UN Climate Conference Copenhagen 2009 goes online

While the important conference (shortened COP15) actually does not take place until December, it has already received quite some press, at least here in Denmark where the preparation has been long underway. I naturally hope positive progress will be made during the conference, but rather than getting involved in the politics of the event in this forum, I have chosen to highlight a few interesting, unexpected and somewhat risky web decisions made by our Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the body, responsible for the new website at http://en.cop15.dk/

1) The COP15 website is based on Synkron Via CMS and implemented by an Aarhus-based partner called Mjölner Informatics. According to reliable sources, the bid was won over several Sitecore partners and I suspect that the product was chosen based on a public tender that favored features and price over vendor intangibles. From my perspective, Synkron Via seems an unusually risky choice, in particular given the lack of large-scale references on the platform; something Sitecore – and others for that matter – would have been able to offer. Interestingly, Dynamicweb, the vendor behind Synkron Via, has already started pushing COP15 as a public reference (in Danish), but my advice to prospective Synkron Via customers with multi-lingual and high-performance requirements, would be that they adopt a wait-and-see strategy until the product has been battle-tested by the traffic conference peaks later this year. It is also worth noting that our Ministry of Foreign Affairs do not themselves use Synkron Via. I’ll keep my fingers crossed come December and hope for the best. If you are interested in learning more about Dynamicweb, take a look at my recent comment on the Dynamicweb annual report.

2) Unfortunately the COP15 website does not pass accessibility tests. If you try with W3C validator and take a closer look you will find that the site is not implemented using valid code. Unlike the UK and other European countries, Denmark does not have legislation in place that requires public agencies to build accessible websites. Consequently, Danish system integrators and vendors are not as experienced in this area as their overseas competitors. Still, I find it very disappointing that what is after all a UN-site does not meet these basic standards and widespread international requirements. There is still time to fix before December – let’s hope they do!

3) You can follow COP15 on Twitter or participate in the conversation on several blogs. I would also rate this as experimentation, but certainly less risky than #1.

4) Google Analytics is used for the website statistics. This is the very popular, and free of charge software-as-a-service tool from Google. Free of charge is good. However, I am not convinced about storing all the website statistics in the cloud for such an important conference. Does this really comply with UN policy?

As I said initially, I really hope COP15 becomes a successful conference and achieves the goal of “establishing an ambitious global climate agreement for the period from 2012″. I also hope the website supporting the venture will do the project proud!