Monday, 12 January, 2009

Dave @ BCS

 British Computer Society

I’m going to be talking to the good folk at the Central London branch of the British Computer Society this Thursday, on the topic of The Search for Shared Meaning: How Social Media Changes Everything:

Blogs, online video, photo sharing and social networking are redefining the way that people interact with each other and with organisations. Understanding the implications of this is vital for any organisation which wishes to remain relevant in a Web 2.0 world. Dave will discuss how organisations can approach these new tools, and how such an approach should relate to existing strategies and communication plans.

Weighty stuff, I hope I don’t disappoint!

It all kicks off at 6pm at the BCS HQ on Southampton Street in London.

Hope to see some DavePress regulars there – and for those that won’t be, I hope there will be a twitter back channel to keep folk at home informed on just how badly I’m doing. How about #davebcs for a tag?

Open Source Schools

Open Source Schools is a site that launched sometime last summer, I think, but has now had quite a bit of a makeover.

It’s chock full of great advice and resources on how schools can make use of open source software – and there is plenty in there that other organisations or individuals could pick up on too.

Sunday, 11 January, 2009

What is Twitter for?

Whenever I mention Twitter to anyone who wasn’t previously aware of it, the first question they ask is always ‘What is it for?’

Like many social web services, it can be difficult to explain the concept of Twitter. I find it is best to respond with another question: ‘Well, what is talking for?’

‘Er, telling people about stuff. Asking questions. Finding out what’s going on.’

That’s what Twitter is for, too. It’s just like talking.

Saturday, 10 January, 2009

Bookmarks for January 7th through January 10th

Stuff I have bookmarked for January 7th through January 10th:

Wednesday, 7 January, 2009

Patients Know Best

Mohammed Al-Ubaydli

Dr Mohammed Al-Ubaydli from Patients Know Best came to talk to the Cambridge Refresh group this evening. Patients Know Best is a startup which aims to help patients make use of their ‘Personal Health Record’ – a copy of which can be requested by anyone from their doctor under data protection laws.

The idea is that the management of a patient’s health should be a partnership between the patient and their doctor, and that anything the patient can do to help their doctor must be a good thing. People should take some kind of responsibility for their own illnesses.

One example Mohammed gave of this working is where a patient may spot something in their own record that their doctor has missed – after all, doctors are jolly busy people, and mistakes and oversights do happen. The patient isn’t doing the doctor’s job for them, just providing a second pair of eyes.

It turns out that there is a huge amount going on in both the UK and the US with patients using their access to their records to research their conditions and provide support to each other through social networks and other means. One of the jobs Patients Know Best is doing is collecting all this stuff together, onto a wiki. This is not only useful stuff to be doing, but also good marketing, of course. Patients Know Best could become synonymous with this kind of social use of medical records.

Patients Know Best are developing a software package to enable patients and doctors to communicate better through the web. My understanding is that it will allow patients to access their records electronically and then discuss the details with their doctor, without needing to make an appointment, thus saving everyone time. Mohammed is looking for people: to act as beta testers and to offer their services to the startup – principally Java-savvy developers at this stage.

You can see Mohammed’s slides on Google Docs.

Below are the notes I made during the talk – there may well be inaccuracies and falsehoods amongst the typos – if you spot any do let me know in the comments. I’ve tried to add as many links in as I can to help make the notes as comprehensible as possible…

  • Communication is crucial in chronic diseases
  • Patient has time to learn about your condition
  • Patient has less than 1 hour with specialist per year
  • Lots of different people work together with patients
  • Patient knows more than anyone about their personal circumstances
  • Why don’t more people use the web to communicate about their condition? 1. Security risks around digital data; 2. Issues around consent and data protection act; 3. What if the right person doesn’t get access to the information they need (eg doctors seeing patient records); 4. Not knowing that you can communicate, or how you can communicate
  • 3 key questions for your clinician: 1. What are we doing; 2. Why are we doing it; 3. What happens if we don’t do it?
  • Get a copy of your personal health record – you can’t know what is going on without it
  • Patientslikeme.com – takes the view that you are safer the more people know about your situation – also rareshare.org (treat such open sites with a little caution)
  • Patients’ access to PHRs is a Lutheran revolution – everyone should have access and understanding
  • Having understanding of your notes make medicine participatory not paternalistic
  • You can check your records and possibly spot something that busy doctors might miss (is this treating a symptom rather than the actual disease in the system?!?)
  • More private tools: MyFamilyHealth, healthecard, PAERS, t+medical, healthspace
  • Rareshare – social network for people with rare diseases. Sharing of experience and stories. Clinicians also use it to learn (US based)
  • Patientslikeme – connect with similarly ill people and share knowledge, experience etc. Learning from peers rather than those in ‘authority’ (US based?)
  • Harold Shipman – got away with it by faking records, not possible if publicly available. Elimination of distrust
  • PAERS – access records through web interface
  • Healthecard – carry your records around on a USB card, very private (UK)
  • Healthspace – you put your own info on it. Good system but isolated from NHS records.
  • Think positive (vodafone backed?) Records home monitor data (couldn’t find a link within 2 minutes so got bored)
  • MyFamilyHealth (Cambridge based) Plot family tree with illness history. GenSeq backed – they use DNA samples to provides details of health risks etc also. Provides tailored health information – which drugs would work best for you, etc?
  • 3G doctor – phone based. Video phone consultation for £35 after you have given them details of your problem/history etc. Phone back after 24 hours so have time to consider. (I find this worrying)
  • Lots of information about all these services at podcast.patientsknowbest.com also on the wiki
  • PatientsKnowBest is developing software to provide communications link between patient and doctor to help explain the patient record and what it means
  • How are ‘official’ NHS initiatives liaising with this stuff?
  • Obama to put medical records online?
  • Currently 3 electronic medical records system providers in UK, not many of which work properly
  • UK Gov has set data standards – should all match – HL7
  • Role of Google Health, Microsoft Health Vault etc – use CCR data standard (better?)  – also US based so data protection issues with EU etc
  • What about digital divide – those with access, time and money to do this stuff. Are people without the skills etc really going to get involved, will they be left behind? 2 tier health service?
  • Involvement of support groups, third sector, community groups etc
  • Issue of insurers and employers accessing details of medical history – possibly a concern
  • Mohammed is looking for beta testers and people interested in helping out with the project – UK & then US focused to begin with
  • Tolven Java based is the software for the medical record software
  • Starting with genetic immune deficiencies, then diabetes, asthma etc

Making Council meetings social

Council meeting room
Image credit: tricky

Tidying up a few bits on the IDeA Performance site, and seeing Steven Tuck’s comment on my previous post about it, I thought about how these techniques could be used in different situations within local government.

After all, here is a way of making a face to face event more accessible for people that can’t attend, and as a way of drawing together all manner of online resources for people to share and use.

How about using this kind of online social interaction in council meetings? I’m thinking it could probably be best applied to Overview and Scrutiny meetings, perhaps, but any kind of meeting where taking in views and submissions from people with an interest would work well.

What do people think? Could this work?

And does anyone out there fancy trying it out?!

IDeA Performance

This Friday (9th January 2009) the Improvement and Development Agency and LARCI are holding an event entitled Performance management plus: the next stage of performance management for operational improvement. Sounds like heavy stuff, but with a great mixture of speakers and workshop sessions I’m sure it will be a great day.

I have a little involvement with the event, though, because one of the people behind the event is IDeA’s own social media evangelist Ingrid Koehler, who fancied applying some of the ideas from my work in Sweden with Cisco to this event, and another one which is coming up at the end of the month.

IDeA Perfomance

To this end, we have created a site very much along the lines of the Cisco08 one (if it ain’t broke, right?) with a few modifications. There is going to be some blogging, bookmarking with delicious, flickr photos, video interviews and of course the Twitter backchannel – all aggregated on the front page. The tag to use in any content you would like to contribute is ideaperf – so tag away!

We really going to try to apply some of the principles described by David Wilcox in terms of creating a ‘social learning space’ – we want to make it possible for those not attending to play a part in what happens at these events – and for the conversations and shared learning to carry on afterwards for as long as is required.

So, anyone with an interest in local government performance management – do visit the site before, during and after Friday’s get together: share what you know, and find answers to your questions!

Monday, 5 January, 2009

Bookmarks for January 4th through January 5th

Stuff I have bookmarked for January 4th through January 5th:

  • Back in the office, back on PM « Policy and Performance – "We won’t be gearing up with a big project on PM like we did before, but we will be looking at how we can gather knowledge across the sector. As a start and with the help of Dave Briggs, we’ve set up a social learning space that we’ll be using at two seminars in January and beyond. Don’t go and visit www.ideaperformance.com just yet (’cause it’s still pretty much empty) – but it won’t be long before we should have some great content there. I can’t wait to start building and sharing."
  • 6 Concepts That Matter – "Don’t be distracted by any book with a focus on Social Media. Instead focus on concepts that matter for building communities."
  • Multiply – Secure, Family-Friendly Media Sharing – Multiply is taking over all the communities from the soon-to-be defunct MSN groups
  • Co-op – "Stay in tune with your co-workers. Ask questions, share knowledge, track time, and update agendas all in one place"
  • Life With Alacrity: Community by the Numbers, Part One: Group Thresholds – "We often think of communities as organic creatures, which come into existence and grow on their own. However, the truth is they are fragile blossoms. Although many communities surely germinate and bloom on their own, purposefully creating communities can take a tremendous amount of hard work, and one factor their success ultimately depends upon is their numbers."

Saturday, 3 January, 2009

Bookmarks for January 1st through January 3rd

Stuff I have bookmarked for January 1st through January 3rd:

  • Thriving too: Leadership in a Paradigm of Respect – "we now have the means to group and voice in potential numbers never before dreamed of, how do we ensure that the overall system remains balanced, and really intelligent?"
  • Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies – Freesouls – "If I had to reduce the essence of Homo sapiens to five words, "people do complicated things together" would do. Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because they augment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality."
  • WhosTalkin? – Useful looking tool to track what people are saying online, via Beth Kanter
  • 5-Part Social Media Process – Amy Sample Ward shares her tips on how to form a successful social media strategy.
  • 100+ More Wiki Tools and Resources – "Wiki engines are some of the most versatile platforms for creating websites out there. MediaWiki (the engine that powers Wikipedia) is probably the most widely used, but there are literally hundreds of other wiki engines."
  • SaaS Business Intelligence with Google Apps – "Panorama Software has partnered with Google to provide new capabilities to Google applications and Google docs via the strongest suite of analytics, reporting and visualization applications."

Thursday, 1 January, 2009

Are video games art?

John Lanchester is quickly becoming my favourite contributor to the London Review of Books. So much of his writing is both accessible and informative. This issue he looks at computer games:

From the economic point of view, this was the year video games overtook music and video, combined, in the UK. The industries’ respective share of the take is forecast to be £4.64 billion and £4.46 billion. (For purposes of comparison, UK book publishers’ total turnover in 2007 was £4.1 billion.) As a rule, economic shifts of this kind take a while to register on the cultural seismometer; and indeed, from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist. The newspapers cover the movies extensively, and while it isn’t necessary to feel that they do all that great a job of it, there’s no denying that they have a try. Video games by contrast are consigned to the nerdy margins of the papers, and are pretty much invisible in broadcast media. Video-game fans return the favour: they constitute the demographic group least likely to pay attention to newspapers and are increasingly uninterested in the ‘MSM’, or mainstream media.