I am probably not the right person to answer your question as I am not much of a booster for SMART. I think that alternatives such (1) as a set of sub-national RAM surveys with multiple indicators surveys will give you want at lower cost than SMART or (2) a national S3M with multiple indicators will also give you want your want but with fine-scale mapping of indicators at similar cost to SMART. The main advantages with SMART are that there ar a lot of people out there that know how to do SMART, The SMART project will provide support and good data-handling tools for nutritaional anthropometry such as ENA for SMART, and familiarity with the method in the donor community. You might want to post your question to the [url=http://smartmethodology.org/index.php/forum_category/]SMART forum[/url].

Greetings, Please send me an email address to reach you and I will send you some useful SMART advocacy documents.

While we have a SMART Program Officer with us ... I'd like to ask whether the SMART forums are working. I have had no luck when posting there. Some of my colleagues also report having programs with this site. The problem seems to be with registration.

Dear Mark, I appreciate you bringing up this point. The SMART Forum is currently being re-vamped to better meet the needs of its users and will be launched in the coming month. Please let us know if there are any other points we should bring up with the developers.

That is good news. I think just about any threaded Q&A forum format would work well enough. I think the ability for the SMART project to quickly add forums should the need arise is important. EN-NET has expanded in this regard since starting. The ability to add formatting and links in messages is useful. EN-NET does this with a limited set of modified HTML type tags and it works well - users can choose to use tags or not. An important thing will be to avoid a lot of images and page-junk. This makes pages hard to load over poor internet connections and we do get a lot of those in the field. One thing that might not be possible would be the ability to cross-post from EN-NET and the SMART forums. I think this may prove difficult to do. Another approach might be to not have a separate SMART forum but to have a dedicated SMART forum on EN-NET. This might be most convenient to users as it will all be in one place. Moving from software to "wetware" ... do not neglect the human angle. I think EN-NET has done well in this regard with the Moderator-Expert-User model. Also, your experts need to be welcoming, informative, helpful, and polite. I hope this is of some help.

Hello,

Can someone share with us a discussion about the relationship between wash, diarrhea and malnutrition?

I want a diversification of ideas.

All links are helpful

Thank you.

I think it makes a lot of sense to have this is in one place. We get a concentration of expertise to service the EN-NET and SMART user-base as well as having a lot more in one place. Also, I think that EN-NET is running well and SMART forums are moribund. Doing it all here would (I think) save SMART a lot of time and effort. Often there are institutional brakes in agencies and donors that prevent collaboration. I suppose the least we can do here is to annouce the rebirth of the SMART forum(s), re-post relevant messages to the SMART forums, remind users of the SMART forums, &c. We can only await events.

Dear Scott, If you'd like to chat with ENN on how we might usefully collaborate regarding en-net and SMART, don't hesitate to contact us.

Just a note to say that the SMART forums appear to be up and running.