Category Archives: Submissions

Priming the pump

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Well the early start on submissions was gratifying, but short lived. I fully respect that for many, their involvement in the Afghan Mission is either too difficult to share or you don’t see it as anything more than just doing your job. Canadians, however, know very little about what that job can entail. The Canadian military has, historically, fallen from public view shortly after distinguishing itself in one conflict or another. The human stories usually don’t come to light until decades later. Please help to ensure that this time it will be different.

I have added historical timelines, courtesy of the National Post Afghanistan TImelines http://afghanistan.nationalpost.com/category/timelines/ to provide you all with a news context for your involvement. I have also added a page of Canadian Casualties, as I would like to see the Families of the Fallen share some of the human stories on behalf of their Fallen Soldier.

I started to borrow content, by year, from Combat Camera, http://www.combatcamera.forces.gc.ca/site/index-eng.asp , to prime the pump and provide an example of a good caption, but for some reason, as of 22 January, a video search for afghanistan images by year only turns up photos from 2011 and 2012.

Many of you have expressed enthusiastic support for this project but I have yet to see a submission from any of you. You KNOW who you are.

Many thanks.

Melanie

Submissions are beginning to come in

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Submissions are beginning to come in. Thanks to all to have gottent things moving on that front. The site is currently set up as a blog, but our volunteer web team met yesterday to discuss the requirements of a secure, user friendly web site. Right now, there is no straightforward process for uploading stories, images and video clips. The plan is to have a more robust web site in place early in the new year. (Our volunteer web team is almost complete. What we really need to complete the team is someone who can write code, or a donation of funding to hire someone to write the code for the site.)

What does this mean?

Well for starters, in order to register at the site, you will soon be required to complete certain fields in your profile so we know who you are. For those of you who have already registered but have incomplete profiles, I encourage you to return and complete your profile. When the site is rebuilt, incomplete profiles will be deleted.

The pages for specific types of submissions, once we migrate to a real web site, will be able to provide a more robust, one stop portal as it were, where you can upload text, graphics, large image and video files. Submissions, as they come in, will go into a data base acessible to our volunteer administrators. At the same time, submissions wil be retreived from the site and entered into an excel data base for subsequent sorting, editing and follow up with submittors when there is incomplete information.

In order to protect the integrity and validity of the entire finished product, we need specific information from those of you who submit for sorting, cross referencing, and validation. It’s also important to know the deployment dates of all submissions so they can be incorporatedaccurately into the time line of the final publication. This means that each submission page will have specific fields of information that must be filled in before you can submit your written, graphic, photographic or video submission. This information is essential for project volunteers working on building the final publication. Without it a submission cannot be accepted for publication.

At the end of the day, if you are contributing to this publication, we want to ensure that your submission is part of an honest and inclusive representation of the Canadian Afghan Mission, free of fabricated accounts by ”wanna be” soldiers and civilians who never served.

Many thanks

Melanie, Project Coordinator