Jack Mason, IBM Strategic Communications, HealthNex Producer
The consensus from the health IT blogosphere is....let's do this thing! So mark April 18-19 on your calenders.
To reiterate: Blogposium will be a two-day, virtual collaboration among our circle of bloggers to show the world that together, we can do real and practical work. To make this cross-blog cooperative experiment a success, we'll keep the work and the objective relatively simple:
The Objective: to help flesh out The Clinical Informatics Wiki started by Dean Sittig with a dozen or more new entries, so that this wikipedia-like resource will become more useful for all.
The Work: In the next few weeks, each participating blogger will choose a topic related to healthcare IT (I'll take on Biobanking, for example) research it, and prepare a first draft for an entry in the ClinfoWiki. Entries should include basic definitions, links to supporting material, etc.
April 18: Bloggers will post their first drafts on and all of us, as well as all our readers, will provide comments, suggests and edits on each other's work. Everyone should include links at the bottom of their draft to the preliminary drafts of fellow Blogposium participants, so that we will pass traffic and editorial eyeballs around.
April 19: Based on community input, bloggers will post their second draft, for ultimately inclusion in the wiki.
The beauty of this approach, we hope, is that each participant can draw on their particular interests or expertise, and contribute something of practical value with only a short commitment of time and effort.
And if we can succeed with this fairly straightfoward effort, perhaps we can take on tougher assignments in the future, and demonstrate that a confederation of bloggers can be a really useful engine, to paraphrase my 3-year-old's Thomas the Tank Engine obsession.
How to Participate: Shahid Shah was kind enough to register people's previous interest in this collaboration. He's currently traveling. But in the expectation that he can create a similar registration page for people to declare their topics, that will be the plan. Stay tuned.
How to Help: First, spread the word to fellow bloggers who might have the kind of expertise to participate, as well as to the broader audience who can lend their collective intelligence to make our entries smarter and sharper.
Second, alert the media! This is by no means an exercise in self-promotion, but a public experiment to push the boundaries of what a ring of bloggers and readers can accomplish together. In this case, the greater the attention, the more productive this collaboration will be. For my own part, I will be working with my IBM colleagues to shine a light on this project.
Of course, if you have other thoughts on how to make this collaboration a success please add your comments hear or send them to me at healthnex@gmail.com
This should be an exciting and fun little piece of work for all of us. And given the enthusiasm so many of you have shown towards the idea of working together toward some common good, I'm proud to be connected to all of you.
Blogposium Countdown: t-minus 20 days and counting.
Jack,
I will put a post on my blog about it but I’ll be somewhere in the Atlantic & out of contact on those days – couldn’t the timescale be lengthened to enable more people to contribute – especially as the 14th-17th is a bank holiday weekend for those of us in the UK?
Rod
Posted by: Rod | March 31, 2006 at 10:52 AM
Rod:
Duly noted. We'll extend the dates from the 18th to the 20th to give everyone more time to participate.
Posted by: Jack Mason | April 03, 2006 at 05:46 PM