Benjamin Mason Meier, Assistant Professor of Global Health Policy, is one of the creators of the Global Health and Human Rights Database. Benjamin and his colleagues wanted to collect information on different forms of legal tools used around the world to advance the human rights in health. Here is a link to his paper describing the project: “Bridging international law and rights-based litigation: Mapping health-related rights through the development of the Global Health and Human Rights Database.” I was interested in seeing his data on the map. So I used an open source project CartoDB to plot Benjamin’s data on the map. And here’s a quick visualization. Now I’m interested in comparing the resulting map with The World Bank eAtlas of Global Development maps. In particular, it would be interesting to compare GDP with focus on health-based human rights.
Tag Archive for crowd sourcing
Conceptual Design, Featured, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy
2013 Think Tank Presentation on Socio-Technical System Design
by Olga Werby •
I’m about to leave for Washington D.C. for a Think Tank on Citizen Engagement in Biomedical Research. I have only five minutes to talk during the introductory speed geeking event, where all of us get to know about each other and each other’s projects. I’m going there to talk about our lessons learned from designing complex socio-technical systems that required intense participation from their users. I’ve been working on designing such systems for many years now. Some projects were/are very successful, some not so much. I’m not sure I will be able to give a full account of what we’ve learned, so I’m putting up a long(ish) version of my presentation here — if I had 15 minutes, this is what I would say to our very interesting group of participants. I chose these four complex socio-technical systems because all of them were in some measure educational ventures and all required outside users to contribute large amounts of data. I will start with Ushahidi. Ushahidi was born during the 2007 Kenyan election. That election was bloody and the violence, in many cases perpetrated by the government, was not being reported. Ushahidi was a grass-roots effort to tell their countrymen and…
Conceptual Design, Interaction Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding
BRIDGE to Health
by Olga Werby •
This week, I was invited to attend a BRIDGE Summit at Stanford. I was there to represent Ushahidi’s work and wasn’t particularly sure what to expect… But it turned out to be a very interesting brainstorming session for a new product/service in the health space: BRIDGE. Dr. Stephen Friend (M.D. and PH.D., president/co-founder/director of Sage Bionetworks) ran the show. What you will read below are just my notes, ideas, and understanding of what we were trying to do. I’m sure others at this summit came away with a whole different set thoughts, but, in the interest of advancing my own understanding and sharing of ideas in general, it seemed worth putting together a narrative of the product we were designing. So what is BRIDGE? After a two day discussion, we settled that BRIDGE is a platform (rather than an app) that will strive to: help gather medical information; crowdsource algorithms that would act on collected data with an aim to make medical advances; provide services to patients (information, education, support); facilitate research and make it easier for scientists to get access to data and to post requests for crowdsourcing projects; ease communication between all individuals and organizations working to advance…
Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy
US Rio+2.0 Speed Geeking Session
by Olga Werby •
So I’ve learned a new word: Speed Geeking. It’s like speed dating but for geeks to quickly present their ideas to a small group. You have five minutes strict, and then move on to the next presenting geek. It was a very interesting format, but it clearly had accessibility issue: I walk with a cane and I found it very hard. It would have been impossible in a wheelchair. And others with disabilities clearly had issues with this format. But that said, I’ve learned a lot. Below are my notes on the Speed Geeking event at US Rio +2.0. Noel Dickover — Senior New Media Advisor, Office of eDiplomacy, U.S. Department of State — introduced Speed Geeking and ran the event with an iron fist! FrontlineSMS Demoed by Sean Martin McDonald, Director of Operations http://www.frontlinesms.com Main Point: SMS is cheap data that is easy to structure and moves over cell networks (without Internet) Yahoo Demoed by Gil Yehuda, Director of Open Source Product Management at Yahoo! Gil talk about the use of Flickr for journalism, human rights, and keeping people safe. He raised the issue of copyright. KIVA Demoed by Beth Kuenstler, VP of Marketing & Communications If you haven’t…
Background Knowledge, Background Knowledge Errors, Conceptual Design, Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Users
US Rio+2.0 Breakout Session on Environmental & Conservation Education
by Olga Werby •
Below are the notes from the US Rio+2.0 conference hosted at Stanford last week. The notes are from the Education: Environment and Conservation breakout session. US Rio+2.0 Breakout Session Education: Environment and Conservation Attendees: Prof. Anthony D. Barnosky: Professor and Curator, Department of Integrative Biology at University of California Berkeley Wali Modaqiq: Deputy Director General (DDG), National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Dr. Khalid Naseemi: Chief of Staff & Spokes Person for National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Julie Noblitt: The Green Ninja — Climate-action Superhero Prof. Robert Siegel, M.D., Ph.D.: Associate Professor, Microbiology & Immunology Human Biology/African Studies at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences Dr. Beth Stevens: Senior Vice President, Corporate Citizenship Environment and Conservation at Disney Worldwide Services, Inc. Madam Anyaa Vohiri, M.A., J.D.: Executive Director, Environmental Protection Agency of Liberia Olga Werby, Ed.D.: President, Pipsqueak Productions, LLC. Mostapha Zaher: Director General (DG), National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan Our breakout group was partly the result of the conversation started the day before in the Environment session. Some of the members of our breakout group were present in that session as well. The main discussion…
Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding, Users
Special Preview: Social Media by Thomas Erickson
by Olga Werby •
Interfaces.com was given a free advanced preview of Thomas Erickson’s report and videos on social computing. The videos are very well produced and provide an interesting point of view and good insights on social media. Below are few of my notes based on the video content and ideas discussed on this blog in the past (my former students should find these familiar). Social Media Definitions & Ideas Social Computing: this is really about groups working together using ICT (Information Communication Technologies). I think this is a broader definition then the one offered by Thomas Erickson, as it includes all forms of ICT. Social Scaffolding: we all have a set of social scripts — culturally-specific, socially constructed norms of behavior — that help us navigate group interactions and allow for self-organization of crowds, at least shot-term and for a limited goal (like crossing the street). [Please watch Dr. Erickson’s example of street crossing in “Video 4.3: Social Computing video 3 – Face-to-face Interaction as Inspiration for Designing Social Computing Systems”.] Product design needs to create opportunities for social interaction — these scaffolds have to be built into the system: meeting spaces, places to sit down, well-lit areas, easy communication tools, games,…
Background Knowledge Errors, Cultural Bias, Group Decision Errors, Mental Model Traps, Misapplication of Problem Solving Strategies, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding
Knowledge, Context, & Expectation
by Olga Werby •
These are three necessary components of any product design: Knowledge: the background information that forms the foundation of product design Context: the ecosystem in which the product will be used Expectation: the alignment of goals between product creators and the users for which it was designed A failure to fully understand any of the above variables results in errors that propagate throughout the product system. But what if the product is disaster preparedness? Consider the design of an evacuation plan ahead of a disaster. You would need to understand the what kinds of damage the disaster is capable of wrecking; the probabilities for each outcome; the people and the ecosystem in which the disaster will occur; and expectations of all the participants in the evacuation plans. Tsunami and The Zoo A few years ago, I was teaching a fifth grade science class where we were discussing the possible damage from a tsunami in San Francisco (we just visited the Bay Model). The problem I posed to the students was to design a reasonable evacuation plan for The San Francisco Zoo animals. The Zoo lies on the tsunami flood plane, and as far as we knew there was no plan for…