Test post

Blah blah blah

Learning, and nerdiness

I'm gearing up to co-facilitate the Strategic Connector Nonprofit Leadership Institute at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits (where I work as a program coordinator). Although I try to resist thinking about leadership (or anything, really) in terms of quotes, there are just some that ring true at various times.

Tonight, it's Confucius, although I don't account for the translation: 

"By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest." 

Although it sounds ominous, I think it reflects the ease/difficulty by which we all learn. It's easier to reflect than to act, and it is easier to act than to evaluate, through experience, one's previous actions. 

And easiest still to refer to the best.comic.ever:

From Cat & Girl by Dorothy Gambrell

Social Media & Healthcare - The Wisdom of Patients

The California HealthCare Foundation has put pen to paper and documented The Wisdom of Patients: Health Care Meets Online Social Media, in a report of that name released last month. 

The report cites the Pew Internet & American Life Project that indicates patients are more likely to consult the internet for information on a medical condition than a doctor, and that social networks have positive effects on those most isolated from offline social networks. The title is a play on the popular book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, the man most often behind the New Yorker's Financial Page. Surowiecki, and the CHCF report, assert the truth to the old cliche of 'two heads are better than one'. And in fact, the more heads, the better, resulting in what's known as a positive network effect.

It probably sounds scary, looking online for health information, and the arguments of skeptics come quickly to mind - is it reliable, who posted the information, what's their self interest, how can you verify this is true, how does this interact with my specific condition, etc. Yet relying on the singular knowledge of a single physician, who may (or may not) have seen your condition before, also sounds scary. The report cites the example of the DiabetesMine, who were able to self-police product placement out of their social network, and Dr. Daniel Hoch, whose patients have together found and guided him to better tools for working with biofeedback devices in patients with neurological disorders.

Modern healthcare has often loudly extolled the virtues of active patient involvement, and for those of us in America, being proactive when it comes to understanding the conditions, treatments and drugs we and our loved ones take is essential. Enter the social network as provider of information, whether a review of the side effects of a drug to what a certain procedure will be like.

The report goes on to explore the business of health care, and here the report uses the online banking industry as an analogue. When banks took information online, customers reported greater satisfaction with service and the ability to be more informed about financial decisions.  How can this be used in health care? And how can data aggregated (with opt-in permission from consumers, of course) help guide healthcare delivery, patient satisfaction, and increased health?

Finally, what is the future of Health 2.0? Greater transparency when it comes to health care costs, and greater ease of access to information, says the report. It references the launch of www.carol.com, a site whose advertisements here in the Twin Cities make it seem like eBay for health services (which, I think is a good thing?), as an example of introducing patient knowledge and competition into the health care market. And they discuss the future development of the Semantic Web, where computers are better able to parse and make sense of consumer searches. (More on that to come in future posts.) 

Ultimately, the report is a useful overview of what's happening in the world of health information. When it comes to the internet and social networking, I'm reminded of the Minnesota nonprofit organization Caring Bridge, that helps families create Web sites to keep others informed when a loved one is sick or in the hospital, helping to rally offline support through an online medium.

And I'll close with the story of Matt Logelin, who was featured on the cover of the Star Tribune in late April. Matt and his wife Liz, both former Minnesotans, had just had their first child, Madeline, when Liz passed out and suddenly died as result of a blood clot. So Matt, now a single and grieving Dad, went online to find support. It's a heartbreaking situation, but one that demonstrates the power of free information, and personal agency when it comes to health care online. 

Madeline (hearts) the MN, from mattlogelin

On newspapers - or, MinnPost, anyone?

Eric Alterman wrote (in his cheekily titled "Out of Print" article for the 10/31/08 New Yorker) that "Vastly more Americans believe in flying saucers and 9/11 conspiracy theories than believe in the notion of balanced - much less objective - mainstream news media." 

I had a good chuckle at that, having given up on journalism after college, despite two stints as an editor-in-chief. I had written more than my share of (in retrospect) unobjective pieces for the (decidedly unobjective) college magazine I edited, and was done with the myth of impartiality. The only thing rising faster than my political awareness was perhaps my indignant anger at the media. Who can be objective when language itself is so laden with prejudices, and reporters of different backgrounds, races and educations can perceive reality so differently? Does anyone really believe any reporter who rejects a point of view can see outside his or her 

own life experiences? I said good riddance to bad rubbish, looked longingly at alternative newsweekly internships, then ultimately set my career sights elsewhere and washed my hands of the whole affair. Just last week, when I opted for the Star Tribune as lunchtime reading, some of the dreck I found there only served to reassure that choice. 

Yet I am not entirely untroubled by the current state of American newspapers, past prejudices and recent disappointments aside. I recently sat in on a class at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, taught by Eric Black and featuring Joel Kramer, former Editor and Publisher of the Star Tribune, and more recently, founder of Growth & Justice and the nonprofit online newspaper MinnPost. 

Kramer, who had come up through newspapers, talked about the business model that had sustained papers for the past 200 years in America. At their peak, about a third of all income was generated from classified advertising, nearly a third more through display advertising (especially from the department stores), with only 20 - 30 % of income being generated through readers. So printing and distributing the paper all came out of that reader income, while advertising paid for the reporters. This balance seemed to work alright, and gave journalists the time needed for reportage and analysis, unlike television and radio, whose constant need for content was less friendly to the process of interviewing, researching, fact-finding, fact-checking and editing. Competition emerged from new technologies came to compete, but never took that much market share - radio, television, cable television, and direct mail. These mediums relied upon the fertile ground of the newspaper to harvest stories and facts from, without interrupting the newspaper's consistently solid revenues and profits.

Fast forward to today, when papers are jettisoning staff, cutting column inches, and closing foreign bureaus. So what happened? It wasn't that readers have stopped reading the newspaper - readership had been in decline for years and years, yet revenues and profits had remained relatively stable. It was the internet, of course. 

First, classified advertising went to the Craigslists.  The old display advertising stalwarts began to lose market share to Wal-Mart and other discount retailers, who do very little advertising, cutting further into revenues. And then the advent of search-based advertising, such as Google AdWords, where advertisers can see effectiveness down to the click, did away with John Wanamaker's old conundrum: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." And as Kramer put it, "How many reporters does Google employ? Zero."

So what to be done? Kramer thinks the nonprofit model, where journalism can be supported through a savvy mix of quality, thoughtful content, paid for by online banner ads, ta

rgeted search advertising, and the loyalty of members, individual donors and foundations.  As a nonprofit, too, journalism may be better positioned to be seen as a community asset, more about the community and less about the shareholder; more about democracy than the bottom line.

As for the fate of the full-time journalist? "Well," Kramer said, "People are still artists."

Hello, world.

I love thinking about Information. Capital I Information, as in Library and Information Studies, Information Technology, the Information Age, Informatics. I'm also intrigued by the lower-case kind - how we find information; how we use information to train, instruct and shape the world; the ways information is used, divulged, and wielded in power structures; and the transformation of information --> knowledge --> action. And so in this spirit of affection for information, I'm launching The Secret Life of Information to bring light to these thoughts.

To help tether these abstract ideas to earth, a few thoughts on the outset of this blog:

• I define Information broadly, as a concept, with frequent recurrence and application in everyday life. In the words of Wikipedia (accessed 4/26/2008): "Information as a concept bears a diversity of meanings, from everyday usage to technical settings. Generally speaking, the concept of information is closely related to notions of constraint, communication, control, data, form, instruction, knowledge, meaning, mental stimulus, pattern, perception, and representation."
  
  
• Information, I believe, lives a secret life in that the immensity of the Internet and the aggregation of human knowledge over time is a Borges-esque labyrinth, unknowable in its sheer size. How can normal, everyday people navigate these meta-libraries to create meaningful lives, productive societies, just governments, and empowered communities? How can Information be made human-scale, and what technologies will we use to do it? I'm intrigued by online searching, tagging, linking, and efforts to digitize libraries; I'm hooked on concepts from social media to agile software design, and by the fantastic people, organizations, and ideas I encounter. I hope to highlight and aggregate those projects here.
  
  
• As a current practitioner in the nonprofit sector in the United States, I see the sector as the "information sector", and hope to lead and explore ways of shared, cooperative knowledge management for the intentional creation of communities. I see myself as a professional learner, aspiring librarian, educator and overall smarty pants. And what kind of smarty pants would I be if I wasn't online being smart?

So at the outset of this creative endeavor, some apropos whimsy from Cat and Girl.

-nicole