With the materials, ideas and insights from the three workshops in Glasgow, Perth and Edinburgh we grouped all ideas and themes together. We then invited designers, developers, people who live with a condition and people who provide services (you can see who came along there) to come together to use these ideas to bring the Engine to life.
Here’s what we said to them:
The ALISS project is working to improve access to local information to support the self management of long term health conditions …
We’ve got some ideas about how to use the web to make it easier to find out about local information and you’re invited to a 2 day event to make those ideas real.
- are you living with a long term condition and want to share your experience of finding and sharing information?
- working on a project with similar aims?
- do you currently provide or gather information about self management activities?
- can you code and make stuff work on the web?
- interested in developing a new type of information service?
If so then come and join us in March. We’re looking to work with a wide range of people that can bring different experiences to the event.
We’re also looking to have some short presentations and discussions/workshops looking at tough issues such as sustainability and funding models. If you think you can help us with this we would love to hear from you – maybe you could tell us about your project or lead a discussion?
We’ll provide a great venue in central Glasgow, food & drink and wifi.
What’s this all about?
Around 40% of Scotland’s population (that’s about 2 million people) live with a long term health condition (LTC). There are many local activities and services that can lessen the impact of these conditions on their lifestyle and help them lead full and positive lives but accessing these requires support and information – they need to be able to find out what’s happening in their local area.
This isn’t so easy on the web so the ALISS project is aiming to build one place for this information to be collected. One place to contribute and one place for information providers to get it from. It won’t be another website, it’ll be a behind-the-scenes online store of local information, available in open formats to enhance resources that already exist and fuel the development new ones. Everybody will have a chance to contribute so we’ll get to know about more of the self management support that’s on offer.
We’re calling this new place the ALISS Engine and there’s more about the project here.
On 11th and 12th March 2010 we’ll be gathering in Glasgow for two days of discussions, idea development, prototyping, planning with post-it notes and generally developing a blueprint of how this thing might work, and how it might be used to support new systems and services for people with LTCs. We plan to have a working prototype of the ALISS Engine available to test out ideas online.
We’ll be working in groups looking at areas of development, probably along the lines of:
Input/data-capture – how do we get information into the Engine? It exists in many forms (posters, adverts, lists, newsletters, emails etc) so how do we ensure that the Engine can accept different forms of info? Who’s involved now in producing and gathering this information and who might be involved if ALISS were available?
Sense-making – how do we make the essential connections between the activities and services that are submitted and the benefits that they may have?
Filtering – how will we ensure that the information held in the Engine is relevant and helpful? What roles might, for example, voluntary organisations play in this?
Re-use/re-presentation into existing sites, and new channels/sites – how do we ensure that the information that’s made available from the engine is resuable by existing information services? What are the likely requirements of those developing new services in the future?
Non-digital possibilities – how could the ALISS Engine support better visibility for services to non-digital audiences?
Building the Engine – How do we go about build this thing for real?
Of course, it didn’t work out quite like this!…
