G'day Jason,
My name is David Pratten. I am a Sydney based, Australian, freelance Information Designer (http://davidpratten.com) who is passionate about creating tools that help busy people to find the information that is relevant to them in detailed reports.
I read with interest about your conversation with Robert H. about the "the need for standards within and across organizations for the development of reports .... for good information practice." and I am interested in working with you on "developing vendor-neutral reporting templates"
I believe that we can use visual metaphor to improve on the static webpage or the PDF, to deliver understandable reports to people in information intensive roles. I have created and open sourced (GPL2.0) a tool that may be of interest.
As a test-case for this open source project, I have secured permission from the Federal Government's Productivity Commission to republish one of their reports . The result is at http://knowledgeferret.com/?focus=nfpr-nfpr where you will find a copy of their report (http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/not-for-profit/report ) into the not-for-profit sector which is over 500 pages long.
Access to the document is through a visual metaphor that reveals related material, and shows search results. Every page of material may be separately commented on via twitter, facebook and a dozen other social media sites. These benefits are well expressed by Lina Caneva, Editor at probonoaustralia.com.au in her recent review of my work for the Productivity Commission http://www.probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2010/04/techie-simplifies-nfp-report
The document reader is an instance of the knowledge ferret open source project https://code.google.com/p/knowledgeferret/ . An explanation of the technology may be found in here http://www.davidpratten.com/2010/04/26/visual-metaphors-assist-busy-readers-learners/
Let me know if, and how, I can contribute to your initiative.
David
