Welcome to the UnaMesa blog for 2009.  Starting with the new year, we’re making a few changes here at the UnaMesa Association.  First and foremost, we will be striving to more clearly communicate the goals, as well as the results, of our efforts to create innovations that improve team based public services.  Gone from this blog are the detailed, overly technical weekly blog posts from our conference calls. These can still be found, however, on our project wiki. In their place, I and other UnaMesa Associates will be posting regular updates on our projects.   These  blog postings will be part of a larger communications strategy put into place with the goal of helping social service organizations learn about and benefit from tools like TiddlyWiki and SharedRecords.  You’ll be hearing more about this strategy in coming weeks.  (Thanks to Barak of Rassak.com for helping us develop a more effective approach to communications.)
To begin the new year, I’d like to describe a bit of what is meant by team based public services and highlight a few learnings from our projects in 2008.
  • Public services include education, health care, and the other fundamental benefits that communities provide to their citizens
  • Team based means that the recipient (or “client”) interacts directly with the providers of a service and plays a key role in delivery of the service.  For example, a student must play an active role in and interact directly with teachers in order to get the benefits of an education.   (This contrasts with public utilities, such as sewer systems or roadways, where there is little or no interaction between the client and the provider.)
Ignorance and lack of access to information are the biggest challenges facing team based public services.  For example, health-care workers cannot provide appropriate treatment for a patient without knowing that patient’s medical history.  Similarly, teachers cannot provide the best education to students when they lack textbooks and other basic resources.
I originally started work on this problem in 2004.  As a fellow in the Digital Vision Program at Stanford University, I was surprised to learn that these problems were not unique to the developing world and emerging economies.  Public services in the US and other developed nations also suffer from these problems with the end result being individuals who are sicker, less educated, and less happy than would be possible with an increased level of resources.  (Bhutan, where “Gross National Happiness” is more prominent than GNP, may be an exception.)
Clayton Christensen and his coauthors of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns” lays out the serious barriers to improving a public service like education.  The UnaMesa Association takes a page out of the Christensen playbook by focusing on innovations at the grassroots level.  In particular, we focus on providing tools for gathering and sharing information in communities where the providers and beneficiaries are not currently using any information technology -  such as a child resources center that uses only paper records and file folders to manage their data.  Christensen calls this “competing with non-consumption” and  gives many examples where solutions that work here “at the bottom” disrupt the status quo (because of their radically lower costs) and can go on to change the way industries or public sectors function (by changing expectations).
In 2008, UnaMesa participated in three projects focused specifically on decreasing ignorance and increasing access to information.
  • The UnaMesa Academy pilot project in Oakland, California looked at  helping staff members of social service organizations incorporate free, digital tools into their processes for gathering information and recording client interactions
  • The Virtual Interactive Classroom in Bangladesh used a combination of video broadcasting and mobile phones to bring high-quality English courses to students who have never been in a physical classroom
  • The Student Notebook project in Ontario, Canada gave students a private, automatically updating copy of the teacher’s presentation materials and  resources which gave students an unprecedented ability to make and share their own  notes and create unique learning experiences suited to how they learn best.  (See the professor’s blog post on his view of this pilot project.
In this post, I’d like to touch on a few learnings from the Academy project.  (See the links above and http://tasks.projects.unamesa.org/Summary2008 for detailed information on all the UnaMesa projects.)
Originally we envisioned the UnaMesa Academy as tackling a paradox of social service organizations.  Our research and that of others has shown that these organizations could save a significant amount of time and money by using digital tools in place of or in combination with paper filing systems.  Today staff members and clients spend a lot of time pulling paper charts out of filing cabinets, filling out redundant paper forms, putting charts back into filing cabinets, looking for misplaced files, and faxing documents back and forth.  Simply scanning those paper forms and making them available electronically can substantially reduce the workload, make sure that information is never lost, and make more time available for providing care.
The paradox is that the social service organizations never have the time or money to invest in  researching and implementing the digital systems.  Even if it would save them time and money tomorrow, they are so busy and cash strapped today that they don’t have time or resources to even think about changing.
The idea of the Academy was to break this paradox by working directly with staff members of several organizations on their problems “today.”  Give them free tools and free support to help reduce their workload and figure out collectively what’s the best way to gather and share the information needed to serve their clients.  Then, as these best practices took root in their organizations, help the solutions grow and spread to other organizations in the same field.  The goal was a very low cost, low risk approach to incorporating digital tools into their workflow that could be spread virally from organization to organization.
The current process for tabulating tutoring notes and progress reports

The current process for tabulating tutoring notes and progress reports at AICRC

What we found was that, yes, organizations could greatly benefit from digital tools.  The picture on the left shows the current “sorting” step in the workflow process at AICRC (American Indian Child Resources Center) which participated in the initial Academy pilot.  (A big thanks to AICRC for their willingness to work with us and to try something a little bit different.)

However, we also found that saving money and even saving time was not particularly a strong motivator for participation.  Instead, the biggest factor cited by staff was a desire to “Go Green” by reducing paper usage.

We also found that once people started with digital data collection, they got excited about the new possibilities for organizing the information to better serve their clients.  (The sorting process as shown in the picture would be done automatically with digital data and would allow the organization to sort and view data in completely new ways.)

Mostly we found that the original idea of the Academy – to gather multiple organizations together – was simply not possible logistically.  We also found that organizations were very reluctant to consider widespread changes in their overall workflow.  Instead, they much preferred very narrow or incremental changes, such as collecting contact information digitally while keeping other forms on paper.  This approach would minimize the impact on their existing operations.

Based on these findings, we’re looking at an alternative approach to introducing innovations in data gathering and sharing.  This new approach focuses on creating specific digital tools for the very common data needs of many social service organizations, such as collecting contact information.  We now think that we can create a small library of robust, digital forms complete with web based storage and processing which will work with existing paper based worfklows.  Organizations can immediately adopt these specific forms and see benefits without disrupting their existing workflow. (There will be a few options for them as far as customizing the forms, for example, with the organization’s name and pre-filled data.)  This base of template forms will then serve as a path for continually introducing and incorporating more effective tools for gathering and sharing data.

Eventually, we plan to integrate this work with the OpenRosa project to allow data gathering by mobile phones as well as web based interfaces and paper forms.    In this effort, our goal can best be summed up as “the right information at the right time to the right people“.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.

-Greg