Tag Archive for sagebase.org

Background Knowledge, Pipsqueak Articles

Commons Assembly: Bridging Health Divides

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Commons Topper

Last week was the week the Sage Event—a conference of Sagers (individuals who have been Sage Bionetworks supporters over the years and some new comers) that I have been organizing for the last 5 months. At its core, the idea for this event was the provide an opportunity for Sage Scholars and Sage Mentors to come together and share their projects. These Sagers are incredible people! Below are some of my thinking as it emerged from listening to their presentations. And when the videos become available, I will link to those as well in another post. There were four general themes for the day: 1. ICT and Health; 2. Delivering Health to Hard-to-serve Populations; 3. Rare/Orphan Diseases; and 4. Health, Education, Patient Data, and Advocacy. But the ideas shared at the event were not to be constrained! So allow me to present a very different non-technical view as a way of summarizing ideas that floated during the day. First, allow me to break the science investigations into two parts: • First based on DATA Science—analysis of information available about patients and the environment as coded in medical records or submitted via apps or gathered via sensors. In other words, scientific…

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Conceptual Design, Product Design Strategy

Sage Mentors and Scholars

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2015 Sage in Paris.031

One of the goals of the Sage Assembly was to facilitate opportunities for groups whose members rarely have a chance to make their voices and opinions heard at such events, whose members could benefit from the exposure to the ideas and people at the Sage Assembly, and who can take those ideas and projects and connections back to their own social networks and help them grow. To achieve this goal, Sage Bionetworks had set up a scholarship fund — Open Innovator Awards — to assist ten recipients with travel and living expenses in Paris. The recipients of the Open Innovator Awards were pulled from a pool of applicants, Sage Scholars, who have been nominated by Sage Mentors. Each Sage Mentor was responsible for selecting no less than 2 and no more than 10 Sage Scholars. Sage Mentors had complete freedom to choose those who they believe would have benefited from participating and who could contribute in a positive way to the Assembly. Sage Scholars had to be 18 years of age or older. Sage Mentors were expected to help their Sage Scholars with their applications and the final Poster Presentations: “Instances of Open Practice”. The presentations were be on display…

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Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding

Mapping the Wisdom of the City

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Sage Assembly 2015

One of the events at the Sage Assembly in Paris this year was the group design sessions to try to solve “problems of the city” after the Charley attack. Paris is still in shock and the city is trying to do something to heal itself. My group, led by Arno Klein of Sage Bionetworks, was charged with finding ways of using crowdmapping to help find some interesting solutions. This was a complete blue sky session. And our ideas were presented by Arno at the Hotel De Ville in Paris. Here are my prep notes for this event. Cities generate an enormous amounts of data: parking tickets data; water consumption data; number of riders using public transportation per hour per location; etc. But most of the data stays locked within isolated databases inside frequently competitive city departments. There are several cities that are trying solve the data silos problem. Palo Alto, CA, created a city API and open-sourced all city data to allow its citizens to discover problems and develop novel solutions. One of the prevailing problems, even after the break down of data silos, is that the data is not normalized, making it very difficult to manipulate. Data normalization can…

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Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding

2015 Paris Sage Assembly Summary Slides

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Institut Pasteur Sage Illustration

In 2015, the first Sage Assembly was held at the Institute Pasteur in Paris: http://sagebase.org/paris-assembly-2015-april/ Below are my slides from the last day’s concluding remarks. 1. Let me start by saying what an amazing experience the last few days have been. Interesting ideas, great people, innovative solutions all came together here, in Paris. Thank you institute of Pasture for being such wonderful hosts. 2. And of course none of this would have happened if not for one man, one American in Paris, Steven Friend. Thank you for working so hard to change the world, Steven! 3. And all of us! Don’t we group well? But there are still some obvious empty pins on this map. The World-wide Sage Community has room to grow! So let me come straight to my topic — how do we create systems that help us change the world? How do we design and foster supports , scaffolds that make open data initiatives possible? Well, I believe we have to start by understanding the people and communities in which they work. And we need to think about how change propagates… 4. Change can be sparked by a single individual and then move all the way up…

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Conceptual Design, Interaction Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding

BRIDGE to Health

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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…

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