Do we need a Public Health 2.0 Special Interest Group or eCop

I am wanting to engage with interested Public Health/Health Promotion colleagues around Australian and New Zealand and even around the globe about an idea of establishing a Special Interest Group (SIG) around professional practice and new communications technologies and ideas such as:

·        social media, (including tools such as Blogs, Social network media like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Youtube, Webinars, Podcasts, Wikis, Skype, Social bookmarking, RSS and a long list of other tools/methods and settings),

·        mobile phones/smart phones and apps, and

·        changing public expectations for participation, co-creation and engagement linked to Web 2.0.

I think a Special Interest Group should aim to include Public Health/health promotion people from Australia and New Zealand but will obviously have very porous boundaries both geographically and professionally. I open to be persuaded we need a global group.

Rationale

I have come to realise that health promotion/public health practitioner face many challenges in mastering these newly emerged and emerging Web 2.0 technologies.

The incorporation of these new tools and ideas into our practice will shortly no longer be optional. The uptake of Web 2.0 by the general public continues at an extremely rapid pace and our professional practice lags behind. These new tools also give the people we formally called our 'target groups" new capacities and have been accompanied by new Web 2.0 expectations for opportunities for greater participation and engagement.

Increasingly our audience is no longer happy to go to a static health promotion web page and read our material. They now demand to comment on it, criticise it, improve it and share their ideas throughout their networks. 

As R. Craig Lefebvre, has said, our targets now carry guns.  See http://www.slideshare.net/rcraiglefebve/social-media-strategic-shift-or-tactical-tool-5360928 See Slide 10

These new technologies offer great potential for Health Promotion and Public Health. We are getting new ways of engaging with the public. Increasingly powerful and affordable smart phones give people new capacities. These new media tools potentially offer new ways of reaching and engaging with communities. They are also fantastic collaboration and partnering tools. We are only starting to glimpse the future implications of these changes for Public Health/Health Promotion

However for us as practitioners, the adopting these new tools means involves learning new skills, mastering new jargon and methods, overcoming many practical and organisational barriers, considering and managing novel risks, dealing with policies and procedures that are yet to be updated to take account of new technologies and public expectations.

Not least, adopting these new Web 2.0 tools will involve considering new methods and reconsidering established ideas, models and theories. These new tools have implications for our professional roles, competencies and our professional identities.

It is possible that the new Web 2.0 tools are not just a collection of tools. There collective impacts on out practice have a potential to reshape of our institutions and practice. Hence the terms, Public Health 2.0 and Health Promotion 2.0.

At present I feel that the early adopters of these new ideas are scattered across Australia and that many practitioners feel excited by the potential but daunted by the challenges. People are feeling isolated and are looking for a electronic community of practice (eCoP) to share information, share skills, ideas and solutions. Some people are sensing that this we need to talk how Web 2.0 will change profession.

What would a SIG or CoP do?

A Special Interest Group SIG or electronic Community of Practice (eCoP) could:

http://www.ewenger.com/theory/

• Set up an email based e-network for sharing news, ideas, tools, relevant literature, asking for help and feedback on project ideas and other documents such as organisational policies.
• Organise online events such as Webinars and Twitter chats (perhaps in conjunction with #hcsmanz (link http://bitethedust.com.au/bitingthedust/2010/12/04/healthcare-and-social-media-discussion-on-twitter/ )
• Share a group blog to share ideas.
• Share contact details and interests so people could make contact with each other for small group professional conversations using e-media and perhaps Skype.
• Organise face to face events and meet-up perhaps in conjunction with significant Public Health and Health Promotion conferences.
• Develop position and discussion papers on key issues.

It may be useful to align such a SIG with key professional bodies such as the Public Health Association Australia, Australian Health Promotion Association, and Environmental Health Australia.

http://www.healthpromotion.org.au/

http://www.phaa.net.au/

http://www.aieh.org.au/about/index.php

I am interested in your ideas. Please leave your comment and vote.

Please share this with your colleagues.

Questions that we need to think about.

Is this a good idea? Please vote on the poll to the right by date end of February.

Is the scope and purpose right or wrong?

How does health promotion in the context of community health or general practice fit in?

What would you change about as a rationale and purpose?

What do you think of the sort of activities that the SIG could undertake?

What do you think it should be called and what about a suggestion for a Twitter hashtag?

How does this relate to the wider worldwide set of #hcsm twitter tags?

Is the time right for a distinct Public Health group? A lot is happening already around Health 2.0 such in the #hcsmanz Titter group.

How doe we spread this to practitioners and the universities?

So many choices: What are the tangible steps

So many choices as to me learning needs and goals.

I might want to choose to develop the capacity to:

1. Cloudsource ideas and improvements to health promotion resources that I have been involved in developing such as The Connecting with Kids cards, SEEDS (Social and Emotional Early Development Strategy) and the Healthy Bodies Health Minds comprehensive framework.


2. Run a Community of Practice around using these resources/programs/approaches.


3. Using wikis to get comment on project plans and grant submissions and to register community. support for grant ideas. I think Google docs might be the tool for this.


4. Weaving together Youtube and Facebook, blogging and my email contacts to explain the strategic directions in my mental health promotion work and to engage people in a conversations about how we could work together in pursuit of common goals.


5. Organizing launches of health promotion resources/programs and do online familiarization sessions. Use social bookmarking for evidence brokering.


6. Deliver more inclusive online and interactive training particularly to rural and remote partners.


7. Use email list managers, Facebook, Twitter and SMS to organize F2F or virtual events.

So many options and decisions.

• But it is much clearer to me what I need to being doing now .




• Practice, Play, Explore, Trial, Checkout, Evaluate, Put aside, Adopt, Reflect.


• Master the software.


• Take reasonable and wise risks.


• Understand and manage the risks of these technologies. Understand identify, monitor, avoid, live with.


• Bring along my managers, peers and partners.


• Feed this into my professional association.


• Be enriched by the perspective and professional conversations about these tools and the emergent Health Promotion 2.0 paradigms.


• Share and discuss my learning with line managers and worm teams and key partners. Invite colleagues to my blog.


• Find allies and partners for new projects.


• Understand what resources are needed. (Time and money and IT resources are needed or these types of projects.).


• Work towards a project plan for small online project as a practice event. This is my sand pit -a safe play space for learning and development.


• Work towards a “Session Plan-Lesson Plan” with-in such a project. I need to set up accounts and manage all the passwords and log ins securely.

Do I need to find a buddy with someone who has mastered what I'm still to master about online facilitation?

Zooming In-What do you want to learn to facilitate?

What do you want to learn to facilitate?

What would I like to achieve, change or do more of?

I’ve been unable to separate these two focus questions for this Facilitating Online Communities 2010.

Give my role in Health Promotion, I’m asking myself what do I need to be able to do with Web 2.0 tools and online communities.

• Find, organize and spread evidence based practice, useful data and ideas.
  
• Find people who might be interested in health promotion.
  
• Understand my partners and their needs and beware of opportunities to offer advice and collaboration.
  
• Interest people in becoming involved in health promotion projects and strategies. Link them up with other with a similar interests and complementary abilities.
  
• Improve readiness of others to engage in health promotion and build their capacity to do the work.
• A Find innovators and early adopters and support them and raise their profile with others as pat of a larger change strategies.
  
• Advise others and provide expert support with my specialist skills and knowledge to undertake programs and projects that will improve population health outcomes.
  
• Manage projects and collaborate with other on projects.
  
• Evaluate projects and programs.
  
• Set up and facilitate online Communities of Practice LINK
  
• Set and facilitate wiki based events to capture practice wisdom around specific topics.
  
• Produce and publish digital everything from podcasts to small videos to
  ElluminateLive sessions.

*****

I want to know what these new web 2.0 tools can do? – What types of problems they can be applied to?

I want to know how to use them well-both strategically and tactically.

I suspect there might be foundational skills and advanced skills that build on the foundational skills.

I suspect I also ready have some skills from my 13 years of participation in online communities. I suspect it is a case of building on F2F skills as used for collaborations, project management, event organizations, communications, and meeting facilitation.

I want to learn how to modify my F2F skills to the new online environments. I’m interested in many things.

How can I use web 2.0 tools to collaboratively:

• focus collective attention on hot topics, issues and possibilities,
• define problems and map there dimensions and dynamics,
• brainstorm possible solutions ,
• identify and draw in resources,
• choose priorities,
• consider evidence of what strategies are most likely to work in local contexts
• write and agree on collaborative action plans,
• implement and evaluate the impacts of these action plans.

I'm also interested in building online Communities of Practice. The Australian Government has published some useful definitions and guidelines.

Related to this I am yet to master:

• Using online tools to further community engagement and mobilization.
• Using Facebook and other social network media (Linkedin) and traditional strategies to interest people in working on the problems and solutions I value.
• Online advocacy and marketing of ideas and interesting people in problems, heuristics and paradigms.
• Using Web 2.0 surveys such as Surveymonkey and polls
  

There are many tools to play with Delicious, Digg, Slideshare, Youtube ect.


So many more options. How do I choose?

I read today at http://mashable.com/2010/07/28/social-media-productivity/

Map out the various social media apps and tools that you use in your daily work life and rank them in order of importance to you. If you could only keep one of them, which would it be and why? Ask yourself which tool helps you accomplish the widest variety of tasks on a regular basis. Is that the same tool as the one you couldn’t live without?

Good Questions but oh I wish that I was at that stage now.