1-22-10 Community Call Minutes

The meeting began at 2pm with the following present:


 * Vincent Navarro, OurMed Tech Committee Chair
 * Dr. Stephen Press, DC - OurMed Content Committee
 * Richard Knipel, Wikimedia Foundation NYC Chapter President
 * Elise Passikoff, Formerly with Scientists without Boarders and NY Academy of Medicine
 * Soo Cee Lee, PharmaD
 * John Volpe, MBA Project Manager at Tap Root Foundation
 * Greg Miller, Executive Director at OurMed
 * Diane Joiner, formerly with WebMD
 * (other guest listeners not identifying themselves)

Greg greeted the community and let people know that we'd try something different by going for a full hour and allowing folks to drop off after the first 30 minutes.

Technology Update:

With Vincent Navarro on the call, the first topic of business was the Technology Update. Greg thanked Vincent for his patience in the past 6 months to screen, advice and in the last month, negotiate some of the remaining terms.

Vincent spoke about how everything was finalized with the contract and that the award goes to: Blueliner. (www.bluelinerny.com). The contract went to them for thorough review this weekend and we expect a dully executed agreement by Monday. Following that we will schedule a design meeting in about two weeks.

Greg suggested that we could have a similiar weekly conference call just for Techincal issues.

Vincent agreed and said that there will be a need for project managers and quality assurance analysts.

Greg asked to clarify qualifications for folks on Tech committee. Will there be screening including resumes, interviews. Answer-all that, yes.

Stephen spoke about the importance to upgrade the MediaWiki software and asked whether or not that would be a Blueliner task--Vincent will look into that.

To illustrate perspective on where we've come to where we can go, Greg referenced Wikipedia's earliest archived webpage from February 2001

To reference what Wikipedia looked like after their initial launch, Greg called attention to the February 2001 website found here: http://web.archive.org/web/20010303221706/www.wikipedia.com/wiki/HomePage  Richard read the headline title of the site and the group laughed at how they were boasting about their 1000 pages (currently, Wikipedia has about 4million articles and that is just in English).

Discussion ensued about the old Wikipedia logo and Greg asked Vincent if he thought Blueliner would redesign the logo along with the design of the new site. Vincent explained that the first phase includes up to 10 iterations of the look and feel of the website.

Elise suggested that the logo and branding could be a whole nother project outside of this one--John agreed.

Greg informed the group that there is nearly $10,000 under the first milestone for design. Blueliner actually already designed a pretty good look &amp; feel along with their response to our RFP back in July and is one reason why we like them.

Weare.Us – A Patient support website

Greg reviewed the progress from research originally with Professor Stan Kachnowski's HIT (Health Information Technology) Lab and how OurMed over the past couple of years has sussed out the content, pros and cons of hundreds of websites. The OurMed office has many diagrams of these and all are welcome to drop in.

One of these sites that Greg came across was Weare.us.

Elise asked if this site will be included in the OurMed roll out. Greg said that there has already been references to the way the OurMed general public (patients, advocates, consumers) can give feedback.

Stephen asked if this was a site that we would try to emulate the content of or partner with. If we siimply link to them (the way that is done now on WikiChiro), it could be easier.

Greg explained the longer term vision of including zip code based information so that a Diabetes article can be accessed with physician verfiable disease cause, treatmetn, risks, etc on one side and the other side being consumer or "average Joe / plain Jane" comments &amp; feedback on the other.

The group checked out the site.

To date, many of the OurMed Community Discussions have been focused on how to write articles, organizational development or what is wrong with biased healthcare information models found on the internet. There are many good things happening out there too and OurMed has done significant work to benchmark against those websites and approaches as well.

According to their site, they “aim to empower patient communities to take control of their condition and their lives by providing knowledge, social resources, and tools in a place of paramount relevancy.” Co-Founded by one of OurMed’s early sponsors, Dr. Declan Doogan of Pfizer, Head-Global Research &amp; Development brought a basket of corporate sponsors with him to provide an original $50,000 of seed funding to the project. WeAre.Us implements Web 2.0 Technology in the form of Social Support Networks. Often compared to MySpace and Facebook, they are patient-led, positive, and private health and lifestyle communities dedicated to patients, family, friends, and caregivers of those coping with chronic, life-shaping illnesses and conditions.

Looking at how they developed successfully this was their history of organizational development as reported by: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/weare-us At the time of this writing, it is not clear if they are profit or not-for-profit organization. Chris Seta, Chief Architect, Co-Founder; Dr. Declan Doogan, President, Co-Founder; WeAre.Us received $50k in Seed funding. (8/08); Carlo Rizzuto, VP - Business Strategy; Stephen Doogan, Business Development; Kev Burns, Senior Engineer; Robert Anton Patterson, Chief Marketing Officer, Co-Founder; Valerie Chavez,, Head of Community Management, PR Contact. Analysis: Upon launch, weare.us received 50,000 unique visitors per month due to publicity campaigns. During the first quarter of 2009, they achieved 25,000 unique visitors with traffic dropping off significantly towards the end of the first year. (file://localhost/Source http/::www.crunchbase.com:company:weare-us)

John offered to review the site and supply comments. 

Input (and eventually your vote) solicited for “The Pepsi Refresh Grant Project”

Greg explained how Oleta McHenry, former accountant for the Wikimedia Foundation took initiative and forwarded us the lead for the Pepsi Grant:

Greg gave an overivew of the grant award process.

Elise said that she had participated in the JP Morgan Chase support for Idealist.org which had a similar voting system as Pepsi. She described it as being the wave of the future.

John Volpe voluntered to help edit the grant. John, us this link and edit on that page: http://ourmed.org/index.php/Pepsi_Refresh_Grant_Project

Wikipedia 9th year Anniversary Celebration: (Wikipedia Day NYC :

In a segway with Elise' comment about how sometimes it's hard to work offline on some OurMed projects without meeting folks, Greg illustrated an example with Wikipedia's event on Sunday where everyone is getting together for 6 hours of "Lightning Presentations" and How/To sussions.

Richard gave the group an overview of this Sunday's (Jan 24th) celebration of Wikipedia's 9th year anniversary. Richard told us that there will be presenations from the eKindling Philippines OLPC group (one Lap Top PC project).

He mentioned that there were some Medical Wikipedians coming from Pensylvania and invited Greg to do an OurMed presentation.

John suggested Greg use the powerpoint that was already developed--Greg thanked John and Richard for the idea and will do it.

The event will be held at NYU's Kimmel Center at 60 Washington Square South from 1 PM to 7 PM onSunday, January 24th.

If anyone wants to register they can sign up here: http://bit.ly/wikidaynyc

Information here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_DayAny questions about the event can be directed to Richard Knipel to: pharosofalexandria("at"}gmail.com

The OurMed Symbiosis Project:

Richard gave us an overview of his five-part plan to jumpstart Ourmed by developing positive symbiotic relationships with existing open content communities, in particular the Wikipedia community, and then building on and improving health and medical topics derived from that content on OurMed itself. Greg described the meeting with Stan and Richard yesterday. Following are the main elements of the plan that Richard will flesh out:

1. Ensure our MediaWiki and WYSIWYG configuration is compatible with Wikipedia 2. Import high quality health and medical topics articles from Wikipedia: Featured articles and Good article

3. Collaborate with Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine and its member

4. Incentives for expansion of high quality content by Wikipedia editors through Wikipedia:Reward board and other model

5. Develop blue-ribbon OurMed content based on expert review and improvements by health and medical professionals, with Flagged revisions system and Citizendium-like model

 

OurMed Policy Development: 

Greg recalled the OurMed Policy discussion that was started last week and thanked Stephen Press for his work to help there. Stephen described how he made the OurMed Policy page so that it would not be editable to the normal users but everyone could add ideas to the discussion page.

Greg then asked the group if they can recall OurMed's three pillars....

Richard answered "Be Referenced. Be Polite and .... "  Stephen answered "Be Bold" - Greg questioned whether or not we really need that last one. Elise said we did.

The group brainstormed and thought up all kinds of other ideas. Richard suggested we have something more in line for the medical community.

After some discussion, we all agreed to change "Be bold" to "Be Objective/Unbiased"

Additoinal ideas can be included here: http://ourmed.org/index.php/Talk:Ourmed_policyhttp://ourmed.org/index.php/Talk:Ourmed_policy 

Building content on OurMed one article at a time

Greg explained that instead of importing or copy/pasting free license content, we could also write articles from scratch.

Today Soo Cee Lee spoke about how she could write on Diabetes and Alergic Rhinitis. She will first edit the articles that are on the site and then look into which articles she might have to use.

Changes or additions can be made easily with our WYSYWIG editor (what you see is what you get), making it much easier than Wikipedia and cutting the volume ramp up rate to the new site significantly faster.

John asked if there will be an easy "Help" feature that will explain all the functionality and Greg assured him there will be. Here's a list of CopyLeft sites:

1) NIH's National Library of Medicine and PubMed

2) Wikipedia.org3) Medpedia.com

4) GanFyd.org (original medical wiki site that says Medpedia copied them and boasts 2000 site visitors per day)

5) PubMed.org6) Medline.org

7) Others?

To post a new article, simply goto: www.ourmed.org/index.php/ARTICLENAME

NIH/NLM’s PubMed Licensing / NLM Mobile MedlinePlus

Last week, we were joined by Rob Logan, Senior Staffer from the National Library of Medicine to support us in finding out PubMed's content licensing policies in regard to using them in bulk on the OurMed website. We are currently awaiting confirmation as to the depth and scope of such usage. In the mean time, here are some recent developments on mobile phone technology using PubMed content:

Mobile MedlinePlus (http://m.medlineplus.gov/

&lt;https://securenet.rfmh.org/,DanaInfo=m.medlineplus.gov+&gt;).

Wondering what the side effects are for your new prescription? Go to Mobile

MedlinePlus while you're waiting for the pharmacist to fill your order!

Visit Mobile MedlinePlus during your train ride to work to read the latest news

on diabetes. Or, the next time you're in your doctor's waiting room, visit the "Talking With

Your Doctor" page on Mobile MedlinePlus to learn how to get the most out of your

visit.Mobile MedlinePlus is available in English and Spanish (http://m.medlineplus.gov/spanish

&lt;https://securenet.rfmh.org/,DanaInfo=m.medlineplus.gov+spanishhttps://securenet.rfmh.org/,DanaInfo=m.medlineplus.gov+spanish&gt; ) and includes

a subset of content from the full Web site. It includes summaries for over 800

diseases, conditions and wellness topics as well as the latest health news, an

illustrated medical encyclopedia, and information on prescription and

over-the-counter medications.

More information from: Naomi Miller, Manager, Consumer Health Information

National Library of Medicine; Email: Millern ”at symbol” mail.nlm.nih.gov

 

Open Source Medical Computing Initiative in Europe: Greg told the group how Professor Tony Wasserman (Carnegie Mellon, Silicon Valley), introduced him to this movement of Open Source Medical Computing in Europe. Greg estimated that they were a year behind OurMed and two years behind Medpedia.com.

Stephen commented on how they could be good partners.

Adjournement:

Greg thanked the group for participating the whole hour and again reminded folks of the Wikipedia Day at NYU. Next meeting January 29th at 2pm