Proposal: Linking Communities Of Healthcare Blogs Amongst Wikis
Collaborating communities of healthcare professionals together with consumers are essential to solving the healthcare crisis. Through tidings feeds, conversation together with knowledge-sharing, these communities help growth people's understanding, spark innovation, render decision-support, enable amend problem-solving, together with mobilize grass-roots efforts.
The most practical means to produce this is through "virtual communities" using communication vehicles such equally blogs, wikis, forums, listing serves, together with real-time workspaces. Each of these technologies has for certain unique capabilities, equally good equally overlapping functions.
Following is a proposal that combines these unlike vehicles inward an optimal means enabling virtual communities to generate, evaluate, evolve, together with implement strategies together with tactics for solving the healthcare crisis from the "bottom-up" through grass-roots action.
Unlike a blog, a wiki is an first-class vehicle for organizing content, similar an encyclopedia, using links to pages via a tabular array of contents or taxonomy, which gives a comprehensive “whole-picture” view. It enables the reader to navigate chop-chop together with easily from theme to topic, category to category, together with tin terminate grip many unlike links to reference materials together with other external data sources. And it allows collaborative editing past times authorized contributors who tin terminate modify together with add together content correct on the wiki pages. They too enable comments, equally does a blog.
Blogs, on the other hand, produce non organize content into a comprehensive view. Instead, posts look chronologically, non organized past times topic. This is a proficient means to deliver a diversity of unlike issues for review together with discussion, similar a tidings feed. The reader scans through the issues of the day, reads the ones they want, together with post comments equally desired. When the comments create community dialogue, blogs help surface novel ideas, challenge people’s assumptions, together with atomic number 82 to greater learning.
So, wikis are similar encyclopedic organizers together with blogs are similar newsfeeds, both of which enable conversations. How tin terminate they live on used together for maximum benefit?
Well, when it comes to focusing virtual communities on something equally complex equally finding solutions to the healthcare crisis, I advise using our Wellness Wiki equally a vehicle for organizing together with growing content, together with using a community of blogs to “feed” the wiki. What I hateful is that the weblog posts would:
- Present timely data (news, studies, insights, opinions, experiences, questions, etc.) on unlike topics of involvement (some of which mightiness fifty-fifty live on based on content from the wiki itself).
- Engage people inward short-term dialogue nearly that information.
- Have links to them from the appropriate wiki pages, thence people reading a theme on the wiki tin terminate easily navigate to the associated weblog posts. If a post does non accept a corresponding page on the wiki, because it introduces a theme absent from the wiki, thence the wiki should live on expanded to include that topic.
- Contain links to specific pages inward the wiki equally is appropriate.
In approximately ways, this is similar a blogs aggregator, except that each weblog post is organized inward the wiki past times topic/category, non past times the fourth dimension catamenia inward which the posts laissez passer on to appear.
If for certain topics inward the wiki involve deep continuous dialogue, lengthy posts, branches into sub-topics, voting capabilities, file exchange, etc., thence a virtual forum tin terminate live on ready for that purpose.
If whatever bloggers are interested, delight contact me.
Steve