I have finished to check the proof of my article entitled Opportunities and challenges of Web 2.0 within the health care systems: an empirical exploration for Informatics for Health and Social Care (An International Journal of Informatics in Health Care).

Here goes the abstract:

The Internet has become one of the main drivers of e-health. Whilst its impact and potential is being analysed, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has reached the health field and has emerged as a buzzword that people use to describe a wide range of online activities and applications. The aims of this article are: to explore the opportunities and challenges of the Web 2.0 within the health care system and to identify the gap between the potential of these online activities and applications and the empirical data. The analysis is based on: online surveys to physicians, nurses, pharmacist and patient support groups; static web shot analysis of 1240 web pages and exploration of the most popular Web 2.0 initiatives. The empirical results contrast with the Web 2.0 trends identified. Whereas the main characteristic of the Web 2.0 is the opportunity for social interaction, the health care system at large could currently be characterised by: a lack of interactive communication technologies available on the Internet; a lack of professional production of health care information on the Internet, and a lack of interaction between these professionals and patients on the Internet. These results reveal a scenario away from 2.0 trends.

The article has been done with Miquel Angel Mayer and Joan Torrent, colleagues from Interdisciplinary Research Group on ICTs (i2TIC), and will be published on September 2009.

First of all, I would like to thank Max Senges and Josep M. Duart as organizators of the roundtable with Howard Rheingold at Open University of Catalonia. Ismael Peña has alredy posted about Rheingold wonderfull talk, but here comes my notes and my reflection.

Online Social Networks

• enable people to co-operate;
• have always existed, but ICT empower and transform them;
• are places where communities can growth.

Cultivating Online Communities

• promote social capital;
• support Life Long Learning and teaching
• connect people and build relationship
• develop a community memory and knowledge sharing

Participatory Media

• From text based only community to participatory media;
• Transforms social structures, culture, community, power, wealth ans is characterized by: many to many, consumers/producers, active participation and amplification of network capabilities;
• Changes literacy.

Online Social Community requires

• Marketing is the foundation of online community planning.
• Design Social Architecture.
• Technological planning.

Watch an eight minute intro screencast of the SMC, created by Howard Rheingold

Howard Rheingold talk was wonderful, his discourse could be applied to any virtual community. But, in this case, the debate was focused on education and how can we develop online social networks in this field at Open University of Catalonia (UOC), a virtual university with 40,000 students.

On one hand, I think online social networks as a “formal” learning/teaching environment challenge educational, organizational and technological model of my university because it causes a tremendous tension between the need of flexibility   to develop those kind of initiatives and the need of bureaucracy to maintain 40,000 online students within the virtual campus. It just strains all the actors who are involved in the teaching and learning process: teachers, students, managers…

On the other hand, a digital identity is needed to generate online social networks, but how many students or faculty members have develop this digital identity? how many students or faculty members have participatory media literacy?.

Finally, the interaction between this new media landscape based on ICT and the social structure could generate smart mobs, are we ready to take this kind of risk?. I’m ready as well as my institution -I guess- and I’m trying to open the virtual classroom to this new media landscape, it’s fun and most of my students enjoy it too. But as an experiment it has to be evaluated and assessed so… further research is needed each semester. I will present the results here to discuss.

Today I have received an email telling me “natldialogue (natldialogue) is now following your updates on Twitter”. Obviously, I check the link http://twitter.com/natldialogue; its bio description states “How should we protect personal privacy and expand the use of information technology to improve health care?” and its link that points me to A National Dialogue On HEALTH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY.

The dialogue is launched by this question “How should we expand the use of information technology and protect personal privacy to improve health care?” and encourage people to submit ideas or concerns, write questions or comments, share stories or vote ideas from other people. Furthermore, the website provides expert information about the issue

Twitter is just used to follow conversation, but this web also provides a opinion tracker to show what people are thinking and saying about how information technology can be used to improve healthcare while safeguarding privacy.

I must keep an eye on this initiative as a clear and intereting case study to be analysed.

This post will be for sure my longest post ever. I would like to share my thesis’s references. You could also find them at my personal references manager. Enjoy them!

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Cameron Neylon has posted Facebooks for scientists - they’re breeding like rabbits!. I really recommend reading that post. I just reproduce here some of the sites collected by him:

Sites

Blog collections: Nature Network, ScienceBlogs, Scientific Blogging, Wordpress, Blogspot, (OpenWetWare),

Social Networks: Laboratree, Ologeez, Research Gate, Epernicus, LabMeeting, Graduate Junction, (Nature Network), oh and Facebook, and Linkedin

Protocol sharing: Scivee, Bioscreencast, OpenWetWare, YouTube, lots of older ones I can’t remember at the moment

Others: Friendfeed, Twitter, GoogleDocs, GoogleGroups, Upcoming, Seesmic,

Ismael Peña has also started to collect on his wiki the some initiatives under the category Social Networking Sites for Scientists.

Finally I would like to remark the Science Blogging 2008 to be held at the Royal Institution, London, August 30, 2008.

The official forum for Science Blogging 2008, to be held at the Royal Institution, London, August 30, 2008.

The science blogging community is growing rapidly and reaching larger audiences. At Science Blogging 2008, science bloggers from around the world will have the opportunity to meet and discuss the pressing issues in science, science communication, publishing and education. What can science bloggers do to maximise their impact? Can blogging contribute to scientific research and careers? How can blogs be used to help educate the public about science? Readers and writers of science blogs, those who follow trends in online scientific communication and anyone else interested in learning more about science blogging will benefit from the discussions.

This July (16th and 17th) Science Commons has organized a workshop in Barcelona. The goal is to conclude the workshop with a set of shared principles that can effectively guide the development of a collaborative infrastructure for knowledge sharing — one that increases the value of each independent contribution to the global knowledge commons. To reach this goal the organizators have design an excellent programme. Furthermore, I’m sure that participants will enrich the discussion.

On the other hand, the last Eurohealth publication, a joint initiative between the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies and the London School of Economics and Political Sciences - Health, includes an article entitled Access to research data in Europe written by Philipa Mladovky, Elias Mossialos and Martin Mckee:

Summary: The European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) is much more ambitious than its predecessor and health research has been boosted, taking €6 billion of the overall budget of €50.5 billion. Yet, in contrast to other leading research funders, FP7 is largely silent on the issue of access to research data. Sharing health research data is in many ways more complex than other types of research data because of the ethical and regulatory issues. However, these and other technical, legal, cultural and institutional barriers to increasing access to research data should not discourage policy development in this area, since there are many potential benefits.

Keywords: Data, Data Sharing, Research Funding, European Commission

This article could be another input to encourage and stimulate the workshop discussion and to promote Health Commons.

Ismael Peña, a colleague at Open University of Catalonia and a friend of mine, has been working on issues relative with Open Access, Open Science, Open Educational Resources, Open Source Software, etc. His post titled Introduction to the open paradigm sum up the main features of Open movement. Talking about “paradigm” is a tricky question so I have suggested him to title his introduction as Openness at the informationalism paradigm. Anyway, a few days ago he sent me a link to The Health Commons

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

This is the new project from Science Commons that has “the ambition of achieving for the world of science and data, what Creative Commons had begun to achieve for the world of culture, art and educational material: to ease unnecessary legal and technical barriers to sharing, to promote innovation, to provide easy, high quality tools that let individuals and organizations specify the terms under which they wished to share their material” (see An Introduction to Science Commons).

John Wilbanks and Marty Tenenbaum have written Health Commons: Therapy Development in a Networked World - an introduction and overview and have produced a video titled An Introduction to Health Commons

I’m very interested in these kind of initiatives or project. Please contact me flupianez[at]ictconsequences.net if you have or know any initiative related to Health and Openness at the informationalism paradigm as Health Commons or the examples I’m collecting at my wiki under the category Openness at Health.

The Spanish Health Minister has published a press release talking about its collaboration with Microsoft to launch Robot Robin, a Windows Live Messenger Assistant that helps young people through the Messenger to resolve doubts about health issues related with sex, pregnancy and alcoholic drinks. It is said that people can add Robin to the personal contact list and interact with him taking into account legal, privacy and security issues.

This initiative points out some trends detected in relation with health and the Internet as Innovative Health Technology:

• The importance of the private sector and the interest of the big companies like Microsoft and Google to get into this huge market.
• The importance of analyze the supply and the demand side, in this case digital natives as a heavy Internet users (demand) and the Internet as a tool to reach this audience, taking into account the possible digital divide.
• The importance of the understanding about how people use existing technologies everyday to develop new uses.

Ethan Zuckerman, fellow of the Berkman Center for Interent and Society at Harvard Law School, is posting about Open Government Principles workshop at O’Reilly and Associates:

• Tools for open government
• Towards the principles of open government data

The aim of this meeting was to draft a set of principles to define what constitutes open government data:

Government data shall be considered open if it is made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete
All public data is made available. Public data is data that is not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary
Data is as collected at the source, with the highest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely
Data is made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible
Data is available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable
Data is reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory
Data is available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary
Data is available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free
Data is not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

Public Sector Information in the Network Society, as well as Web 2.o phenomenon, may take into account the Open Access Movement.