Information and communication are playing an increasingly important and more sophisticated role in humanitarian-service activities involving logistics, organizational learning, health-care delivery systems, assessment, and education. This role is impacted by important trends and environments within which the humanitarian sector operates. These include a shift of focus from providing direct aid to capacity building, empowerment, and assessment; a shift in project focus from technical solutions to broader sociotechnical strategies; and increased emphasis on demonstrating effectiveness, improving efficiency, and collaborating with other organizations. Five articles in this issue address these areas, including two pieces on developing information and communication tools to support the work of humanitarian organizations, two pieces on preparing students to work in the humanitarian environment, and one on organizational culture and the challenge of enhancing organizational learning in the humanitarian sector.

OVER the last few years, the technology of electronic technical publishing has become increasingly powerful and flexible; professional technical communicators, as well as other professionals in technical fields, now can expect as a matter of course to develop documents at computer terminals, incorporate tabular and graphic material, format them using a wide range of visual attributes, store them electronically, and produce them on sophisticated computer-supported printing equipment.

Not too long ago, publication tasks such as layout, font selection, merging of text and graphics, and copyfitting were addressed only by communication professionals. Now, programs like Pagemaker by Aldus and Ventura Publisher by Xerox make these issues just another personal computer application, like spreadsheets, calendars, and word processing. The impact of desktop publishing (DTP) is already being hotly debated, and we open this new IEEE Transactions section on communication technology with an article that has significant implications for this debate.

Let us, the Communication Technology editors, take this opportunity to introduce one of the new departments that will be appearing in the Transactions. Beginning with the June issue, you can expect either a full-scale article or at least a column on the technologies that are changing the way professional communicators do their work. These technologies include text processing systems, electronic and desktop publishing systems, communication networks, online help facilities, and tools to improve user interfaces. We want to discuss the practical impact of these technologies on job definitions, work flow, shop organization, project management, and the internal and external flow of information.