What Can Crowdsourcing Do for Global Health?
You know I am a bit of a skeptic about social media and global health. Social media, so far, is just one more way to do the same things we've always done. It helps us make progress on the same old things, but it's not a game-changer. I still haven't anything revolutionary.
This blog post by Henry Jenkins, however, got me thinking about crowdsourcing. I am wondering if it might be the application that actually changes the paradigm. The question, however, is how it fits with global health.
Crowdsourcing works best when you can leverage a huge number of people to each contribute a small amount of effort. You can't crowd source something that require deep expertise - crowdsourcing is about volume.
I've been brainstorming about what problems we face in global health that could be solved through sheer volume of effort. Here's what I've got:
1) Focus group testing educational materials. While some things are intensely specific to culture an initial test on people with a similar language and educational background could eliminate a lot of bas poster and pamphlet designs.
2) Translation. You could crowdsource translation of all kinds of written material, and crowdsource the review of translated materials. Considering how much translation costs, and how hard it is to find speakers of some languages, this could save a lot of money.
3) Answering questions. We could pre-qualify health care providers, or other health professionals, to answer questions from people in the developing world. They could text their questions to a phone number. The right software could route it to a website, where volunteers could find answers. It could be modeled after this amazing Peace Corps Namibia program. You'd need to pre-screen your volunteers so it didn't end up as a bunch of gibberish like Yahoo Answers, but that's not impossible.
That's what I can think of right now, but there must be more. What do you think crowdsourcing can do for global health?
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