UnaMesa Newsletter March 2009

Welcome to the first UnaMesa Association newsletter of 2009. Below you'll find brief updates and links to more information on the Virtual Interactive Classroom, Student Notebook, and other active projects. I also invite your attention to the UnaMesa blog, http://blog.unamesa.org/, where we have begun regular postings and commentary on key issues related to innovation in social services.

In these difficult times, every social service organization must find ways to serve more people with less funding. Please do contact me if you see opportunities where UnaMesa could make an impact.

Thank you for your support,
-Greg

Highlights for Jan-Mar 2009:

As noted in our Annual Report, we've identified three areas required to establish a "common denominator" for social services: low-cost connections between providers and clients, data gathering across different mediums, and access to quality information within a community.

Here are a few highlights from our recent progress in each of these areas:

• using cost effective technology (e.g. mobile phones) to create a direct connection between a provider and client
  • Supported updates to the Virtual Interactive Classroom software to be deployed in the Bangladesh Open University course starting on April 15th, 2009
• data gathering which supports a flexible combination of paper, web based interfaces, and mobile phones
  • Developed an initial Forms Repository to facilitate the development and sharing of best practices between social service agencies
• supporting effective use of knowledge through access to good information AND a community of peers connected to that information
  • Kickoff of the Hesperian project to develop a 21st century version of Where There is No Doctor
  • Released version 1.0 of the Student Notebook

In addition to the above efforts, we continue to test economic models that can support community-based services. In February and March, we ran a small but informative experiment designed to obtain feedback from the TiddlyWiki community regarding the value of support provided to them by UnaMesa associates.

Hesperian project

Curt Wands has been named as the editor for the new version of Where There is No Doctor. We're very pleased to be working Curt and the Hesperian team. In mid-April, Hesperian will begin distributing the proposed Table of Contents to their community partners for feedback. Instead of mailing documents back and forth, we'll be helping Hesperian and their partners to use a wiki for real time collaboration on the materials. We will also be supporting off-line use for partners who do not have reliable network connections. This will be the first time for Hesperian and their partners to use digital collaboration tools in their work and we're sure to learn much about what works and what doesn't for the communities served by them.

We've also begun planning the process for converting existing Hesperian publications to digital formats which will be more accessible to other organizations. These organizations repackage Hesperian publications and distribute them in conjunction with other materials and services. Unfortunately, significant manual effort will be required for this conversion process.

Student Notebook

The Student Notebook allows educators and students to annotate, search, create content and work with wikis offline as easily they can when connected to the internet. The notebook:

• contains all the information required for the course,
• can be used by students even when they are off-line,
• allows students to make their own comments and annotations,
• automatically updates with information provided by the educator as it becomes available

After an extensive pilot project (big thanks to Andrew Lister and his students), the Student Notebook is now available for any educator to use in their courses. We are actively soliciting feedback on the technology and hope to have students help us to further improve this technology over this coming summer through Google's "summer of code" program.

VIC project

The Virtual Interactive Classroom has moved beyond the pilot stage. Starting this month, the Bangladesh Open University will be including a VIC course as part of their core offerings. We've been working closely with the VIC thought leader, Yousuf Islam, to make the underlying software available as open source and to identify services that would allow other educators to use the VIC approach. To develop and offer the VIC service on a global basis, the UnaMesa Association and Soft-Ed are seeking partnerships with organizations willing to invest in creating new educational opportunities. Further information and a demo of the VIC techniques are available at the VIC site.

Forms Repository

Over the past few months we have spoken with several groups developing technology for gathering information on mobile phones. This includes members of the Open Rosa project and companies like DataDyne, makers of EpiSurveyor. All of them have cited a need for a repository of forms that can be used as starting blocks for developing their own mobile forms. This confirms our findings regarding organizations that are still using paper and web-based forms. They all need better ways, which are appropriate for their business processes, to overcome the initial hurdle. The Forms Repository Prototype has been created in order to solicit feedback from these organizations. If you have suggestions or comments, please leave them on the form repository feedback page.

TiddlyWiki Community Feedback

Effectively supporting communities of developers and users of free tools and services remains critical to UnaMesa's mission of supporting team based public services. In order for these tools to serve the needs of social service organizations, we need healthy communities of developers, domain experts, and end users who continually improve the tools and help connect the tools to the day-to-day operations of those organizations. As a tool, TiddlyWiki allows web based information to be distributed and accessed without the need for a live internet connection. As such, it makes applications like the Student Notebook possible and will play a role in off-line access to Hesperian's healthcare information.

UnaMesa supports the TiddlyWiki community in several ways, including operating the community site - http://tiddlywiki.org/ - and sponsoring associates, such as Eric Shulman, who monitor questions on the discussion forums.

In order to learn how we can better serve the community, in February we ran an experiment designed to obtain feedback from the TiddlyWiki community regarding the support provided to them by UnaMesa associates. Overall the response was overwhelmingly positive and included many thoughtful comments on both the support process and on appropriate methods for evaluation. You can read more about it on the UM blog and see a brief summary of the comments here. We're are grateful for all the responses.

We always welcome ideas and are especially eager to find examples of systems that have worked for other communities. We hope to identify core processes that sustain and support community developed infrastructure, tools, and services over the long-term.

For previous newsletters, please visit the newsletter archive. See the UnaMesa blog for recent updates and commentary.