Public services and Web2.0

The blog at Sharp Brains continuously provides food for thought. A recent posting alerted me to Medicine 2.0 - "how web 2.0 interacts with the medical field" - "the bi-weekly blog carnival of the best posts pertaining to web 2.0 and medicine".

Inevitably this opens up a whole world of new links, such as the Medical2.0 blog, which points to Medical 2.0 "a new platform/ service for physicians, researchers, other professionals in the fields of medicine and biological science ..... a directory that aggregate applications, platforms and websites that their content are on the fields of medicine and life science and they are based on web 2.0 tools"; which, in turn, points to PeerClip, very similar to ClipMarks, but "exclusively for physicians,  physician assistants  and nurse practitioners": "an efficient way to store important medical information coming from a variety of online resources. With PeerClip, physicians are able to quickly capture key information in a central location while gaining insight from the collective intelligence of their peers".

Another world of links it opens up is through Health2.0 which turns out to be a wiki "set up as a service to the community of visionaries, entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, policy makers, and professionals who are working on fundamentally redefining the healthcare industry along the lines of "Web 2.0". This movement was initiated at the first Health Camp, which took place in December 2006 in San Francisco, CA."

Now, I'm not especially interested in medicine or health from these particular perspectives, but I am interested in examples of how Web2.0 is coming to be used. I notice that these tools are mostly for professionals, not customers, clients or users of Public Services.  And that is an area that does interest me.

The launch last Wednesday (17th  October 2007) of Sheffield's  strategy for adults with learning disabilities, "A Good Life", is a case in point. Setting off a "consultation", the strategy is not posted on the website, nor was even an electronic version available by email.  The launch was a very traditional event in a very familiar, officer-led, process. Whatever efforts officers make to consult with service users, Web2.0 - based on communities and collaboration - offers so much more in participation and eDemocracy, the means to influence strategically those services which impact on our lives.

• A footnote to this posting: also worth a quick look, together with the Comments it attracted - "An Open Letter to the Physicians of the World" posted just a few days ago, on 6 October 2007, by  Bertalan Meskó, a medical student at the Medical and Health Centre of the University of Debrecen, Hungary.

 

Comments

[Dr.Uri Ginzburg]

Hi

Thanks for writing about my blog:
http://blog.medical20.com/
and about our new venture:
http://medical20.com
In our project we already added links to consumers related platforms and tools and we will keep on doing it and add more and more for the benefits of everyone, not just professionals.

Thanks
Uri Ginzburg MD,MBA