INSTEDD: Open Collaboration

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Open Collaboration Experiment around Emergency Alerts, Disasters, Market Recalls, and More...

We set up two open collaboration spaces around up-to-date notifications and alerts on the following:

- Emergency Preparedness & Response alerts, Recent Outbreaks and Incidents, Clinician Outreach and Communication Activity (COCA), and Public Service Announcements for Hurricanes from US CDC

- Recalls, market withdrawals and safety alerts from the the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

These spaces offer a suite of collaborative features, including: commenting, tagging (adding your own keywords), mapping (user generated and automated), relating multiple alerts, searching and filtering, specifying a time window, adding attachments, subscribing (currently in the form of a web-friendly format also known as RSS, but in the very near future we will support email subscription), and more. The two spaces are also equipped with an intelligent process (referred to as machine-learning algorithm) that "learns" from inputs provided by the users (e.g., adding a keyword (tag), or correcting the mapping of an item). This intelligent process quickly and accurately learns from users inputs (with 95% confidence based on previous tests) and starts suggesting tags as well as correcting itself and offering even better results over time (by simply accepting or rejecting a suggested tag or an automatically mapped location).

Have you an alert or item you like to share with the community? You can easily contribute that alert by clicking the "Add Item" feature.

We invite you to try it and help us spread the good word by inviting others as well. We look forward to your feedback and comments in order to make this tool as useful as it can possibly be. If you have thoughts or questions you can contact us at info@instedd.org or email me directly at: kasshout@instedd.org.

Posted by Taha Kass-Hout, MD, MS at 6:43 PM

Labels: Alert , CDC , Collaboration , Emergency Preparedness , Evolve , FDA , Hurricane , Outbreak , Programs , Projects , PSA , Public Health , Recalls , Response , Riff , RNA , Technology