DailyPost 481
BASE DOCUMENTS
Documents which provide the purpose, definition, ingredients & the modalities to create, operate & facilitate achieving the results can be termed as Base Documents. Though all of us are in search of such documents to gather basic functional knowledge of the topic, project or technology, it is goes unexpressed. The creation of Base Documents facilitates basic understanding of the issue at a mass scale and also provides a reference point for discussions and finding concrete solutions to the projects at hand. It is a great starting point in our learning process.
We live in a learning age & we all have become learning individuals, if not for anything else, then for our survival itself. Base Documents is to fulfil this urge of getting the information handy. Take the example of CCTV Networks have entered our lives beyond our imagination. An attempt to create is fraught with lots of handicaps. If there were to be a National CCTV Protocol as the Base Document, all critical issues could have been ironed out. Its creation would become an extremely easy task. It would become a all pervasive utility.
In today’s complex and complicated world we end up hiring a consultant, advisor or expert to facilitate such tasks. It is costly & results are less than satisfactory. If in its place we have a validated Base Document, one can get going without any major effort. Slowly it becomes a habit & trust gets created. How may us doubt the contents of Wikipedia? Public domain today is a knowledge repository & Base Documents would for sure be a worthwhile value add.
National Institute of Standards & Technology, NIST, US, creates lots of such documents, a humongous task. One of its documents, Talent Imperatives for Cyber Security took four years and a collaboration of thousands of experts. * Universal Declaration for Human Rights* took years of international collaboration. The world has been reaping its benefits since then. In a country bereft of Base Documents, the movement for creating Base Documents should start.
BASE DOCUMENTS ARE THE GOLD STANDARD.
Sanjay Sahay