Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 151 posts

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#91

Post by Spooky23 »

jowea wrote: post #47
zeroCalories wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.

The UN is many things. I guess most reports are a product of the secretariat/bureaucracy and the independent agencies more than the UNGA and the UNSC which is where the diplomacy happens. Although as usual the journalists failed to cite the @#*&#@(! report so I could read it myself. Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning bureaucratic orga…

Diplomacy is an art, not a science, and “doing something” isn’t necessarily the goal.

I’ve worked in government in varying capacities, and one thing that happens is that legislatures want reports. It’s part of the governing process. The fact that it’s being written and later has meaning and justifies inquiry which may not have happened otherwise.

It’s hard for people to understand because companies don’t work that way - they have their own mercurial processes. I went to a conference awhile ago, and the AWS sales dude gave me a bunch of swag. Palo gave me a fancy water bottle, Oracle gave me a dancing wind up dude for my desk. The hotel gave me a pen.

Does that make me buy AWS? No. It’s a token that essentially buys attention and goodwill for a moment in time.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#92

Post by XorNot »

Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should go look up what a military command actually does during a war. Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read reports, and write more reports.

In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).

Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#93

Post by [deleted] »

dgfitz wrote: post #46
browningstreet wrote: post #9

This sounds exactly like “work” today. Certainly matches my experience in big tech. It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree. I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished. My ability to gle…

As a male breast cancer survivor, when I dug into the actuals of the Susan g komen foundation, I realized how much of a fraud the whole thing was. It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.

[deleted]

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#94

Post by vr46 »

simpaticoder wrote: post #30

This is an institutional reflection of the individual tendency to talk about problems rather than solving them. Or, an important variant, where the urge to help those in need is expressed as directing them to "appropriate resources", which are also services that direct those seeking help to other appropriate resources, ad infinitum. The net result is a whole army of people who's expressed goal is to help people but w…

The UN is operating at a different scale doing something quite unique, and the reports don’t need to be widely-read to be important or influential. I ran kitchens at a series of homeless shelters for ten years and the difference between cooking/serving food, and actually procuring supplies and dealing with the supply chain - was the difference between something that took one hour and something that took nine months. It is much like this with the UN and other international trans-governmental organizations, they work with ridiculously complex systems and get real shit done, even if it’s not as visual as handing out a plate of food.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#97

Post by nashashmi »

willguest wrote: post #54

> last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100 reports The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy

Isn’t this why democracy fails? It is exhausting. It is work designed for a paid shill. It is a burden placed on the governed by the government to distance everyone from participating.

It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#98

Post by nashashmi »

kingstnap wrote: post #13

UN library has lot of stuff in it. https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot. Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically: > Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General > The present report has been prepared pursuant to…

It is the kind of stuff made for historians fifty years in the future.

No one cared about the resolutions regarding Israel until now. But now that they do, it is there for Your benefit.

Post reply on HN