Healthy Living Proposal: Linking Communities Of Healthcare Blogs Alongside Wikis

Collaborating communities of healthcare professionals as well as consumers are essential to solving the healthcare crisis. Through word feeds, conversation as well as knowledge-sharing, these communities help increase people's understanding, spark innovation, render decision-support, enable meliorate problem-solving, as well as mobilize grass-roots efforts.

The most practical means to produce this is through "virtual communities" using communication vehicles such every bit blogs, wikis, forums, listing serves, as well as real-time workspaces. Each of these technologies has for sure unique capabilities, every bit good every bit overlapping functions.

Following is a proposal that combines these dissimilar vehicles inwards an optimal means enabling virtual communities to generate, evaluate, evolve, as well as implement strategies as well as tactics for solving the healthcare crisis from the "bottom-up" through grass-roots action.

Unlike a blog, a wiki is an splendid vehicle for organizing content, similar an encyclopedia, using links to pages via a tabular array of contents or taxonomy, which gives a comprehensive “whole-picture” view. It enables the reader to navigate chop-chop as well as easily from theme to topic, category to category, as well as tin move grip many dissimilar links to reference materials as well as other external data sources. And it allows collaborative editing yesteryear authorized contributors who tin move modify as well as add together content correct on the wiki pages. They likewise enable comments, every bit does a blog.

Blogs, on the other hand, produce non organize content into a comprehensive view. Instead, posts seem chronologically, non organized yesteryear topic. This is a expert means to deliver a multifariousness of dissimilar issues for review as well as discussion, similar a word feed. The reader scans through the issues of the day, reads the ones they want, as well as postal service comments every bit desired. When the comments possess community dialogue, blogs help surface novel ideas, challenge people’s assumptions, as well as atomic number 82 to greater learning.

So, wikis are similar encyclopedic organizers as well as blogs are similar newsfeeds, both of which enable conversations. How tin move they hold out used together for maximum benefit?

Well, when it comes to focusing virtual communities on something every bit complex every bit finding solutions to the healthcare crisis, I propose using our Wellness Wiki every bit a vehicle for organizing as well as growing content, as well as using a community of blogs to “feed” the wiki. What I hateful is that the weblog posts would:

• Present timely data (news, studies, insights, opinions, experiences, questions, etc.) on dissimilar topics of involvement (some of which mightiness fifty-fifty hold out based on content from the wiki itself).
• Engage people inwards short-term dialogue nearly that information.
• Have links to them from the appropriate wiki pages, thus people reading a theme on the wiki tin move easily navigate to the associated weblog posts. If a postal service does non convey a corresponding page on the wiki, because it introduces a theme absent from the wiki, as well as thus the wiki should hold out expanded to include that topic.
• Contain links to specific pages inwards the wiki every bit is appropriate.

In to a greater extent than or less ways, this is similar a blogs aggregator, except that each weblog postal service is organized inwards the wiki yesteryear topic/category, non yesteryear the fourth dimension stream inwards which the posts tumble out to appear.

If for sure topics inwards the wiki postulate deep continuous dialogue, lengthy posts, branches into sub-topics, voting capabilities, file exchange, etc., as well as thus a virtual forum tin move hold out ready for that purpose.

If whatsoever bloggers are interested, delight contact me.

Steve

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