AS some of you might have noticed I have already defined an open EpiData site - in the form of a wiki - where some experiences on using this technology already exist.

The www.epidata.org site has been reserved by me a few years back with the intention that this could serve as the "community" site for EpiData, maintained collectively by the body of epidata users.

Pedro Arias and I created teaching material for use in the Canadian Field Epi course last autumn. Off list I have suggested to a number of users mentioning materials to add these to the site, but the time and energy to get onto a new way of working can be difficult to find for already busy people. If the material already exist it is quite easy to copy and paste into the wiki and upload the figures/images.

The experimental site is found at http://www.epidata.org/wiki

There is some learning problems in the beginning when editing in the wiki format, but with a few experiments it works very well. An introduction is shown at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_edit_a_page

The optimal would be that a group of persons together take on the responsibility of maintaining the open site, since we must unfortunately expect that someone will add irrelevant material or suggestions which otherwise are not appropriate. The initial steps of forming such a group has been made, but awaits further initiatives.

Kind regards

Jens Lauritsen