Content In the Field

Peace Corps Content in the Field

Making digital materials accessible to Volunteers in the field.

Challenge

Enable Peace Corps Staff to generate content that can then be distributed in various preferred formats for Volunteers in the field – PDFs, HTML, Epub, Mobi, etc.

Background

Peace Corps Staff currently produce documents using MS Office products in a fairly ad-hoc system within Peace Corps Headquarters – relying on file sharing (but not an Intranet), emailing, and a spectrum of skills and preferences for version control (filename conventions and Track Changes within MS Word, for example.) These materials also fall into various content types that are related but distinct: Manuals, Training Packages, Briefs, etc.

These materials are edited, approved by various stakeholders, and sent to Peace Corps Country posts for review. At this point documents are given to a graphic artist for publishing layout (InDesign), and a PDF-formatted document is the result. This document is then either placed on the Peace Corps public website, our internal intranet, or emailed to Post Staff as an update. Conventionally, documents were sent to a printer for mass publication to be sent to various requesting posts for these manuals – though this has fallen off considerably in recent years as digital documents have been deemed sufficient by both country staff and Volunteers.

Given that many Volunteers are now bringing laptops, smartphones, tablets, and e-readers with them to their country of service, they prefer documents to be made available in more than one format. To date, Volunteer efforts have spurred their own conversion process of PDFs into Epubs, or Word documents in HTML versions, but nothing official or directed by Peace Corps Headquarters. And while Headquarters is currently using a vendor to translate a backlog of publications into epub format, it is thought that it might be more efficient to adapt a formalized workflow from the beginning.

Assets

  • Peace Corps publications (publicly available and our backlog)

  • Peace Corps training packages samples

UC Berkeley I School