OpenQRS

On deck: an open source version of the QRS method. Get in touch if you want to help us with its design or with usability testing. [Look for that to be released this fall.]

One of the core tenets of OpenQRS is to build a decentralized system of QRS accountability that provides data analysis and product performance metrics from local data scientists. We want to build a QRS system that strengthens the data analytic capacities of a global workforce and supports the local economies where these products are being deployed. So, for example, if a medtech product is made in the UK, when it is deployed in Kenya, the data is analyzed by Kenyan data scientists.  

We recently discovered an unlikely OpenQRS model- a cosmetics company in the USA. Yes, we know, that’s not our target market. We are focused on QRS for medtech in low and middle income countries. But this company’s approach reflects what we envision when we champion OpenQRS.

Our goal is to create open source tools and methods for assuring quality and safety of medtech deployed in low and middle income markets where no regulatory systems exist. We aim to empower entrepreneurs and makers:

to determine the QRS risks of their products

to set standards for how to address these QRS risks, as appropriate to their product and market, in a transparent way

to monitor performance meeting these standards (in a big data platform with auditing services for those who opt-out of an open data model)

to open source the tools and methods developed to monitor QRS in order to reduce the costs and improve the quality of these resources

Let’s take a look at Beautycounter, a US-based company, that sells cosmetics and personal care items- everything from sunscreens, shampoo, and soap to mascara. Despite its name, the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act does not regulate cosmetics, except for color additives though notably not ones used in hair dye. (1) Well known words, such as “organic” and “natural”, do not have any standards for when they can be used. With over 10,000 possible ingredients, the FDA’s (industry funded) ingredient review panel has restricted only 11 ingredients from use. (2) Meanwhile, the EU has restricted use of over 1300 ingredients from cosmetics. (3) This discrepancy demonstrates how unregulated the cosmetics and personal care industry is in the US.

Drawing upon those ingredients banned in the EU, Beautycounter developed a list of 1500 ingredients that are suspected to be linked to cancer, hormone disruption or other health problems. The company has made a public commitment to “never use” these 1500 suspect ingredients. Confirming this pledge, the independent, non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG) rates the majority of Beautycounter products as “EWG approved” or with a green “safe” label. (4)**

Faced with the challenge of an unregulated market, Beautycounter:

Chose to create their own standards when none were required

Raised the bar by adopting standards beyond existing EU standards

Made their self-established standards transparent (“never use” list)

Met their commitment with accountability (externally verified by EWG)

Beautycounter exemplifies that this challenge navigating unregulated markets is not limited to low and middle income markets. With a President who has pledge that every new regulation will include the removal of two regulations, it is a critical time for American consumers to become informed advocates and for companies to raise the bar on their own practices.

If you have a medical technology designed for deployment in low and middle income markets where no no regulations apply, we want to hear from you about what you are doing to address the Quality, Reliability & Safety of your product.

**Disclaimer: This post is in NO WAY meant as an endorsement of Beautycounter’s products nor its business model. To advance its mission to educate people about the safety of personal care products, the company employs a direct sales model, aka network marketing or multi-level marketing model. MLMs are a controversial business model with critics. (5) 

Disclosures: Per its business model, Beautycounter came to our attention through a friend who is an independent consultant. We received no financial or in kind incentives for writing this post. However, after reviewing the company’s approach and products, Kate entertained the possibility of joining the company as an independent consultant with the aim to redirect any profits from that endeavor to support her philanthropic activities, which include OpenQRS. In the event that decision is made, this post will be updated accordingly.

1. How FDA Evaluates Regulated Products: Cosmetics https://www.fda.gov/aboutfda/transparency/basics/ucm262353.htm

2. Why This Matters: Cosmetics and Your Health, EWG, April 12, 2011 http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/2011/04/12/why-this-matters/

3. Cosmetic Ingredient Review, Intertek http://www.intertek.com/cosmetics/ingredient/

We are thrilled to be the 103rd interview with Stephen Ladek for the Terms of Reference podcast. It is an honor to be included on his show featuring people working in aid and development. Check out his website with fantastic resources: Aidpreneur.

The conversation raised terrific questions from what sustains our “patient innovation” approach and gave us a chance to celebrate the inspiring work of people with whom we have a chance to collaborate over the years. 

To those directly mentioned here and the MANY more who have supported, advised, and contributed to the project- especially our core team of builders (past & present): Brooke Estin, Laura Thierry, Erin Beitel, Rey Buckman, María Teresa de Ávila, Roz Dunn -- thank you for being part of this adventure! Have a listen and please let us know your questions, comments and feedback: http://aidpreneur.com/tor103-openqrs-with-kate-michi-ettinger/ A Snapshot ToC:

We are thrilled to announce that we will host a panel: Bright Spots: Innovations for Quality, Reliability or Safety of Medical Technologies at the 2016 International UNESCO Conference in Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact. Core thematic areas include:

Technologies for Humanitarian Action

Medical Technologies

Science and Technology for Disaster Risk Reduction

Technologies for Sustainable Access to Energy

ICT for Development

Technologies for Sustainable Habitat and Cities

Our panel focuses on medical technologies deployed in low and middle-income countries (LMIC) that often encounter a lack of clear guidelines for how to address quality, reliability, and/or safety (QRS). In this regulatory absence, innovators have stepped up to develop creative QRS solutions.

We will examine "bright spots" – promising examples of systems level innovations that address the QRS of medical technology. Our session features four systems level initiatives. We are pleased to introduce our panelists:

Emmanuel Kouemo Tchokodjeu, Cardiac Centre Shisong, Cameroon, Advanced Medical Technologies Management in Limited Resources Settings Context: Five Years’ Experience from the Cardiac Centre of Shisong in Cameroon

Roberto Musi, United Nations Office for Project Services, Haiti Office, Setup of Health Technologies Maintenance Units in Complex Settings: An Experience from Three Community Reference Hospitals in Haiti

Andrei Dizon Coronel, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, The eHATID LGU Program: A Continuing Effort in the Collaborative Challenge of Nationwide Health Informatics

David Matthew Garrity, GVA Research LLC, United States of America, Additionality vs. Systems Approach: ICT and Tuberculosis Epidemic in Southern Africa

Speaker abstracts: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Program/Sessions/DAY1/SE05-MED

Our panel will explore questions including:

what QRS issue did the initiative aim to address?

how did they solve it?

what outcomes/impact have they had?

To enhance the learning and translation of these programs to other settings, we will focus our discussion on:

what unexpected outcomes were encountered?

what/who were facilitators of success?

what failures did they experience and how did they recover?

what were/are the biggest challenges going forward?

Our discussion will be practical as it will center on lessons learned from implemented solutions. We will surface facilitators of success and key stakeholders engaged in order to enable successful replication of these promising models.

To review the full preliminary program: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Program

Early Bird Registration ends March 31: Please Register: http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Registration

We wanted to share these two calls for upcoming Tech4Dev conferences:

1) UNESCO Chair in Technologies for Development: From Innovation to Social Impact, 2-4 May 2016, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Call for breakout session & event proposals due 11 Sept http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/Call1

Core Themes: Humanitarian Action, Medical Technologies, Disaster Risk Reduction, Energy, ICT4D, Habitat

Cross cutting issues: Gender, Open Innovation, Living Labs/Hackathons, IoT, Scaling Businesses, Public-Private Partnerships http://cooperation.epfl.ch/2016Tech4Dev/ThematicAreas

** If you want to propose an event or breakout session/panel on Open Source, IoT, MedTech and/or ICT4D- let's talk! **

Stay tuned: Call for abstracts begins Oct 5 ... Follow: @codevEPFL 2) ISTAS IEEE, International Symposium on Technology & Society, Dublin, Ireland 11-12 Nov 2015 "Culture, Ethics & Knowledge Society"

Call for practitioner and oral presentations due 14 Sept http://www.istas2015.org/home/default.asp?page=c4p Thematic priorities: Technology and Development: Humanitarian Engineering and ICT4D; Impact of Collaborative Open Innovation, Alignment with Public Policy Professional and Research Ethics in STEM  (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) Future Internet: Balancing Personal Privacy, Public Security and Surveillance; Connected Enterprise; Impact of Consumer Electronics

Next Generation Computing: Big Data; Embedded & Wearable Technology; Cloud Computing; Internet of Things; Sensor Networks; Smart Cities

Technological Forecasting

We are thrilled to share our chapter:

Open Issues and a Proposal for Open-source Technologies to Assure Quality, Reliability, and Safety in Health Care Devices Targeting Low- and Middle-income Countries

that appears in the book: Technologies for Development, edited by Sylvia Hostettler. 

S. Hostettler et al. (eds.), Technologies for Development, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-16247-8_8 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

Last June, we presented our research in two papers at UNESCO’s Technology for Development conference, hosted at EPFL in Lausanne and organized by Sylvia Hostettler.  Our paper that presented the background research and proposal for OpenQRS was presented in the Openness Paradigm Panel and was invited for publication in the conference book.

We are Chapter 8 in the book.  Here are the table of contents for the chapter:

8. Open Issues and a Proposal for Open-source Technologies to Assure Quality, Reliability, and Safety in Health Care Devices Targeting Low- and Middle-income Countries

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Methods

8.3 Results

   8.3.1 Health Care Product Development

   8.3.2 A Changing Landscape

   8.3.3 Stakeholder Perspectives on the Current State of Affairs

   8.3.4 Synthesis: Stakeholders in Emerging Markets

8.4 Key Issues to Address in the Current Context

8.5 Timing for a New, Open Approach to QRS

8.6 Conclusion

References 

At Mozfest in October, we launched #openhealthmap- a project to map open source projects in health. Our aim is a shared resource that makes it easy to discover who's doing/done what and to identify what can we do together next!

At Health 2.0 Europe, several speakers from the UK's National Health Service (NHS) shared that the NHS intends to support more open source health technology development.  Indeed, several of the 50+ projects identified for #openhealthmap emerged from NHS Hackdays.  We think this map will serve as a timely, global resource for connecting open source project in health.  Most importantly, we are excited to discover opportunities for collaboration that will leverage the power of open source to promote outstanding health care.

Here's a quick overview of learning so far, our vision, and what's next.

Learning #1: We Need A Taxonomy for Open Source Projects

We encountered the question: what makes something open source? Is it that the project relies on open source technology? that it has an open API? that it make something available under an open source license? that it adopts an open source philosophy?  Our map will reflect this information in an easy to understand way.

Project Aim #1: A Periodic Table of Open Elements

We were excited by the enthusiasm around our quick mock up of a  Periodic Table of Open Elements at MozFest.  Refining this prototype will provide a flexible and fun way to show how open source fits into a project. Imagine a table of elements that can be combined to reveal how open source applies within the project.  For example, if a few elements can be arranged to reveal that the project makes software available under an open source license (OfficeLibre) or that it involves open source methods (Open Source Malaria). If you would like to join us in designing this part of the mission, please get in touch to collaborate!

Learning #2: We Need A Landscape Map for Health Care

Current sites that inventory open source projects are for/by technologists and tend to lump all projects under the tag "health".  This approach misses the opportunity to showcase how open source brings value in health care in a way that makes sense to the health care community and patients.  For MozFest, we created an icon guided diagram to prompt people to think about about where in the health care experience open source might be leveraged -- in the community setting, via mobile phone, in the ambulance, in a small clinic or outpatient setting, or in the hospital. 

The inspiring work of 15 year old Jack Andraka demonstrates, the untapped opportunities for citizen scientists to contribute significant advances to medicine. We see the value of tracking open source projects in drug and device development, supply chain, distribution of health care resources, and access to medical research.  We are working with Jenny Molloy who manages the Open Science Working Group for the Open Knowledge Foundation to bring these efforts into our landscape map. 

Project Aim #2:  Health Care Landscape for Technology Map

It is our priority to develop a mapping tool that engages health professionals and patients as partners in open source technology development.  We continue to champion relation-centered design: it's our relationships that make us human. To be effective, health technology needs to support the clinical relationship. As the number of health apps that languish grows, we believe that this relationship is critical.Our map will create an interactive interface that intuitively locates where the open source technology fits within a health care interaction/setting.  If you would like to join us on this part of the mission, please participate!

Learning #3: We Need Data

In order to be useful, #openhealthmap needs data.  This means that we need to make it quick and easy to add projects. We know there are more projects and we are excited to fill out this map.  In the short term, if you have projects to include, please add them here.

Project Aim #3: Easy to Use

Ease of use is our priority.  Both for entering projects and for looking through what's already out there.  We will build the map so that it can be analyzed by geography, by health care setting, by type of open source project, by type of clinical interaction, by health topic/issue.  If there is something that you would like to see the map include and/or an analytic function that you would like to see included, please let us know in the comments. We welcome you to participate building this map with us! 

Next Step...

We've applied to the Knight Foundation's Prototype Fund to build this map.  We'll hear back on that in December.  In the meantime, if you want to contribute to this initiative, we welcome UEx/front end design and backend developer support, including someone who can hack the health care landscape map together with Ushahidi... whatever skills you bring, we welcome your participation - get in touch!

We loved MozFest!

From the BBC Labs' Ethical Cafe that prompted important questions about consent for data collection to a session on how to walk the talk, we had a blast learning, doing & (map) making! 

[BBC Labs: Perceptive Radio & hidden photo camera ... capturing all data that can be accessed from you and your devices]

The Mozilla #EmbraceOpen team asked Mozillians: What does "open" mean to you? This was a recurring question for us, so we sketched a "Periodic Table of Open Elements" to show how open philosophy might be applied.  We plan to evolve this table... so please feel free to build on this idea in the comments.

[That's Ac: Access, Ha: Hardware, Me: Methods, Co: Content, Fc: Free Culture, So: Software, Ph: Philosophy, Kn: Knowledge, Cs: Citizen Science, Da: Data]

On the Science floor, we joined a hallway of map makers including Lucas Blair of Little Bird Games mapping career pathways in STEM. I'm the interdisciplinary career that bridges science & technology.

and Billy Meinke from Creative Commons who mapped skills for open:

We made #openhealthmap - a map of open source projects in health. Thanks to Mozillians & the Twittersphere, we identified over 50 projects that demonstrate the myriad ways that open source philosophy can be applied in health care. 

You can see the digital summary of results or the actual table. If you know other projects, please tell us and help build this open map!

To participate in an ongoing conversation about open source initiatives in health, join us in the open health forum. (Hosted by Open Knowledge Foundation)

To identify opportunities to apply open source in health, Mozillians also created a Library of Problems and a Gallery of Ideas.

 Library of Problems: [partial, full list on our MozFest Etherpad at 142]

Health staff don't have skills to use tech or access to new tech

Negative clinical trial data is often not available

Different doctors have access to only partial medical records 

Literacy levels - people may not understand forms/consent

Donated medical equipment breaks & can't be repaired

Access to information is restricted and proprietary (e.g. lab reference values)

Researchers of cures/treatments work in isolation

Need for a stakeholder view of data (who collects it, what data do they collect, why are they collecting it/what's their interest) in order to understand what the barriers are to open and how open source can bring value

How to make what is shared accessible/used by other researchers across disciplines/geography

How do you implement new technology (e.g. 3D printed body parts) and overcome the high technical and regulatory barriers to new technology creation and adoption

The Gallery of Ideas offer interesting solutions that leverage the power of open source: [partial, full list on our MozFest Etherpad at 112]

Open data available on clinical trials (see e.g. YODA with selected clinical trial data from Johnson & Johnson)

Open lab values aggregated to enable access to benchmark lab results

Open mHealth / quantified self data available to contribute for public commons (see e.g. OpenmHealth and mHealth working group)

Crowd sourcing data collection to advance medical knowledge to reduce the cost of R&D (see e.g. Open Drug Development/Open Source Malaria)

Open funding for translational research (see e.g. science crowd funding platforms: )

Address specific patient health issues by enabling data sharing from the lay public in an open source way (e.g. person with x condition can share their x-rays over time to benefit others with x condition)

Building operations/systemic level of care on the idea of leveraging personal networks, operating with transparency and strengthening relationships

Open Costs (how do other countries manage care costs and disease treatments)

Modular equipment

Open Source Tool for securely sharing health data with GP/Researchers on my terms (e.g. facebook privacy setting)

Global health data commons to which people can opt to contribute their personal quantified self and other health data

Check out the full report on our MozFest Etherpad.

We will continue to build this map of open source in health.  Our next step is to make the map easily searchable, to enable open contributions and to contextualize this map of projects for identifying opportunities for collaboration and disruption of health care with open source solutions!

Huge thanks to our collaborator and co-facilitator Jenny Molloy from the Open Science Working Group of OKFN

[Jenny with SenseDrinks attendees at prototype mapping session]

And big shout out to everyone who contributed to our #openhealthmap from MozFest, the Twittersphere and the prototype at MakeSense SenseDrinks.

After 2+ inspiring days on the Science Floor- we left happy & energized- thanks all for an awesome MozFest - #EmbraceOpen & see you next year!

- Kate

We're at MozFest this weekend!  Come and visit us at Science and the Web (7th Fl).

We've teamed up with Jenny Molloy from the Open Science Working Group of the Open Knowledge Foundation to build a map of open source projects in health/health care.

We're looking for any and all projects that involve or depend on an element of open source (software, hardware, methods, data, citizen science, free culture). 

If you have a project that you know well or have heard about, please let us know about it.  Tweet the name/link or share the details here. URL to share: http://goo.gl/forms/yeufSOZGxF

Thanks for building this map with us! 

Kate

We took a summer break from weekly check in posts. Here's an overview of what we've been up to including summer highlights:

At UNESCO's Tech4Dev, we presented the research behind the OpenQRS proposal and results from our pilot with Walter Karlen's mHealth app.

We presented OpenQRS to the Center for Affordable Healthcare Technologies group at the Institute for Biomedical Engineering at Oxford University.

We visited T-Mobile's Innovation Lab with Rafael Zequeria. Rafael gave us a 101 on the Internet of Things (IoT) and we explored how OpenQRS could work with IoT health products.

User Interviews

We expanded our "scaffold" prototype to new appropriate technology medical devices including:

3D Printing Medical Devices in Emergency Situations: Dara Dotz

Egg Cup Smart Stethoscope: Dave Springer

Open Hardware Infusion Pump: Gerrit Niezen

Solar Vaccine Refrigerator: Zach Friedman

As well, we interviewed product designers with products further along in development (prototype/deployment stages) to better understand their needs and what value OpenQRS could bring at these later stages. 

These user interviews provided us with great insights for how and when we can best support device designers with OpenQRS resources.

Getting into all things Open

We attended OKFest in Berlin, which included interesting sessions on the "unintended consequences of open" and "privacy in the context of open." Both topics that we're eager to continue to explore in the context of OpenQRS.

We had a chance to catch up with Jenny Molloy who coordinates the open science working group for Open Knowledge Foundation.  We started an exciting dialogue about how and where open science and open health intersect.  This meeting prompted our collaboration at MozFest to map open projects in health. 

When we arrived in Berlin in June, we received an invitation from Impact Hub Berlin to pitch OpenQRS at Hubpertivo- a fresh and productive take on Friday evening happy hour.  By engaging people in creativity and harnessing the power of a happy crowd to help social entrepreneurs solve challenges! Hubertivo features 3 social entrepreneurs; each pitch their project and share a current challenge. Then, attendees share their questions, insights, and suggestions for the entrepreneurs over a drink. 

Here's our slide deck from the presentation:

OpenQRS at Impact Hub Berlin from Kate Michi Ettinger

The main challenge we shared is about how to communicate this niche topic to a broader audience- essential to engage people for our project. 

On Day 3 of UNESCO's Tech4Dev Conference*], we presented on the panel: Strategies for Successful Implementation of mHealth in Low Resource Settings moderated by Walter Karlen.   Lisa Stroux shared brilliant work on assuring the quality of sounds for a low cost, mHealth-based ultrasound designed to reduce perinatal mortality in low resource settings. Araya Medhanyie emphasize the importance of addressing community health worker's needs based experience with an mHealth app to address maternal health in Ethiopia. Balwant Godara provided a landscape analysis on mHealth use in infectious disease diagnostics in India.  Andrea Beratarrechea MD contributed insights from the implementation of mHealth strategies for lifestyle modification in hypertensive patients in Argentina. 

I kicked off the presentation by sharing my perspective on why adoption of health care IT often feels like herding dinosaurs. 

Drawing upon my experiences in health care product design and as a clinician in the trenches of medicine, I presented the concept of relation-centered design and a scaffold of ethical considerations to build integrity by design into mhealth apps and devices targeting low income countries. 

Ethical Considerations and Relation Centered Design for mHealth Applications from Kate Michi Ettinger

It was exciting to share what we learned when applying the scaffold to a diagnostic tool of Grand Challenges Canada grantee, Walter Karlen. In this pilot, we applied our prototype framework to a mHealth app developed for community health workers to diagnose pneumonia in children in rural South Africa.  Walter was our 1st customer/ collaborator to apply our prototype Integrity by Design | OpenQRS framework from the outset of development- kudos to Walter! 

Day 3 ended with a fantastic panel moderated by Zach Friedman, Program Director at LIGTT: Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies.  The health panel featured diverse stakeholder perspectives on "scale" and sustainability for medical devices. [Kudos Zach for a panel featuring women in STEM]

We were thrilled to see the proactive, innovative approach to addressing quality and safety in low resource settings presented by Tiffany Diage from Echelon MDM, an innovative approach to developing local medical device manufacturing capacity in Ethiopia. Referencing our relation-centered design presentation, Karen Pak Oppenheimer of World Health Partners shared a key learning from RHP's work in India was the importance of addressing relationships in product and service design.  

One of the closing remarks was the recurring theme of the difficulty of current regulatory approaches and their inappropriateness to the Global South.  We have a proposal for an alternative and we look forward to working with our tech4dev colleagues and learning forward to address this issue.

Congratulations to the organizers for an outstanding conference! 

OpenQRS was at UNESCO's Technology for Development conference organized by the UNESCO Chair for Sustainable Technology and CODEV from EPFL in Lausanne.  The conference theme focused on "What is Essential?" in technology for development. Tech4Dev (#t4d2014 on Twitter) provided an opportunity to present two parts of OpenQRS.  On Day 1, we presented our findings from >40 stakeholder interviews and how this research informs our vision for OpenQRS. We had a lively discussion and received great feedback on OpenQRS.  Our OpenQRS proposal was a timely response to a common theme across many panels that the current regulatory environment for deploying new technologies in the Global South is paralyzingly problematic.

Very special thanks to Denisa Kera, National University of Singapore and Sachiko Hirosue, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, who co-chaired this session on The Openness Paradigm.

Denisa and Sachiko hosted a panel that featured open projects:

open source hardware assn (OSHWA) president Gabriella Levine kicked off the panel introducing Sneel, a OSHW robotic snake 

Professor Irfan Prijambada (DIY microscope)

Nur Akbar Arofatullah (Lifepatch citizen science project) 

open data research by Nanjira Sambuli from iHub in Kenya 

open research advocate Scott Edmunds from @GigaScience

Sachiko, Denisa, Gabriella and Marc Dusseiller of Hackteria co-hosted a water hackathon as a panel- bringing Makers into the UNESCO event.

As well, Dara Dotz presented her experience working with 3D printing medical devices in post-disaster environments, specifically Haiti and hosted a workshop to demonstrate how to 3D print Medical Devices.  We've consulted with Dara to apply the OpenQRS/Integrity by Design Framework and we were thrilled to see the enthusiastic response to her project!

Jenny Molloy, from the Open Science working group of the Open Knowledge Foundation, wrote a brilliant post about all the open science projects presented at Tech4Dev.

A snapshot of some of the extraordinary people who made this an exceptional and inspiring conference. Thanks to all for an informative and inspiring event!

As we research for OpenQRS, we identify people, organizations, tools and technologies that we think contribute to the overarching vision of building products with integrity by design.  

We are eager to share our research openly in order for others to add to it and to build from it, but we're stumped on how best to share this information.  

We see this resource as an ecosystem map of people, projects, companies, tools and technologies.  Resources would be listed with basic contact details and keyword tags, and they could be searched by geography, focus (QRS), resource type (hardware/software/open,etc), etc. [visually similar to We Feel Fine] 

We would like contributions to the map to be open to anyone. Contributors earn editorial/curatorial privileges based upon their contribution record [similar to wikipedia editors].

Ideally, the map could be organized with a personalized view/notes independent of a generic shared view.  This approach would allow for organic organization by users and minimize the need to adhere to a rigid, imposed taxonomy.

We've wondered what is the best technology to do this?  

.

In a recent weekly check in with Social Tech Europe, we had our in-depth discussion about what technology tools exist to capture, map and share the resources we identify in our respective research work.

 Our Requirements for an Ecosystem Mapping Tool

Data that needs to be mapped:

For OpenQRS: A link categorized as [people, projects, companies, tools/products] and organized by geography (may have multiple geographic sites), device category, QRS category, keywords.  Potentially with comments/notes.

For Social Tech: people, networks or companies who are using digital technology for social good with categories [Cities/geography | events | sectors | networks]

Features: - visually appealing/understandable, such as We Feel Fine - map can be embedded within blog/website - anyone can update/add to it (tiered access including curators) - annotate it with comments (like pearltrees) - ability to have a personalized view for my own organizational framework that plugs into a public framework (like pinterest) - notification for updates - open source

.

Mapping Tools on our radar:  Pearltrees  (link focused, allows comments, allows multi-editors) Kumu (relationship focused)  Mural.ly (collaborative development within established teams, but not as appropriate for open access; no localized view) Wordpress theme: Explorerly (allows for posts to be mapped geographically, each link has comments area but only by geography)  Google Maps (geographic mapping, but not multi-dimensional and not great for multi-site initiatives) Evernote with mapping tools Ushahidi  (maps by time and geography with comments, open to anyone to contribute, need to check editorial capacity)

.

Mapping Tools/Resources we would like to learn more about: Torque: An Open Source Mapping Tool for Big Data by CartoDB  Maptools.org  Cytoscape Gephi

.

Proprietary mapping tools/resources that we wish were open source: SocialSca.pe 

.

If you have experience with any of these tools/technologies and/or if you have other mapping tools that would fit what we're looking for, please let us know!  

Thanks for your help!

Here’s what we’re up to this week at OpenQRS - get involved!

Here's what we're up to this week at OpenQRS - get involved!

One of my favorite reads from 2012 was Bo Gyllenpalm's: Ingmar Bergman and Creative Leadership.  Though best known for film, Ingmar Bergman also directed award winning theater productions. He crafted productions that yielded peak performances night after night even though he never returned to the theater after opening night.  One point that resonated from Bo's study of Bergman's creative leadership: it didn't matter if you had the best play, all star cast and a peak performance, if the audience wasn't ready for the show, it would flop. (1)

The magic formula for what makes a good idea take off is often studied yet remains elusive. (2) Planet-well.com, the first company that I cofounded was a social network platform to improve patients' experiences with chronic disease medications and lifestyle changes using a team-based gamification model. With a chronic disease focus, we had a solid business model with 6% internal rate of return. Maybe it sounds like something that you heard about that received funding recently?  Well, that was in 2000: pre-social enterprise, pre-impact investment/venture philanthropy, pre-social networking, pre-gamification.  The business model didn't have a high enough return on investment for the venture capitalist (VC) market at that time, and many VCs were highly skeptical that people would share health information as we proposed.  

Like Bergman's view about audience 'readiness' for a play, so it is with products, services and businesses. One of the hard won lessons from my first start up: timing is everything!

When I first encountered the idea behind OpenQRS in 2010, I knew that the world was not ready for it.  People barely knew what "appropriate technology" meant and open source and social enterprise were growing but still very niche topics.  As well, I needed to learn more about this market, to listen to diverse stakeholders and to understand the complexities surrounding this issue.

How do you know when the world is ready for an idea?

References

1. Creative Leadership and Ingmar Bergman by Bo Gyllenpalm, Stabim Press, 1995.