted to a small group of selected partners. In the future, we will introduce a fourth type of user: those who are involved in any revision/flagging process and/or those who would be elected as member of an editorial committee.

 

Two-layer approach
My M&E follows a two-layer approach in the resources that are posted on the website. The “Recommended” label marks resources which have been validated by one of the official partners of My M&E and appears as the title of the page, making it clearly distinguishable from pages that include contributions from the community.