Towards a global collaborative sensibility: World 2.0
Sensibility: The ability to feel or perceive stimuli; a keen intellectual perception; mental or emotional responsiveness toward something, such as the feelings of another.; receptiveness to impression, whether pleasant or unpleasant; acuteness of feeling; refined awareness and appreciation in matters of feeling; the quality of being affected by changes in the environment.
Last week, I wrote about an organization by the name of OneSpine and their work connecting donors with patients in need of spine surgery in the developing world. Much has been written about the digital divide in the web 1.0 world and while some have argued that this is now passe with the emergence of the participatory web, others have not been so sure. Even with 60 million web 2.0 users in the US, socioeconomic disparities in the uptake of technology persist. Is web 2.0 the people’s web or not?
Recently, Al Gore called for World 2.0 or for web 2.0 technologies to be put in service to the globalpopulation, truly maximizing their architecture of participation and lower barriers of access. Marta Strickland points out the need for health 2.0, food 2.0 and green energy 2.0, and quotes Al Gore from a recent web 2.0 summit in San Francisco as saying, “It’s time to look at redesigning our systems to be powered by the web. It’s time to look at redesigning ‘the context in which these online activities take place — in other words, World 2.0.’”
Desmond Tutu echoed this call at the Global Ministerial Forum on Research and Health in Mali last week, presenting a document calling for global action on health IT.The document was developed at a series of Rockefeller Foundation conferences held last summer in Bellagio, Italy and signed by more than 100 representatives of health care organizations, health IT vendors, national governments, universities, industry groups and charitable foundations. The document states, “To achieve substantial progress on improving health quality, access, affordability and efficiency, nations must share and work toward a global e-health vision.” And to achieve such a vision, we need technologies which are collaborative; interoperable; need-driven; person-centered; reusable; scalable; standards-based; sustainable; and owned by in-country organizations (Versel, Digital HealthCare & Productivity). Most of these adjectives could be applied to the community to which we belong — SpineConnect!
I am not sure how many of you are aware of this fact, but there are 7 international (non US based) groups within the SpineConnect community. They are based in Canada, India, around south Asia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia as well as Turkey and provide golden opportunities for collegial connections and the sharing of knowledge and resources across the waters. As a member of the community, you can browse groups and join multiple ones. Think of it as your own personal first step towards World 2.0 in the surgical profession! Next time you are at a conference, invite your international colleagues to join us, or get in touch with friends from your fellowship days who have now moved overseas and send them an invite!
Remember — Good things happen when we connect!
With many thanks to _fLeMmA and nat_olly for their artistry!
Kirsten Broadfoot
Tags: collaboration, collegial connections, digital divide, digital health, digital healthcare, e-health, health 2.0, knowledge-sharing, OneSpine, participation, participation in, scalable, scalable network, sense sensibility, sensibility, sharing of knowledge, spine surgery, spineconnect, surgeon community, sustainable, the digital divide, web 2.0
