Inform/Constituencies

There are three constituencies of people related to Inform.

The first group are the people who will be enlightened by being presented with information based on the material we are writing. We call these people the Listeners. They are policymakers or others in positions of influence or authority. A key thing to note is that they may well never read the Inform site itself (although of course the site should not denigrate them, in case they do!). All explanatory content needs to be written with the Listener in mind.

The second group are the people who will be doing the enlightening. We call these people the Users. They are likely to be geeks, or at least people familiar with technology, directed here by advocacy organizations. They may well have some or a good grasp of the specific issues, and so will not necessarily be learning new technical information from the content. What they will be learning is how to present it in a new and more understandable way. They will read and copy the content and resources, perhaps remixing it along the way or simply memorising key ideas and explanatory strategies, and then go and take it into meetings.

The third group are the people who create the content. We call these people the Authors. They are the subset of the Users with the ability to write in a way that a Listener can understand. This is a non-trivial skill; we do not expect a large proportion of Users to become Authors. If all Users made good Authors (and so were good at explaining issues to the Listeners), then there would be little need for Inform to exist at all.

In one sense, the purpose of Inform is for the Authors to share their explanatory skills with the Users so that more people can effectively reach the Listeners.