Practitioners and program managers are often treated as if they exist in a knowledge desert where, if only we could get them some life sustaining knowledge resources, they might finally be able to thrive. It seems to me that things are more like a swamp. The advent of the internet and the tremendous leaps forward in search engine technology have made for a proliferation of resources so profound that the poor practitioner is left slogging through the mud trying to figure out which way to turn. And it is getting worse.
Many organizations, CAPTURE included, are riding the wave of enthusiasm for Knowledge Translation/ Knowledge Exchange and are building portals, wikis, networks, websites, hubs and communities of practice. This incredible level of activity is a wonderful thing but I wonder whether 15 disconnected “one stop shops” is what the practice community needs. Consider the poor practitioner stuck in the swamp:
- Trying to remember the name of the site they heard about 3 months ago
- trying to remember their login info for each site
- needing to type in their personal info over and over again
- trying to remember where they saw a particular resource
- trying to compare resources across sites (the old apples to oranges problem)
- Needing to go to 6 different sites in order to get their work done
What a pain.
What if there was a way to simplify the user experience for the practice community while adding some new features and saving some taxpayer dollars? We think we have some ideas that might be helpful in this regard:
- In the spirit of the Open ID open source project, CAPTURE hopes to build the infrastructure that will allow a single articulated log in to function on multiple, unique health promotion and disease prevention websites across Canada. Practitioners will benefit from the potential of a single sign on and taxpayers will benefit because each organization won’t have to build and maintain an application to manage permissions on their website.
- Using screen scraping technology, CAPTURE hopes to index a multitude of practitioner resources from across Canada and provide an integrated search engine that will direct program planners to the original source documents. We plan to index examples from practice, scientific literature and examples of relevant local policies. Further, we plan to categorize these resources in a consistent way so that practitioners might be relieved of the need to compare apples from one site to oranges on another… and pears on the third, etc.
- We believe that continuous improvement of practice demands that the practice community view the evaluation of their own work within the context of a knowledge cycle (see here and here). The problem is that most of the resources needed to execute a continuous cycle are not housed in one place. Want examples of interventions? Go to the CBPI, healthevidence.ca or Cochrane. Want program planning resources? Go to the OHPP. Want evaluation resources? Try TEIP or THCU or the CES. Want to disseminate your findings to other practitioners? Good luck. CAPTURE plans to integrate these various, separate steps into one convenient, easy to use tool while at the same time respecting the valuable contributions that other organizations are making.
That last point is critical. CAPTURE will NOT be generating content de novo and we are not looking to duplicate or replace what is already out there. Quite simply, it would be impossible for a single organization like ours to take on the content development efforts currently being managed by dozens of different organizations. Our Zombie Manifesto for Product Development demands that CAPTURE aggregate and profile the work of our big brained partners. If we can do this, while simultaneously making for a more streamlined user experience, so much the better.
